Editing Inyo County, California (section)

==History==
{{category see also|Native American history of California}}
{{multiple image|align=right|direction=vertical|width=200|image1=Mount Whitney 2003-03-25.jpg|image2=Badwater elevation sign.jpg|footer=[[Mount Whitney]] (top) is less than {{convert|90|mi|km}} away from [[Badwater Basin]] in [[Death Valley]] (bottom).}}

Present-day Inyo county has been the [[:Category:Native American history of California|historic homeland]] for [[Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas|thousands of years]] of the [[Mono people|Mono]], [[Timbisha]], [[Kawaiisu]], and [[Northern Paiute people|Northern Paiute]] [[Native Americans in the United States|Native Americans]]. The descendants of these ancestors continue to live in their traditional homelands in the [[Owens River Valley]] and in [[Death Valley National Park]].

{{further|History of California through 1899}}
Inyo County was formed in 1866 out of the territory of the unorganized [[Coso County, California|Coso County]], which had been created on April 4, 1864, from parts of [[Mono County, California|Mono County]] and [[Tulare County, California|Tulare County]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=99Y3AAAAIAAJ&q=unorganized+%22Coso+%22&pg=PA190 |title=California, Theodore Henry Hittell, '''The general laws of the State of California, from 1850 to 1864''', H.H. Bancroft, San Francisco, 1865. p.190 |access-date=November 5, 2011|year=1865 |author1=California |last2=Hittell |first2=Theodore Henry }}</ref>  It acquired more territory from Mono County in 1870 and [[Kern County]] and [[San Bernardino County]] in 1872.

For many years it has been commonly believed that the county derived its name from the Mono tribe's name for the mountains in its former homeland. Actually the name came to be thought of, mistakenly, as the name of the mountains to the east of the Owens Valley when the first whites there asked the local [[Mono people|Owens Valley Paiutes]] for the name of the mountains to the east. They responded that that was the land of Inyo. They meant by this that those lands belonged to the Timbisha tribe headed by a man whose name was Inyo.{{citation needed|date=December 2021}} Inyo was the name of the headman of one of the Timbisha bands at the time of contact when the first whites, the Bennett-Arcane Party of 1849, wandered, lost, into Death Valley on their expedition to the gold fields of western California. The Owens Valley whites misunderstood the reference and thought that Inyo was the name of the mountains when actually it was the name of the chief, or headman, of the tribe that had those mountains as part of their homeland.{{citation needed|date=December 2021}} In Timbisha, ''ɨnnɨyun'' means "it's (or he's) dangerous".<ref name="William Bright 2000">William Bright & John McLaughlin, "Inyo Redux", ''Names'' 48:147-150 (2000)</ref>

To supply the growing [[Greater Los Angeles Area|City of Los Angeles]], water was diverted from the [[Owens River]] into the [[Los Angeles Aqueduct]] in 1913. The [[Owens River Valley]] cultures and environments changed substantially. From the 1910s to 1930s the [[Los Angeles Department of Water and Power]] purchased much of the valley for water rights and control. In 1941 the [[Los Angeles Department of Water and Power]] extended the Los Angeles [[Aqueduct (watercourse)|Aqueduct]] system farther upriver into the [[Mono Basin]].