Chapter Four:
Parks and Forests: Protection Begins (1885-1916)
(continued)
Hydroelectric Development on the Kaweah River
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West of Sequoia Park the canyon country above Three
Rivers also began to change. Half a century had now passed since Hale
Tharp and a few others became the first non-Native Americans to reside
in the area, and new potential uses for the land and its resources were
becoming apparent. Of these the most radical departure from the
traditional world of small-scale ranching and farming came from the Mt.
Whitney Power Company, which began construction of hydroelectric plants
on the Kaweah River in 1898. During that year, using sequoia lumber cut
at Atwell's Mill, the power company built its first flume and power
house, using water from the East Fork of the Kaweah. The turbines began
humming in June 1899 at the pioneer Kaweah Number One Plant located at
the new town of Hammond, two miles west of the Sequoia Park boundary on
the Middle Fork of the Kaweah. Construction soon began on a second
plant, which diverted water from the Middle Fork barely 100 yards down
stream from the park boundary. And in 1902, three years before work
concluded on the Number Two Plant, the company applied for permission to
begin planning a third water diversion, flume, and power plant within
Sequoia National Park. [70]
In 1902 the lower Middle Fork Canyon remained an
inaccessible and little-visited corner of Sequoia National Park. Since
the death of James Wolverton in 1893 and the eviction of squatter
Bonivie, the area had been uninhabited for the first time in perhaps a
thousand years. A poor trail still ran up the canyon to Giant Forest via
Hospital Rock, but with completion of the wagon road to Giant Forest,
the route seemed even less important than before. The canyons and river
flats proposed for development by the power company were too low to
support sequoias, and critically, the local agricultural interests
strongly supported the proposal since the power generated would be used
to run pumps for irrigation. Faced with a significant proposal to use
rather than preserve a part of the park, and sensing no significant
opposition, the Department of the Interior granted permission to the
company to construct hydroelectric improvements.
By May 1913, when the Mt. Whitney Power Company
started operations at its Kaweah Number Three Plant, Sequoia National
Park had felt twentieth-century industrial technology for the first
time. Developments included low dams on both the Marble and Middle forks
of the Kaweah, nearly five miles of concrete canal, and a concrete power
house that straddled the park's boundary, half in and half out.
Additional plans called for construction of another power plant in the
park, to be called Kaweah Number Five, together with additional flumes
and a 100-foot-tall dam on Wolverton Creek near Giant Forest. [71] This dam, constructed on private land
within the park, was necessary to provide adequate late-summer flow for
power generation; failure to find adequate bedrock foundations for the
dam was the only thing that stopped the project.
Between 1905 and 1915 the Mt. Whitney Power Company
permanently changed the face of Sequoia National Park in several ways.
Not only did the company dam two of the park's rivers, scar the Middle
Fork Canyon with several miles of flumes, and clear-cut nearly a hundred
acres of forest at the Wolverton Reservoir site, but it also constructed
roads. To facilitate construction of the Kaweah Number Three Flume and
the eventually aborted Number Five Plant, the company built a wagon road
up the Middle Fork Canyon as far as Hospital Rock. Seeking access to its
Wolverton Creek project, the company constructed another wagon road
along the north edge of the Giant Forest, passing the base of the
General Sherman Tree. Both roads opened new portions of the park to
vehicular tourism.
In hindsight, it is perhaps too easy to fault the
Department of the Interior for allowing the Mt. Whitney Company projects
to mar the natural face of the park. If proposed two decades later, the
projects would probably have been rejected as inappropriate, but in the
first decade of the new century the national park idea was simply not
mature enough to prevent construction of a locally popular dam. It is
worth remembering that in 1914 Congress itself gave away the
incomparable Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park for
construction of a reservoir by the city of San Francisco. In the end,
further damage to Sequoia was prevented not by the government, but by
the faulty engineering of the company itself. Had it not sought bedrock
at Wolverton in a nearly bottomless deposit of glacial debris, the
company might well have gone on to build the Kaweah Number Five
project.
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