Mariposa; Tulare

The creation of California as a sovereign American state was an immediate consequence of the Gold Rush. The first legislature divided the state into twenty-seven counties. The arrangement of the counties, in 1850, expresses very clearly the ;mass of votes in mining areas and the almost entire absence of population in most of the San Joaquin Valley. The two San Joaquin Valley counties of 1850 are Tuolumne, centered about Sonora and Angels Camp; and Mariposa, centered at the Southern mines. Mariposa, in fact, for no particular reason, was given the wide wilderness of the rest of the valley as its domain. It was so large that today that territory includes more than eight counties.

County making was an opportunity for the politicians of those first legislatures, which met annually, with annual elections, and so had each year new ideas. In 1852, certain leaders in the Mariposa mining area decided that it would be good business for them to get a new county created and to make themselves officers thereof. Accordingly, the complaisant legislature cut off the south end of the valley, still virtually uninhabited, and made it “Tulare County,” with county seat to be located in the Kaweah Delta. A carpet bag party from Mariposa and the Fresno river settlements, including the famous Major Savage, rode on horseback to the designated locations, Poole’s Ferry on Kings river and Woodsville–given that name because a man named Woods had been skinned alive there by Indians the year previous. Woodsville was about seven miles east of what later became Visalia. A poll was set up, the carpet baggers duly elected officers and established a county seat; and the most of them returned to their homes in the north, leaving there new officers to run the county. This Tulare extended as far northward as the San Joaquin; and while the boundaries as worded by legislature were very vague, included the spot now the city of Fresno.

The first persons known to have settled in the Kaweah delta were the Woods part, destroyed by Indians, as referred to above, in January, 1851. Loomis St. John, for whom the St. John River is named, about the same time located on this stream. In the fall of 1851, C.R. Wingfield and A.A. Wingfield came from Mariposa and located on the south bank of the Kaweah at this point. In December, 1951 [sic] Nathaniel and Abner Vise came to what is now Visalia and built a log cabin on the north bank of Mill creek. In 1852, bona fide settlers began to arrive in numbers, including Colonel Baker, afterwards noted as the found of Bakersfield. Because of the fear of Indians, a stockade was erected at the point where the Vise brothers were living. The point was first designated by the board of supervisors as Buena Vista, while, from the Vise brothers, the township was called Visalia. The next year, 1953 [sic] after a bitter contest among a few settlers with money spent on both sides, te county seat was moved from Woodsville to Visalia, and has remained there ever since.

Tulare county has suffered loss of territory three times, First, in 1856, when its norther zone was cut off to form a part of the newly created Fresno County, second, in 1866, when the southern portion was cut off as Kern; and third, in 1893, when the western end of the remainder was amputated, to become Kings county.

History of Fresno County and the San Joaquin Valley, pg 13 and 14

Lilbourne Alsip Winchell, 1933

Transcribed by Liz Brae 2007