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The poetic name Mariposa, Spanish for “butterfly,” was first
applied in this region by
members of the Moraga Expedition, to a small stream at the foot of the
Sierra Nevada mountains.
The party had left the Mission San Juan Bautista on September 21 of
1806, on an expedition to
locate suitable sites for a proposed string of inland missions to
parallel those located along
the coast. Led by Alferez Gabriel Moraga, they crossed the San Joaquin
River on September 27 and
during that afternoon encountered, “myriads of butterflies, of the most
gorgeous and variegated
colors, perched about on the surrounding trees.” Camping that evening
on a slough not far from
the main river, the chaplain and diarist of the expedition, a
Franciscan priest named Father
Pedro Munoz, made this entry for September 27, 1806:“This place is called the Mariposas because the great multitudes of
these, especially at
night and in the morning, could not be more troublesome, their
eagerness to hide from the rays of
the sun reaching such proportions that they pursued us everywhere, so
much that one got into the
ear of one of the Expedition Leaders, causing him great discomfort and
not a little effort to
extract it.”The mining camp of Mariposa materialized in the spring of 1849
when a miner named Alex Godey
found a few flakes of gold while prospecting the streams of Colonel
Frémont’s Las Mariposas
Grant. Gold was plentiful in the vicinity and it wasn’t long before a
good number of miners were
settled in along the small flat bordering Mariposa Creek, a little ways
below the present Hwy 140
bridge. Later that fall, Palmer, Cook & Co. sent about fifty men from
San Francisco to work a
claim they had leased from John Charles Frémont, which later became the
Mariposa Mine. Their
arrival soon led to a townsite being laid out, and Mariposa took its
first step towards
permanency.In addition to the rich placers of the area, the camp chanced to be
located on the
gold-bearing quartz veins of the Mother Lode. Its future thus insured,
the small mining town grew
in size and importance as miners from the surrounding areas gravitated
to the rich diggings.
Saloons, general stores, restaurants, and hotels were quickly
established to take care of the
miners’ every need.Mariposa County was one of the original twenty-seven counties
created in California when the
boundary lines were drawn in 1850. At that time it occupied more than
one-fifth of the state’s
area or approximately thirty thousand square miles. Stretching from the
Coast Range to the
present Nevada state line, and touching Los Angeles County on the
south, Mariposa County
unwillingly became the “Mother of the Counties,” as huge parcels of
land were annexed away to
create six new counties and add pieces to five others. It was
eventually whittled down to it
present size, a mere 1,455 square miles. The county seat was moved here
on November 10 of 1851
from the nearly abandoned Agua Fria, which had lost most of its
population to the rapidly
expanding Mariposa.Although he never lived in Mariposa, Colonel John C. Frémont—the
famed explorer, army
officer, and presidential candidate—had a major influence on local
events. In fact, he at one
time owned the entire town as it was located within the boundaries of
his vast, forty-four
thousand acre Mariposa Land Grant.In 1847, Frémont gave $3,000 to Thomas O. Larkin, the U. S. Consul
to the Territory of
California, in order to by the Santa Cruz Ranch, a choice piece of
property located near San
Jose. When next Frémont and his wife happened to meet Mr. Larkin, they
were in for a little
surprise. “To their stupefaction the Frémonts learned that Larkin had
not bought the Santa Cruz
Ranch as he had agreed to do, but instead had bought for them a wild
tract of land somewhere high
in the Sierra Nevada called the Mariposa Ranch. It was inaccessible, a
hundred miles from the
nearest settlement, one hundred and fifty miles from San Francisco,
with no farming land, too
wild and cold in winter even to graze cattle, and overrun with hostile
Indians.” Quite possibly,
Larkin may have bought the Santa Cruz Ranch for himself.Frémont was bitterly disappointed at having been sold what he
considered a worthless parcel
of land. However, when gold was discovered in placer deposits near his
property, Frémont became
less bitter. As his grant was a “floating” grant, with its exact
boundaries undetermined at the
time of making, Frémont quite probably laid claim to some land which
wasn’t his in an effort to
gain control of the mines. The U.S. Land Commission eventually ordered
a survey to determine the
exact boundaries of the grant. Allexey W. von Schmidt did the survey
during the months of April
and May of 1852. Laid out in three sections, the grant (which was for
agricultural as well as
mineral land) was often referred to as the “Frying Pan Grant” due to
the survey’s resemblance to
that utensil. The survey also chanced to include a section of the
Mother Lode gold belt.The town’s streets were laid out in 1849, with many of them being
named for members of the
Frémont family. The main thoroughfare, Hwy 140, is also known as
Charles Street, after Frémont
himself. Jessie Street was named for his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont,
while Bullion Street was
named for her father, Senator Thomas “Old Bullion” Benton. Jones Street
honors Frémont’s
brother-in-law, William Carey Jones.Located on Hwy 49, Mariposa remains one of the most important towns
in the Southern Mines. In
addition to being the county seat, it is also on the main road to
Yosemite National Park, which
accounts for thousands of visitors each year. The town has a good
number of historic structures
still intact, and an excellent museum and history center that should
not be missed.
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