Owens Valley

Obviously, many place names hereabouts came from the names of pioneers and explorers who came to the valley more than 100 years ago. It was only natural that the men making those first maps (and faced with dozens of nameless rivers and mountains and valleys) named many of them after themselves or people in their own expeditions.

Certainly that was true for the Owens Valley itself (and the same-named river and lake). Here's that story:

It was the search for beaver, gold and silver - any of which could earn men fortunes - that brought about the discovery and settlement of the valley.

Mountain man Joseph Walker was the first white man to enter the Owens Valley. In 1833, trappers in Salt Lake City wanted to invade the massive Sierras but the vast desert was a flat but awesome barrier.

Walker was an experienced trapper and trail blazer so was hired to go exploring, to find routes from Salt Lake to California and back. He crossed the Sierras to Monterey and the following February, set out on the return trip. He followed the Kern River out of the San Joaquin Valley, crossed the mountains over the pass name named for him (down near Inyokern, east of Bakersfield) and swung north into what is now the Owens Valley.

But the valley wasn't name on that trip, nor did Walker find any beaver, by the way. But he did discover Yosemite Valley and pioneered the Salt Lake-Humboldt trail, later a vital immigrant route.

In 1845, Captain John Fremont was still exploring the west and hired Walker to lead a mapping group south through the valley. When the Mountain Man rejoined Fremont in San Jose, they talked of the grandeur of the mountains from the eastern side and of the large brackish alkaline lake Walker must have been accustomed to passing by now (he had been through there again as recently as 1843, guiding the Chiles wagons, which he had to abandon near the lake due to the exhaustion of the mules and the party being under-supplied.)

As they worked on their maps, Fremont named that lake after one of his party's valuable hunters, Richard Owens. Ironically, Owens never saw the lake or the river, much less the valley, named after him.

OLLP

The Indians and Independence

Charles Putnam built a stone cabin along Little Pine Creek. The trading post he established there is acknowledged as the beginning of what would become the town of Independence. But where did the name "Independence" come from? That story, too, has a natural progression.

As other homesteaders came into the growing settlement, the first name change took place. The growing settlement they'd called merely Putnam's became Little Pine (after the creek). Then during that very hard winter of 1861-1862, fights with the Paiutes began.

Hungry Indians butchered some cows, the settlers retaliated and a war was on, a war that would last a year and a half (but even as late as 1865, one pioneer family's diary recorded that "a horseman came rushing up and said that Indians had killed a woman and her son about 50 miles south of Lone Pine and were coming up the Valley.")

To Protect the settlers, the Army established a garrison near Little Pine in the summer of 1862. The soldiers arrived on the 4th of July and made camp along Oak Creek; you can still see the caves where they lived while putting up their buildings. And as you have probably guessed, it was to commemorate their arrival on Independence Day that the new post was called ... Camp Independence.

It was in 1866 that Little Pine changed its name to Independence on the occasion of the town becoming the county seat - which it still is.

But before the Army got there, that fight in the Alabama Hills took place.

The plan didn't work but the settlers were hoping that the Indians' cattle rustling could be nipped in the bud if a swift and decisive blow were struck at a main camp. In February of 1862, some two dozen settlers made a night march from Putnam's and at sunrise, attacked the Paiutes at a winter camp in the Alabama Hills, destroying much of their food reserves (more than a ton of dried meat).

The attack was probably out in the valley rocks (rather than in the rounded hills) because in describing the fight, pioneer Bart McGee wrote that when the Indians ran for shelter, they ducked into "cavities where they were out of sight in less than 30 seconds. (We shot) into the mouths of their dens while (they shot arrows at us) in showers .... They did not have guns or they would have made a hard fight for us."

Think about that when you're out hiking in those same rocks. And the sheriff getting shot through the door and those stagecoach hold-ups and the saloon shootings when next you're watching a Hopalong Cassidy film.

The movie-makers maybe didn't know it, but what they were doing had all happened before. For real. Right here.

OLLP