Few locales in Kings Canyon National Park have early histories as confused as that of Cloud Canyon. Fortunately, Judge William Wallace wrote a letter in 1924 to the Sierra Club Bulletin that captured and corrected most of these errors.
In the summer of 1880, Wallace was visiting the then-booming Mineral King mining district. While there, he heard a story from a “semi-civilized Indian” named Jim Buck about an area with mineral outcrops on the divide between the Kaweah and Kings rivers.
Setting out to explore this remote area with miner friends Jo Palmer and William Course, Wallace crossed over from Mineral King into the Big Arroyo. The three, traveling with pack stock, made their way to the head of the trees in that canyon and established a base camp.
On foot now, Wallace “took to the crags” along the Kings-Kaweah Divide, where he found an “attractive-looking ledge of gray copper ore outcropping in the face of the mountain…” In conformance with the federal mining law of 1872, Wallace staked out a mining claim in the name of his party. Because it was a cool and cloudy day, and the clouds were hanging low on the peaks, Wallace called the claim “The Cloud Mine.” He also named the creek flowing north from the claim, giving it the name Cloud Creek.
Wallace’s claim appears to be the first to be filed in the never-very-successful mining district in and around what we now call Copper Mine Pass. In his account Wallace makes no mention of either previous mining activity or any trails in that area. The trail over the summit of Copper Mine Pass came later.
Wallace did little to develop the Cloud Mine, abandoning his claim after only a few years, but the name he applied to the region remained in use, at least for those who approached it from the south. This is where the confusion began.
As students of Kings Canyon National Park geography know, what Wallace called Cloud Creek flows northward into a stream known as the Roaring River, which itself drops into the Kings Canyon and merges into the South Fork of the Kings River. Early sheepman Frank Lewis had named the Roaring River in the 1870s, but the connection between that stream in Kings Canyon and Wallace’s Cloud Creek on the Kings-Kaweah Divide was not yet understood.
In the early 1890s, Joseph N. (“Little Joe”) Le Conte began his momentous effort to map the High Sierra for recreational purposes. Unfortunately, although his resulting 1896 map shed much light on the Sierra, Le Conte did not have enough information to work out the puzzle of Cloud Creek and the Roaring River. Le Conte did understand that the Roaring River must flow down from the Kings-Kaweah Divide, but he could not connect this with Cloud Creek. Le Conte’s answer was to omit Wallace’s place name and simply show the Roaring River.
Le Conte also made another significant error. He did not realize that the Roaring River flowed out of not one but two major tributary canyons. Others had figured this out, however, including A. D. Ferguson, who wrote a description of the area for the May 1904 issue of the Mt. Whitney Club Journal. Ferguson made a clear that there were two canyons and he had names for them both. He called the eastern of the two the “Roaring River Canyon,” and the parallel western gorge either “Cloudy” or “Dead Man’s.” Ferguson’s description also shifted Wallace’s 1880 name from the eastern of two creeks to the western of the two canyons.
Into this confusion stepped the U. S. Geological Survey when it surveyed the area in 1902-1903. Wrestling with this uncertain nomenclature in the first edition (1905) of the Tehipite 30’ topographic map, the U.S.G.S. decided to call the western of the two canyons Deadman and the eastern Cloud Canyon. The Survey also concluded that the stream flowing through the eastern canyon was the Roaring River. In doing all this, the mapmakers thus abandoned Wallace’s name of Cloud Creek and, following Ferguson in style if not geography, permanently converted the name of Wallace’s mine and creek into the name of the canyon through which the creek flowed.
These 1905 names are the same we use today, but by 1910, for reasons that have been lost, the Geological Survey changed tits mind. On the topographic map issued that year of Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, the western Canyon became Copper Canyon and the eastern took the title of Deadman. These names showed up again on the 1912 revision of the Tehipite sheet and remained on the official maps until yet another edition of the Tehipite map came out in 1924. At that point, the nomenclature reverted to that used on the 1905 map.
Since that time the name Cloud Canyon has remained affixed to the eastern of the two main tributary sources of the Roaring River, a souvenir of a cloudy day in the summer of 1880 when William Wallace thought he found a copper mine.
© Wm. Tweed