The Owens Valley Indian War: The March South

Most of what happened here in the eighteen sixties is not marked.

Between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-three, the United States Army conducted a series of campaigns against the Owens Valley Paiute, in what the historical record calls the Owens Valley Indian War. The Paiute were not unprovoked. Miners and ranchers had been moving into the valley following a gold rush in the region, occupying the agricultural and hunting territories that the Paiute had managed for generations. The Paiute resisted, as people who are being dispossessed of what they need to survive tend to do.

The Army's solution was removal.

In eighteen sixty-three, soldiers force-marched nearly one thousand Paiute people from the Owens Valley, south over the Tehachapi Mountains, to Fort Tejon, approximately two hundred fifty miles away. The march took place in the spring, under Army escort. Many of the people on that march died, from exposure, starvation, and the violence of removal. The precise number is not in the public record. The records that exist are from the Army's perspective.

The survivors were eventually permitted to return to the valley. Their return was not restoration. The land they had managed was occupied. The irrigation systems they had built over generations were broken. The valley they came back to was no longer governed by them.

The three federally recognized tribes in the Owens Valley today, the Bishop Paiute Tribe, the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley, and the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, are the direct descendants of the people who survived that march and returned. They hold land in this valley. They govern.

There is no monument on Highway Three Ninety Five to the march. The tribes are the monument.