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Sierra Club Bulletin 



them. They would have starved to death in that barren granite. We 

 left our saddles and everything, and took only our clothes and necessary 

 blankets and went on afoot. We lived entirely on horse meat. I don't 

 know how horse meat might be with a little salt, but it certainly is not 

 very nice without salt. It is just a sweet, sickening kind of meat with- 

 out salt, and we tried to chew it as we traveled along, but the meat 

 would keep swelling up in your mouth like a sponge until you could not 

 work your jaws. 



Traveling without the animals was easier, but the country kept getting 

 even more impassable. In working down into one canon, thousands of 

 feet deep, we had to slide down a water-run. Sometimes we would 

 slide thirty feet and fetch up on a bench, throwing our blankets on 

 ahead. We camped down in one of these cafions one night and then, 

 the next morning, started east in the hope of reaching the summit of 

 the Sierra Nevada at a place where we could go down the easterly cliffs 

 into the Owen's Valley. By night we had reached the summit at a place 

 they now call "Taboose Pass," about eighteen miles north of Indepen- 

 dence, and the next day we worked our way down the east cliff of the 

 Sierras along Taboose Creek into Owen's Valley. 



We had no map of the country, and none of the streams or moun- 

 tains were named at that time, except the San Joaquin and the King's 

 rivers. The first peak named, I think, was Brewer, named by the party 

 of scientists we met. 



The rest of our party, who left us soon after we climbed up over 

 Little Pine Pass, found a gold mine near the pass on their way home 

 which they called the "Cliff Mine." This mine developed into quite a 

 rich ledge, and it was through this discovery that the pass came to be 

 known as "Kearsarge Pass." Down in Owen's Valley, south of Inde- 

 pendence, there is a low lying range of hills. In the early 6o's the 

 Hitchcock boys discovered a mine in these hills which they called the 

 "Old Abe" mine, and they called their district the "Alabama District." 

 They were Rebels and in those days "Old Abe" was a term of ridicule. 

 But they named the district in honor of the Confederate cruiser "Ala- 

 bama." These hills are now called the "Alabama Hills." Our crowd, 

 however, were all Union men, and when the news came that the Kear- 

 sarge had sunk the Alabama, our boys named the district where the Cliff 

 Mine was the "Kearsarge District" to taunt the Rebels. The little town 

 which grew up at the mine was called "Kearsarge City," and the pass 

 came to be called the "Kearsarge Pass," and the mountain just to the 

 north of the pass "Kearsarge Mountain." 



Extract from Letter to Horace M. Albright 



April i6, 1917 



Dear Mr. Albright: While I have it in mind, there is one matter that we 

 of the Sierra Club are very anxious that the National Park Service 



