Hale tharp biography

The Kaweah River region was a slow starter in the settlement patterns of California. Before 1862, there was little to entice settlers to the area.

Hale tharp biography

The entire Southern Sierra was a wilderness to the first Euroamericans who explored its foothills. The Spanish government was interested only in finding whatever escaped mission Indians and army deserters might be hiding in the secluded landscape.

The first Americans in the area were interested in beaver pelts and routes across the mountains. The earliest miners stayed almost entirely to the north where gold deposits were a recorded fact and civilization lay closer at hand.

Probably the first known American to live in the Kaweah Canyon was a lone adventurer, a southerner by the name of Captain John Moss whom the local Indians called “Long Hair”.

Sometime in the early 1840s, Moss stumbled down canyon from the mountains into a Waksachi encampment at the confluence of the Main Fork and North Fork of the Kaweah