Tinemaha: The Elk That Came Back

Look east toward the flat green fields and the silver sheet of Tinemaha Reservoir. This is one of the few places on Earth to see the tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes), the smallest elk in North America and found nowhere outside California. Half a million once grazed the state's Central Valley. By the 1870s, market hunting and the plow had all but erased them, and in 1873 California banned elk hunting entirely - too late, it seemed.

The species survived on the thinnest of threads. On the vast San Joaquin ranch of cattle baron Henry Miller, a game warden located a tiny remnant herd - by many accounts just a dozen or so animals. Miller protected them until his death in 1916, and from that handful the population slowly clawed back.

In 1933 and early 1934, the California Fish and Game Commission authorized moving 56 elk into the middle Owens Valley near Aberdeen. Rancher G. Walter Dow organized and financed the effort, trucking animals from Yosemite - crated one by one - onto land obtained from the City of Los Angeles. By the mid-1940s the herd numbered around 130. Their success bred conflict: elk raided crops, and decades of disputes followed, leading to managed hunts and the 1971 Behr Bill, which barred hunting until the statewide population reached 2,000. Today several hundred elk roam the valley in distinct sub-herds.

There is irony in the setting. The name Tinemaha honors a legendary Paiute chief. This valley is Payahuunadu - "land of flowing water" to the Nuumu, the Owens Valley Paiute, who hand-dug some 60 miles of irrigation ditches here long before settlers arrived. The river that once flooded these meadows now feeds Los Angeles. The elk graze on what that diverted water still leaves behind.