Joseph R. Walker: Yosemite in 1833 and the Sawmill Abandoned at Owens Lake

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Joseph Rutherford Walker was born in Tennessee in 1798, moved with his family to Missouri in 1819, and in 1820 traveled to Spanish-held Santa Fe, where he was briefly detained. He became one of the Taos trappers who hunted beaver illegally in Alta California, then in 1827 became sheriff of Jackson County, Missouri, the jumping-off point for the Santa Fe Trail. Hired by Captain Benjamin Bonneville, he led about 50 men west in 1833 to find an overland route to California, following the Humboldt River across present-day Nevada. Historians still debate his Sierra Nevada crossing: Scott Stine argues for a route via the Carson and Stanislaus rivers, while Patrick Vaughan's reading of journals by Zenas Leonard and others supports a passage near Yosemite, as his gravestone in Martinez claims.

The 1834 return nearly killed the party in the waterless Great Basin, and Walker turned them back to retrace the Humboldt route. In 1840 he made the first known American north-to-south crossing of the eastern Great Basin, reaching Los Angeles across the Mojave. In 1843 Joseph B. Chiles hired him for $300 to guide the first California-bound emigrant wagon train; short of food, the party split, and Walker's group abandoned its wagons and a disassembled sawmill at Owens Lake. He became chief guide for John C. Fremont's third expedition in 1845, led a gold-hunting party into central Arizona in his sixties that helped lead to the founding of Prescott, and died at Manzanita Ranch in Contra Costa County on October 27, 1876.

• His gravestone in Martinez, California, says he camped in Yosemite Valley on November 13, 1833.
• Starving in the 1843 drought, his party traded horseshoe nails to the Paiute for fish.
• Captain Philip St. George Cooke described him traveling with his Shoshone wife and living almost as a nomadic chief.
• He beat out Kit Carson for the job of chief guide on Fremont's 1845 expedition.
• Walker Pass, Walker Lake, the Walker River and Walker, Arizona are named for him.