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BEAR VALLEY - FREMONT'S FORT
The BearBuddys Visit Bear Valley - Mariposa
The Bear Buddys recently took a trip through California and stopped in
Bear Valley. Not the one you're thinking of in Northern California with
the skiing, but the other one in the southern Sierra Nevada mounatin foothills.
First named after some early local residents, Haydenville, Biddle's Camp
and Johnsonville, it became Bear Valley in 1858. Located along Highway
49, sometimes known as the Forty-Niner's Highway in Mariposa County between
Mariposa and Coulterville, just where it winds in steep curves down to
the Merced River and back up.
Bear
Valley's place in history is as the stomping grounds of explorer and
army
man Col.
John C. Fremont. Fremont
was one of the principals of California's Bear Flag Revolt before
becoming officially a state. Fremont bought a tract of land in 1847,
a land Mexican
Land Grant called the Rancho Las Mariposas. The grants
boundaries were a bit fluid due to limited surveys and when the gold
rush came in 1848-49,
Fremont claimed his borders indcuded the hills of Bear Valley. His mining
operations there were quite lucrative and at its height, the area supported
a population of 3000, though now pretty much reduced to a handful. From
1850 to about 1860, Fremont's Pine Tree and Princeton Mines produced
enough for Fremont to open a hotel on the spot. Fremont also built himself
a "Little White
House" perhaps in anticipation of a political future which never
quite materialized. Fremont was the first Republican candidate to run
for President
in 1854 with the slogan "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free
men - Frémont." He got beat and never made a lot of further
noise as a politician. His house and the hotel in Bear Valley
both had burned down by 1870. After returning to his mines after his
political campaigns, he found his claims had been "jumped" and
built Fremont's Fort at the edge of the ravine to defend his Bear Valley
lands from the "Hornitos League". Most of his battles were
in a courtroom. What's left now is a gas station and a little museum
in the building next door, and a Historic Marker.
©2010 WLEV BearBuddys.com