Tinemaha Reservoir: A Chief's Name on Stolen Water

That sheet of water shimmering to your east is a piece of Los Angeles, 200 miles from the city. Tinemaha Reservoir was created in 1929 when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power threw an earthen dam across the Owens River. It sits about five miles upstream of the intake where the river is swallowed into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, so its job is to catch sediment and steady the flow before the water begins its long journey south. It is broad but shallow, never more than about 25 feet deep, holding some 16,000 acre-feet, its surface rising and falling with each year's Sierra snowmelt.

The name carries a heavier history than the engineering. Tinemaha was a real Paiute (Numu) leader. During the Owens Valley Indian War of the 1860s, as cattle introduced by settlers ate the wild seed plants and irrigated meadows the Paiute depended on, fighting broke out. On October 6, 1862, Tinemaha, Captain George, and others surrendered themselves and their families as hostages in a fragile bid for peace. In Paiute oral tradition, Tinemaha is also remembered as the brother of Winnedumah, the medicine man turned to stone on the Inyo crest to the east. The 12,520-foot peak above you and this reservoir both bear his name, the mountain officially in 1937.

There is a deep irony in a city's reservoir wearing the name of a man whose people were dispossessed first of land and then of water. Yet the water also made habitat. The flooded flats became a magnet for migrating birds, American white pelicans, loons, and wintering tundra swans. And in the fields on both sides of the highway, especially in winter, you may spot tule elk, descendants of 56 animals brought to the valley in the 1930s after the subspecies was nearly hunted to extinction.