Miners, earthquakes color Lone Pine's past
by Catherine Felty, Outpost staff
The Alabama Hills, located in the Owens Valley on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, were formed about 3 million years ago, around the same time as the Sierra. However, the valley does not experience the same harsh winters that the high mountains do, and erosion produced the smooth rounded boulders seen in the Alabama Hills.
Lonely tree, Civil War legacies carry on in Lone Pine
The town of Lone Pine was named for a lone pine tree that stood at the entrance of Lone Pine canyon, according to the Lone Pine Chamber of Commerce Web site. According to the site, Lone Pine was founded in the 1860s to serve local miners and later farmers who tilled the Owens Valley until the 1920s, when Los Angeles began exporting water from the Owens River and surrounding creeks to serve the city's growing population.
On the Web site, you'll also find that the hills were named by a group of miners who were Southern sympathizers during the Civil War. They named their mining claims after the Confederate ship, The Alabama, which captured or sunk about 60 Northern ships. Eventually, the entire area west of Lone Pine became known as the Alabama Hills.
Lone Pine and the Alabama
Hills became the focus of California's attention on March
26, 1872, when a small earthquake was felt in San Francisco
&endash; an earthquake that was centered in Lone Pine, then
a small mining community, killing nearly 30 people in the
town.
Man leaves paramour to die in rubble
The Chamber Web site tells the story as it appeared in the April 21, 1872, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle: the earthquake was felt from Oregon to Central America. The Lone Pine victims were buried in a mass grave on the north end of town, marked today with a sign.
The Chronicle also related an account of the death of one woman, Antonia Montoya, who was entertaining a young man the evening that the earthquake hit. The newspaper's Lone Pine correspondent wrote that Montoya was buried alive but that the man escaped.
"Had the man not been one of
the basest of the devil's creatures he might have lingered a
couple of minutes and released his paramour from her
terrible straight; in his mighty selfishness, the craven
creature fled alone, leaving the poor woman to perish
miserably in the
ruins." A group of miners
named the Alabama Hills during the Civil War. Photo
by Catherine Felty
World War II brought reluctant visitors
In the 1940s, the American government established a Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, 10 miles north of Lone Pine on U.S. Highway 395. Visitors today can wander through the remains of the camp that housed more than 10,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, according to the Chamber site.
The only reminders today are a few fire pits, a cemetery, strips of old street pavement and an old gymnasium now used for storage by the state highway department. The site is now a national monument, and a tribal member of the Northern Paiute Tribe serves as an attendant.
Posted Nov. 11, 1998
Copyright 1998 Nevada Outpost