Present-day Inyo county has been the
historic homeland for
thousands of years of the
Mono,
Timbisha,
Kawaiisu, and
Northern Paiute Native Americans. The descendants of these ancestors continue to live in their traditional homelands in the
Owens River Valley and in
Death Valley National Park. Inyo County was formed in 1866 out of the territory of the unorganized
Coso County, which had been created on April 4, 1864, from parts of
Mono County and
Tulare County. It acquired more territory from Mono County in 1870 and
Kern County and
San Bernardino County in 1872. For many years it has been commonly believed that the county derived its name from the Mono tribe's name for the mountains in its former homeland. Actually the name came to be thought of, mistakenly, as the name of the mountains to the east of the Owens Valley when the first whites there asked the local
Owens Valley Paiutes for the name of the mountains to the east. They responded that that was the land of Inyo. They meant by this that those lands belonged to the Timbisha tribe headed by a man whose name was Inyo. Inyo was the name of the headman of one of the Timbisha bands at the time of contact when the first whites, the Bennett-Arcane Party of 1849, wandered, lost, into Death Valley on their expedition to the gold fields of western California. The Owens Valley whites misunderstood the reference and thought that Inyo was the name of the mountains when actually it was the name of the chief, or headman, of the tribe that had those mountains as part of their homeland. In Timbisha,
ɨnnɨyun means "it's (or he's) dangerous". To supply the growing
City of Los Angeles, water was diverted from the
Owens River into the
Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. The
Owens River Valley cultures and environments changed substantially. From the 1910s to 1930s the
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power purchased much of the valley for water rights and control. In 1941 the
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power extended the Los Angeles
Aqueduct system farther upriver into the
Mono Basin. The county was home to the
Manzanar War Relocation Center, where
Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. ==Natural history==