Cattle Country: The Laceys and the Valley's First Ranchers

Look at the irrigated green out your window. To a rancher it reads as feed; to the Owens Valley Paiute, the Numu, it was a managed harvest. For generations they had burned, irrigated, and tended native grasses, seeds, and tubers across this valley floor. When cattle arrived, the two systems collided.

The herds came for the mines. In 1861 Samuel Bishop trailed about 500 cattle and 50 horses up from Fort Tejon and built the San Francis Ranch southwest of the town that now bears his name; A. Van Fleet and others settled the same year to feed miners in booming Aurora. Their stock fed on the very plants the Numu depended on. A hard winter in 1861-62 and vanishing food pushed both sides into the Owens Valley Indian War. In 1863 the U.S. Army marched roughly 1,000 Paiute south to Fort Tejon. Many walked back. By the late 1860s Paiute workers were indispensable to the ranches that had displaced them.

Into that valley came the Laceys. By family account John W. Lacey reached the Owens Valley in the early 1870s, married Anna Marie Meyer in 1886, and homesteaded near Fort Independence, where son Mark Buckner Lacey was born in 1888. The Laceys ran cattle at Georges Creek with Anna's brother Hans Meyer and held some of the first Forest Service grazing permits for Monache Meadow around 1904. Later generations built the Olancha and Junction ranches, trailing cattle between desert winter range and high Sierra summer pasture.

Then the water left. As Los Angeles drained the valley in the 1910s and 1920s, Owens Lake went dry and irrigated farming collapsed, yet the Laceys kept ranching here for five generations. The meadows you pass are what survived that bargain over grass and water.