General Grant Grove
To Brewer fell responsibility for supervising the actual field activities of the survey. Although the survey began work late in 1860, it was not until 1864 that it turned its attentions to the Sierra Nevada. During that wartime summer, while the fate of the nation was being decided, Brewer and his men explored and mapped the Yosemite and Lake Tahoe regions. At the end of the field season, Brewer added to the survey team another young Yale Scientific School man, Clarence King. Finally, in 1864, the survey focused on the largest remaining blank spot on the map of California, the high country of the southern Sierra. From the drought-ravaged San Joaquin Valley, Brewer led his men up into the mountains along the divide between the Kings and Kaweah rivers. In early June, they camped just west of modern Grant Grove near a recently established logging enterprise called Thomas' Mill which was beginning the assault on the timber resources of the Sierra. After reprovisioning, and making a visit to the Big Trees now called Grant Grove, the survey party struck out to the southwest following the ridges toward the higher mountains. As they climbed high enough to begin to get a sense of the country to the east and south, they noted many high peaks. Their plan, based on the false assumption that the southern Sierra was structured much like the Yosemite country, was to follow the Kings-Kaweah Divide to the crest of the Sierra. Soon the ridge they were following rose up to form a sharp granite peak. After a difficult scramble they attained the summit, and the nature of the country ahead became much more apparent.
