In the summer of 1907, Sequoia National Park Ranger Harry Britten was charged with building a ranger station, as a headquarters from which to patrol the park’s southern boundary. The site he selected was very near Quinn’s Horse Camp, which had been there for decades, just north of Quinn’s Sheep Camp.

     Harry Quinn was an Irishman, born in 1843 on a small sheep farm in County Down. At age sixteen, he emigrated alone to Australia, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields. Failing, like most, as a gold prospector and miner, Quinn worked on sheep ranches for the next eight years, learning the business well. Then, in 1868, he voyaged to California to pursue the American dream. Arriving in San Francisco, he worked as a stevedore and deck hand on boats between San Francisco and Stockton, where he met Archibald Leitch, a large-scale landowner and sheep raiser in Stanislaus County.

     Quinn’s desire was to buy sheep and rent land to pasture them on. He worked his way around the state managing sheep ranches and looking for opportunities. On the unsettled borderland where southern Tulare County and northern Kern County meet, he saw the free open range of stirrup-high, treeless grasslands as a paradise.

     In 1872, impressed by Quinn’s skills and energy, Leitch hired him to take flocks of his sheep to Kern County to graze. There, Quinn became one of the first settlers at Rag Gulch, about 10 miles east of Delano, just south of the Tulare County line. By 1873, he had filed a pre-emption claim on 160 acres and had purchased a half interest in Leitch’s band of 7,000 sheep.

     Leitch took him into partnership in 1874, and the firm of Leitch & Quinn prospered, eventually owning up to 22,000 acres of grazing land in both Kern and Tulare counties, including mountain land in Dry and Funston meadows, Peck’s Canyon, and even a small acreage in what became Sequoia National Park, where the sheep would be herded in the summer after the grass dried up in the Valley. While 28,000 sheep once pastured on the ranch, the flock averaged around 12,000 animals, divided into five bands.

     The profitable partnership continued until Leitch died in 1896, and then through his estate until 1906, when Quinn purchased the land and sheep interests of the firm. While he kept his ranch’s main headquarters at Rag Gulch, Quinn and his family often lived in Tulare County, where part of the ranch became the townsite of Richgrove. They often spent summers on their Upper Ranch west of Porterville.

     In 1890, the year Sequoia and General Grant national parks were created, none of the many men connected with the sheep interests of Tulare County had attained greater success or prominence.

     Naturally, Quinn opposed the ruling that sheep and cattle grazing would not be allowed on national park lands, when his sheep had used those mountain meadows for many years. He was also being forbidden to drive his sheep across park property to his own inholding and to others that he rented for grazing. Additionally, his horse camp, used to pasture the pack stock that regularly supplied his shepherds in the mountains, and sometimes serving as his summer home on the Hockett Plateau, was now enclosed in Sequoia National Park.

     In 1891, Acting Superintendent Captain Joseph Dorst sent troops out from Mineral King to survey the park’s boundaries. That summer, they covered almost a thousand miles patrolling from their base at Hockett Meadow (then called Zimmerman’s).

     They reported that the country bordering the area was so overgrazed that it could not support visiting parties of tourists. Thus, Dorst recommended that the eastern boundary of Sequoia National Park be extended all the way to Mt. Whitney and that the parks’ rules and regulations should be enforceable by legal penalties, since the troops’ only recourse to livestock trespass at the time was to escort the offenders back across the parks’ boundaries.

     In 1893, responding to the degradation of the public land’s resources, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the Sierra Forest Reserve. This withdrew most of the central and southern Sierra land from sale to private parties, including most of the land adjoining Sequoia and General Grant National Parks.

     While Valley residents generally supported the reservation as an effort to protect their water supply, the sheep, cattle, logging, and mining interests were strongly against it, even though they were able to continue to heavily exploit the reserve lands, since the proclamation did little to protect their natural features (features which were specifically protected in the national parks).

     Thus, Quinn’s sheep continued to appear on the parks’ land, and the sheepmen’s encroachments occupied a good deal of the Army’s time in the parks’ early years. Acting Superintendent Lt. Alexander Tracy Dean reported that, “This condition of affairs renders the duty of guarding the park more difficult, as these large bands of sheep are kept close to the line on all sides, and if not constantly watched will feed over them.”

     The troops continued to patrol, but they had many other responsibilities, such as building and maintaining trails, assisting visitors, fighting fires, and preventing hunting, By 1898, there were still no penalties for trespassing sheep and cattle herders other than expulsion from the parks. When the soldiers were unable to reach the parks until September that year, due to the impacts of the Spanish American War, they found that over 200,000 sheep had gotten into Sequoia, devastating its meadows.

     In 1900, two civilian rangers were hired to protect the parks in the winters and to work with the cavalry when it was on duty there in the summer. In that decade, the problem of large herds of sheep and cattle trespassing on the park diminished for several reasons. The struggle for forage among the many competing cattle and sheep outfits resulted in severe overgrazing, extensive erosion, and widespread deterioration of feed value on the mountain and foothill ranges.

     Effective control of grazing on the Forest Reserve lands began at last in 1905 with the formation of the National Forest system and the establishment of the Forest Service. Also, the parks’ soldiers and rangers were patrolling more rapidly and efficiently as park trails were extended and improved and remote patrol cabins were built. By 1911, with pasture land increasingly hard to get, Harry Quinn switched to raising short-horn Durham cattle.

     The parks’ new patrol cabins included the one built in 1907 near the sheepman’s long-used horse camp. Everyone who roamed the mountains knew the location as Quinn’s, and so the new ranger cabin used his name. The 1909 USGS Kaweah Quadrangle map labels “Quinn Horsecamp” right beside “Ranger Cabin.” Over the years, it has also been called Quinn Patrol Cabin and Quinn Snow Survey Cabin.

     In 1932, twenty-five years after the cabin was built, Quinn, a leading citizen of the bi-county area for over half a century, and “one of the last of the great landowners in the southern San Joaquin Valley,” died at his Quinn Ranch home, in his 89th year. He was buried in the Porterville cemetery.

     Some say the ranger cabin that bears his name is haunted. Perhaps Quinn’s dauntless pioneer spirit still pervades the high mountain meadow where he established his horse camp and spent his summers so many years ago. Or could it be Cavalry Corporal Klawing’s shade, still in pursuit of Quinn’s ghostly sheep? Or maybe Ranger Harry Britten, on his one good leg, is patrolling yet from the sturdy little cabin he built so long ago.

May, 2020