The Bishop Creek post office operated from 1870 to 1889 and from 1935 to 1938. The first Bishop post office opened in 1889. This remote area of California had never been explored by the Spanish although it appeared as Mexican territory on early maps. Explorer John C. Fremont was an early US Army visitor to the region. Officially sanctioned by the federal government, his 1845 mapping party to the Eastern Sierra included the scout
Kit Carson, for whom the capital of Nevada
Carson City was named. Also in the party were Ed Kern for whom
Kern County, California was named and Richard Owens, for whom Owens Lake and
Owens Valley were named. The city of Bishop was established due to the need for beef in a mining camp eighty miles to the north,
Aurora, Nevada, which was believed to be on the California side of the border at that time and was the county seat of Mono County. In 1861 cattlemen drove herds of cattle three hundred miles from the San Joaquin Valley of California through the southern Sierra at Walker Pass, up the Owens Valley, and then through Adobe Meadows to Aurora. To avoid the long journey from the other side of the mountains, a few cattlemen decided to settle in the valley. Driving about 600 head of cattle and 50 horses,
Samuel Addison Bishop, his wife, and several hired hands arrived in the Owens Valley on August 22, 1861 from
Fort Tejon in the
Tehachapi Mountains. Along with Henry Vansickle, Charles Putnam, Allen Van Fleet, and the McGee brothers, Bishop was one of the first white settlers in the valley. Sheepmen soon followed the cattlemen and initially struggled due to a lack of forage for their stock in the area. Remnants of the early settlers' stone corrals and fences still exist north of Bishop along Highway 395 in
Round Valley, California. Samuel Bishop set up a market to sell beef to the miners and business owners in Aurora. One of the residents of Aurora at that time was a young
Samuel Clemens, who later gained fame as author
Mark Twain. By 1862, a frontier settlement known as
Bishop Creek was established two miles east of the San Francis Ranch. The only remnant of Samuel Bishop's ranch is a monument placed near the original site at the corner of Highway 168 West and Red Hill Road, two miles west of downtown Bishop. In 1866, the County of Inyo was established from part of
Tulare County. The Eastern High Sierra/Owens Valley region was the westernmost populated frontier of the U.S. at that time. In 1871, Daniel Bruhn was one of 41 wranglers herding nearly 3,000 wild Spanish mustangs from
Stockton, California to
Texas. Their travels brought them over the
High Sierra and into the Owens Valley, where they lost over 500 head of horses. Some descendants of those mustangs still roam on the California/Nevada border just north of Bishop.
Water conflicts of the Owens Valley As Los Angeles expanded during the late 19th century, it began outgrowing its water supply.
Fred Eaton, mayor of Los Angeles, promoted a plan to take water from Owens Valley, where Bishop lies, to Los Angeles via an
aqueduct. Between 1905 and 1907, most of the land in the Owens Valley was purchased from farmers and ranchers at bargain prices by Eaton, ostensibly for a his own use. The real goal was to send Owens Valley water south to Los Angeles. In 1907, Eaton traveled to
Washington to meet with advisers of
Theodore Roosevelt to convince them that the water of the
Owens River would do more good flowing through faucets in Los Angeles than it would if used on Owens Valley fields and orchards. Despite a political fight with Congressman
Sylvester Smith, who represented the area around Bishop, Roosevelt decided in favor of the aqueduct. The aqueduct was built from 1907 to 1913 under the supervision of
William Mullholland. The aqueduct is long, used no pumping stations; only gravity siphons. For a number of years, Owens Valley residents expressed much animosity toward the city of Los Angeles; for example, in Dry Ditches, a book of poems published in 1934 by the Parcher family of Bishop. The Owens Valley–city of Los Angeles conflict was the inspiration of the 1974 film
Chinatown, starring
Jack Nicholson.
Indian cultural heritage Indians live in and near Bishop on four reservations. The southernmost is the
Lone Pine Indian Reservation; northward is
Fort Independence Reservation and
Big Pine Indian Reservation. The largest and northernmost is the
Bishop Indian Reservation. ==Geography==