Fort Independence & Oak Creek

As you roll north out of Independence, watch the west side of the road. The little drainage crossing here is Oak Creek, tumbling down from the Sierra crest — and it has carried more history than its size suggests.

On July 4, 1862, Lt. Col. George S. Evans raised a flag on Oak Creek and named the spot Camp Independence for the day. This was the U.S. Army's foothold in the Owens Valley Indian War, a brutal collision between settlers' cattle and the Owens Valley Paiute — the Numu — whose food economy the newcomers' herds were destroying. After about two years of fighting and some 200 Native deaths, the Army gathered the surrendered people at the camp and, in July 1863, marched around 900 of them roughly 250 miles south to the reservation at Fort Tejon. Many had never heard of the place and did not grasp they were being walked out of their valley. The removal didn't hold; survivors began drifting home within months, returning to work the very ranches that had displaced them.

The camp was abandoned, reopened in 1865, and shut for good in 1877. Out of that ground came today's Fort Independence Reservation, set aside by executive order in 1915–1916 — a living Paiute community on Oak Creek, not a relic.

Follow the creek a little farther toward the mountains and you reach the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery, a Tudor-style hall built in 1916–1917 from 3,500 tons of native granite hauled from within a quarter-mile. For decades it raised trout to stock the high Sierra, its lakes reached in the backcountry by pack train. A 2008 mudslide off a fire-scarred slope ended fish production, but the granite castle still stands as a museum.