Sequoia National Park was almost home to a socialist colony

The first federally protected lands—Hot Springs, Yosemite, and Yellowstone—were all protected for the same purpose. These great natural wonders had to be set aside before private interests could claim them for their own gain. 

While Yellowstone and Yosemite were preserved in time to prevent or expel homesteaders, other national parks weren’t so lucky. Through laws like the 1862 Homestead Act, American settlers could legitimately gain title to federal lands. In a national park, these private properties are called inholdings. Often, Congress has been forced to work around these inholdings while establishing national parks. 

Sequoia National Park was almost home to a massive inholding stretched across thousands of acres. It was called the Kaweah Colony. It was an organization of socialists trying to build a utopian society in the Sierra Nevada. The General Sherman sequoia tree, which is one of the greatest icons in the national park system, was known to the Kaweah Colony by a different name: Karl Marx.

Today, this is an obscure story—but it could have been much bigger if the Kaweah colonists hadn’t made one huge mistake. 

A Sierra Nevada Socialist Utopia

In 1886, Burnette G. Haskell trekked high into the Sierra with several dozen socialist companions. Haskell was a leader in San Francisco leftist circles and motivated to establish a cooperative colony by the writing of Laurence Gronlund. Gronlund was a Danish-American socialist theorist who wrote The Cooperative Commonwealth. Gronlund’s main idea was that socialist cooperatives could replace capitalism by promoting collective ownership and shared management of industries—and Haskell intended to do just that. 

Haskell chose the North Fork of the Kaweah River to begin his utopian colony. Together, fifty-three individuals made claims under the Timberlands Act of 1878. They made their claims all adjacent to each other, communally acquiring 12,000 acres of land in the Giant Forest. They intended to cut timber among the sequoias (but not the great sequoias themselves) which would be sold at a steep discount in the San Joaquin Valley to undercut capitalist timber corporations. 

Settlement in the Sierra Nevada was difficult and the Kaweah Colony relied on outside assistance to survive. Anyone could pay to become a member of the cooperative, whether they were a resident of the five towns that comprised the colony or not. Between seventy-five and three hundred individuals lived among the sequoias during the six year life of the colony. Some two hundred individuals supported the colony from afar. Membership in the cooperative was $500 a year, which could be paid in a combination of cash and labor. 

To bring the timber to market, the leftist laborers began the arduous work of constructing a road. Only a few dozen men comprised the work crews and they possessed only hand tools. Nevertheless, over the course of four years the laborers produced an eighteen-mile road that rose over 5,000 feet in elevation. When it was completed in the summer of 1890, the road supplied a lumber mill which produced 3,000 board feet of timber a day. 

Socialist colony or timber fraud?

Unfortunately for the Kaweah Colony, they had made a fatal error in the very founding of their upland utopia. 

When the socialists submitted their claims to the General Land Office, it looked extremely suspicious. Laws like the Timber Act were intended to allocate public land to private individuals, but they were often exploited by large corporations. Because the Kaweah colony had made their claims at the same time, all adjacent to each other, it appeared as though they were a fraudulent cover for a timber company. 

In order to hedge against potential fraud, the General Land Office in Visalia froze the land claims until it could be proven that they weren’t going to be transferred out of the hands of individual colonists. Confident that the claims would soon be revealed as legitimate (but seemingly taking little action to prove it) the Kaweah colonists opted to squat on the land 

On September 25, 1890, Congress passed legislation creating Sequoia National Park. Originally, the park was quite small and did not include any of the Giant Forest. Six days later, Congress passed a second law that created Yosemite National Park and expanded Seqouia—this time to include the land claimed by the Kaweah Colony. 

In order for the Kaweah Colony to survive, their claims to the forest would have to be proven legitimate—and be dated prior to the establishment of the park. Because they had been frozen by the GLO, the Kaweah Colony had no legal title to the land (a decision which was affirmed by the Secretary of the Interior in 1891). As a result, the socialist colony was forced to disband, some members having to face prosecution for illegal timber harvesting. 

The Kaweah Colony lives on

The short-lived Kaweah Colony only dwelled among the sequoias from 1886-1892. Despite their abrupt end, the socialist cooperative had a significant impact on the early years of Sequoia National Park. Until the completion of the Generals Highway in 1926, the Giant Forest could only be reached via the eighteen mile mountain road hand-carved by the colonists. Every tourist and dignitary that wished to see the General Sherman tree (Karl Marx no more), used that route. 

Of the buildings constructed by the colony, only one remains in the national park. The Squatters Cabin was a simple home built by a colony schoolteacher. It stands alone among the old growth trees, guarding the secret of the socialists that called the sequoias their home. 

Two sources for this article include archived articles produced by the Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper and the National Park Service. For further reading, look for Cooperative Dreams: A History of the Kaweah Colony by Jay O’Connell.