Three Rivers: Gateway at the Confluence

Three Rivers takes its name from geography. The town sits at the point where the North Fork, Middle Fork, and South Fork of the Kaweah River converge into a single stream, and the settlers who arrived here in the eighteen seventies named their community for the confluence at its heart. The Kaweah then flows west out of the mountains and into the flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley.

Today a dam stops it before it gets that far. The area around Three Rivers was settled slowly and for practical reasons. The lower canyon walls of the Kaweah offered some of the most accessible approaches into the Sierra Nevada in this part of California.

Citrus groves and small farms appeared in the foothills in the eighteen eighties and nineties. But what put Three Rivers on the map, and what it has been ever since, is its role as the gateway to Sequoia National Park. The entrance to the park is a short drive up the canyon from the center of Three Rivers.

Since the first tourist lodges were built in the late eighteen hundreds, the town has existed primarily to serve travelers on their way to or from the giant sequoias. The Kaweah River that runs through town is powerful and flood-prone. It has shaped the town physically, washing out bridges and roads, and shaped it economically, providing the water power that drew the first hydroelectric developers to the canyon in the eighteen nineties.

A utopian socialist commune tried to log the giant sequoias before the national park existed. The Army built the road into the park. A screenwriter who helped shape the modern werewolf mythology lived here.

The drama of the river, the drama of the sequoias up the road, and the history of the people and organizations who fought over this canyon give Three Rivers a story far richer than its size suggests.