History
The Mojave people, Cahuilla people, Quechan, and other Native American cultural tribes and groups lived in and traveled through the Whipples for thousands of years.
Francisco Garcés, the explorer, missionary, and regional "peacemaker" based at Mission San Xavier del Bac had initiated expeditions along the river and surrounding terrain through and past the Whipples in the early 1770s. In 1774 he joined the famous Juan Bautista de Anza Las Californias Expedition from "mainland New Spain to the "new to them" Alta California. They passed through the range en route to the Needles area and onwards inland, traveling in peace with the local indigenous people west of the river. In the early 1900s Wyatt Earp spent his last winters here working small gold and copper mining claims, starting around 1906. The nearby townsite of Earp, California on and near those claims was named for him, although his residence actually stands in the town of Vidal, California.
Currently, portions of the range within and without the Whipple Mountains Wilderness Area are owned by the State of California or private land owners. Access to these areas is not by the BLM, but the other owners and agencies.
Read more about this topic: Whipple Mountains
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)