The Owens Valley War was fought between 1862 and 1863 in the Owens Valley of California and the southwestern Nevada border region. The conflict arose during the winter of 1861–1862, when severe weather conditions including the Great Flood of 1862 created environmental stress in the region. Heavy snowfall in late December 1861, followed by torrential rains in January 1862, caused creeks to overflow their banks and flooding in low-lying areas. These natural disasters set the stage for tensions between American settlers and the indigenous Mono people, along with their Shoshone and Kawaiisu allies, who inhabited the Owens Valley.
The United States Army and American settlers engaged in military operations against the Mono and their allied tribes throughout 1862 and 1863. Camp Independence was established in July 1862 as part of the military response to the conflict. The war involved sustained military campaigns by U.S. forces against the indigenous peoples of the region during this two-year period.
The removal of a large number of the Owens River indigenous Californians to Fort Tejon in 1863 was considered the end of the war. However, the conclusion of major hostilities did not completely resolve tensions in the region, as minor hostilities continued intermittently until 1867. The forced removal to Fort Tejon represented a significant displacement of the indigenous population from their traditional lands in the Owens Valley.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.