Hale Dixon Tharp

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.