LITMIR.BIZ

       Small pockets of ancient metamorphic rock cap the much younger granite of Big Baldy Ridge (Route 28).

       HUMAN HISTORY

      Humans have inhabited the southern Sierra Nevada for up to seven thousand years. Various tribes of the Monache (or Western Mono) people inhabited flats along the five forks of the Kaweah River, while the Yokut people inhabited similar habitats around the Kings River watershed. Both peoples maintained seasonal villages in the foothills and higher elevations, and tribes traveled between the two throughout the year.

      After European American prospectors discovered gold throughout the Sierra, opportunistic explorers flooded into the various canyons and valleys of the range. The first explorer of European origin to encounter the sequoias of Giant Forest was a man by the name of Hale Tharp. The Monache of Buckeye Flat helped treat Tharp’s companion for injuries at what is now known as Hospital Rock, and Monache guides later led Tharp to Giant Forest, where Tharp would eventually establish a seasonal cattle ranch at Log Meadow before ultimately becoming an advocate for protecting the sequoias. Although Tharp’s influence in advocating protection was vital for the parks’ future, his arrival ultimately heralded the decline and exodus of the indigenous peoples in the area.

      Word about the trees quickly got out, and Bay Area lumbermen, already familiar with the exceptional timber provided by coast redwoods, set their sights on the sequoia groves as a means of satisfying San Francisco’s insatiable desire for construction material. Within a matter of decades, the more accessible groves in the Kings River watershed—including the Converse Basin Grove—fell victim to wholesale logging operations. At the same time, the Kaweah Colony, a socialist utopian experiment set on funding their livelihood with sequoia timber, began constructing the old Colony Mill Road from the North Fork Kaweah River to the Giant Forest plateau. Ironically, sequoia timber is uniquely unsuitable for construction, owing to the brittle composition of the wood. When felled, sequoias shatter on impact, leaving only about 25 percent of the tree suitable for timber. And even that wood was suitable for little more than shingles, grapevine stakes, and perhaps most tragic of all, toothpicks.

      An unlikely alliance of conservation efforts—spearheaded by John Muir—and agricultural interests concerned about the agricultural impacts of logging successfully petitioned Congress to create federal protections for the Grant Grove area and Giant Forest, and in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing Sequoia National Park and Grant Grove National Park. The legislation shut out the Kaweah Colony, which abandoned its efforts to complete the Colony Mill Road near present-day Crystal Cave Road.

      US Army Cavalry troops were tasked with protecting the parks, but after several years of inconsistent and unfocused efforts, command was transferred to Colonel Charles Young, the third African American graduate of West Point. Young would become a formative figure in Sequoia’s early history after completing the Colony Mill Road project and opening up Giant Forest to wheeled transportation for the first time. Over time, Colony Mill Road proved to be insufficient for increasing automobile traffic, and by 1926, the newly minted National Park Service had completed the Generals Highway, which would later extend north to connect with the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway in 1935.

      Meanwhile, the ever-thirsty metropolis of Los Angeles had set its sights on obtaining water from the Kings River, which engineers considered ideal for water storage and hydroelectric power potential. The plan was to establish a series of reservoirs within Kings Canyon and Tehipite Valley to store water for use by the city. After a furious battle between Southern California water interests and the ultimately victorious environmental lobby, Congress created legislation to combine Kings Canyon and most of its rugged watershed with Grant Grove National Park and a newly acquired parcel containing the Redwood Mountain Groves to form a new Kings Canyon National Park in 1940. Because it abuts Sequoia National Park along the Kings-Kaweah and Kings-Kern Divides, the National Park Service manages both parks conjointly as one massive mountain park.