Bishop Creek, 1862: The Day the Paiute Held the Valley

For thousands of years this valley wasn't empty desert. The Numu, the Owens Valley Paiute, hand-dug some sixty miles of ditches to flood the meadows and grow wild hyacinth and yellow nutgrass, electing a head irrigator each year to decide where the water went. They called themselves "Coyote's children living in the water ditch." This was farming, just not the kind settlers recognized.

Then the cattle came. In 1861 ranchers drove herds in to feed the silver miners at Aurora, and the animals ate the very fields the Numu depended on. The catastrophic winter and flood of 1862 finished the job. Facing starvation, the Paiute began taking cattle, and an uneasy peace collapsed into the Owens Valley Indian War.

On April 6, 1862, a militia of about sixty men, Visalia volunteers under Colonel William Mayfield joined by Aurora men under John Kellogg, rode out to confront the Paiute near Bishop Creek, just southwest of here. It went badly for them. An estimated several hundred Paiute fighters, in their own country and fighting for survival, drove the militia back. The settlers panicked, lost their horses and supplies, and were pinned down in one of the Paiute irrigation ditches until darkness let them slip away toward Putnam's trading post. Three militiamen were killed, including Sheriff N.F. Scott of Mono County.

It was a genuine Paiute victory, one of the few moments the valley's first people turned the tide. But it was temporary. Army cavalry under Lt. Col. George Evans soon arrived, Camp Independence was established that July, and by 1863 roughly nine hundred Paiute were force-marched south to Fort Tejon. The marker here, California Landmark 811, claims the battle's cause is "lost in obscurity." It wasn't lost. It was hunger, and stolen water.