Even in the twenty-first century, much of the heart of Kings Canyon National Park is remote and seldom visited. Imagine then how difficult the region must have been to penetrate in the 1870s, when neither maps nor trails existed. That is when Frank Dusy first began to explore the headwaters of the Kings River.
Born in Canada in 1837, Dusy lost his parents at an early age and spent much of his youth simply trying to make a living. He came to California in 1858, too late to find wealth in the gold mines, and ended up as a soldier assigned to Camp Babbitt, the Civil-War-era U.S. Army post in Visalia. After that assignment ended, Dusy went to work for William Helm, another Canadian emigrant who had built up a major sheep outfit in Central California. Dusy’s job involved taking sheep into the Sierra for the summers, and this is how he came to know the mountains.
Dusy established a grazing post at a place now known as Dinkey Creek. (Dinkey was Dusy’s dog.) The station, located north of the lower canyons of the Kings River at an altitude of not quite 6,000 feet, provided an excellent base for sheep grazing.
Searching out range for Helm’s sheep, Dusy began to explore the rugged mountain country to the east. This led him first to the relatively gentle watershed of the North Fork of the Kings River, the area where Wishon and Courtright reservoirs are now located.
Pushing further into the mountains, Dusy soon mapped out the high meadow country along the ridges that separate the North Fork of the Kings from the alpine headwaters of the Middle Fork. (Today these ridges form the western boundary of Kings Canyon National Park.)
In this region Dusy found and named the Crown Valley country. This is what brought him in the summer of 1869 to the south rim of the Crown Valley plateau, where he peered down for the first time into the glacial depths of Tehipite Valley.
It is possible that at least one prospecting party had already visited the spectacular glacial valley as early as 1864, but Dusy became the effective discover of the gorge. The valley fascinated him, and he returned to it again and again.
Dusy continued his explorations. In 1877, traveling with Gustav Eisen, Dusy made his way all the way to the headwater of the Middle Fork, visiting the Palisades. The following summer, Dusy succeeded in taking stock along the benches north of the Middle Fork to Simpson Meadow. (This long-abandoned route is remembered as the Tunemah Trail, the name preserving a Chinese epithet about the extreme difficulty of the route.)
And in 1879, Dusy built a rough stock trail down into the depths of Tehipite Valley, providing horseback access to that most rugged of destinations. From Tehipite, traveling now with L. A. Winchell, Dusy made his way up the Middle Fork from Tehipite to Simpson,and then all the way again to the Palisades.
This time, amazingly, he took with him a large and fragile wet-plate camera, and during the trip he took the first photographs of this spectacular region.
During that 1879 trip, Dusy and Winchell named the mountains and canyons they encountered with happy abandon. Not surprisingly, Mt. Winchell dates from that summer, as do Mt. Agassiz and Palisade Creek. Winchell also christened a “Dusy Branch” of the Kings River flowing down from the northern end of the Palisades massive. The name endures, and the region from which its waters flow now bears the name Dusy Basin.
All those who came in subsequent years to explore and marvel at the beauty of the Kings River high country – individuals like Theodore Solomons, Bolton Coit Brown, and J. N. Le Conte – noted that they followed in Frank Dusy’s footprints. Before nearly anyone else, he penetrated the maze that is now the rugged wilderness heart of Kings Canyon National Park.
© Wm. Tweed