Mariposa: The Butterfly County at the Edge of the Mother Lode

The name comes from butterflies. In eighteen oh six, a Spanish colonial expedition under Gabriel Moraga followed a creek through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and found the stream banks alive with butterflies in such numbers that the soldiers named the creek on the spot: Las Mariposas, the butterflies. The name attached to the creek, then to the vast land grant that would come to cover this entire region, and finally to the county and the town that became its seat.

Mariposa County, created in eighteen fifty as one of California's original twenty-seven counties, was enormous. In its original form it covered roughly one-fifth of the entire state, a territory so vast that riding from one end to the other would take weeks. Over the following decades, the legislature carved eleven additional counties out of its boundaries, and today Mariposa County carries the unofficial title Mother of Counties as a reminder of what it once encompassed.

The town grew from a mining camp that had sprung up near Agua Fría Creek during the gold rush that began in eighteen forty-eight. The first settlers built near the creek, but periodic floods drove them uphill to the site where the town sits today, on a gentle rise above the drainage surrounded by oak woodland and chaparral. At its peak in the early eighteen fifties, Mariposa was a genuine regional hub, the supply and administrative center for a county whose Mother Lode stretched for miles through the surrounding hills, yielding gold from placer deposits in the creek beds and from hard-rock quartz veins cut into the hillsides.

Lawyers, judges, merchants, and miners all passed through Mariposa, making it busier and rougher than a small foothill town had any right to be. The gold is largely played out now. Mariposa today is a gateway, its Main Street a string of motels and restaurants and gear shops serving travelers on their way to Yosemite, up the road.