Kaweah River - History

History

Further information: Sequoia National Park and Mineral King

The first inhabitants of the Kaweah River watershed were the Yokuts, who claimed water rights to the entire river. They settled in several villages in the broad, arid valley the Kaweah cuts through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, an area now submerged under Lake Kaweah. The meaning of the word "kaweah", pronounced "ga-we-hah", in the ancient Yokuts language is "crow" or "raven cry". The Yokut sub-tribe called the Wukchumni lived in this area; their largest villages included Cobble Lodge at the confluence of the Kaweah River and Horse Creek, and Slick Rock Village further upstream. The Fawia, Telamni, Wolasi, Choinok, and Yokod lived on the lower reaches of the river above Tulare Lake.

The Yokut subsisted mostly on acorns and the cakes and pastes they made from grinding them. Many of the Yokuts' mortar and pestle sites are still visible today in the form of rounded depressions on granite outcrops along the river. They claimed the water rights of the entire Kaweah, although tribes from the Mono Basin east of the Sierra Nevada came over the Sierra and settled in the high mountain valleys of the Kaweah. Mineral King, a valley on the East Fork Kaweah River, was a summer settlement for the Yokut. However, years before the arrival of Europeans, the valley became taboo to them for an unknown reason.

Spanish explorers named the river Rio San Francisco and Rio San Gabriel while early American settlers often referred to the river as the River Francis. The first known European settler along the Kaweah river was Hale Dixon Tharp in 1856. He settled on Horse Creek near its confluence with the Kaweah River. During the 1860s, other stockman settled along the various forks of the river claiming large areas of land under the Homestead Act of 1862. This act allowed a settler to occupy 160 acres (0.65 km2), or 320 acres (1.3 km2) for a man and wife together. Thus began the settlement of the Kaweah region. Since then, various mining towns (mainly due to the discovery of silver at Mineral King) and small establishments have existed in the area.