Hale Tharp
American gold prospector (1830-1912)
Hale Dixon Tharp was a miner during the California Gold Rush, and the first non-Native American settler to enter Giant Forest, in what is now Sequoia National Park.
Gold Country
Tharp was born in Michigan in 1828. In 1851, a widow from Illinois, Chloe Ann Smith Swanson, hired Tharp to take her and her four sons to California in a covered wagon with two teams of oxen. They settled in Placerville, where Tharp married Swanson. Tharp then began mining in California's Gold Country.
Sequoia
In the summer of 1856, Tharp went to Tulare County to establish a preemption homestead, with the intent to return later to ranch cattle. He built a shake and brush shack near the confluence of the Kaweah River and Horse Creek, east of Visalia and south of Three Rivers. He then returned to Placerville.
Two years later, Tharp and his brother-in-law John Swanson returned to his homestead and built a log cabin and barn, Cattle Cabin. Tharp then sought cattle summer pasturage.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hale Tharp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.