Miwok natives from the western Sierra Nevada foothills and Paiutes from the east side of the mountains were the first to visit the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Hetch Hetchy was the location of late summer and fall encampments for the purpose of gathering food for the winter. Black oaks that dotted the valley floor supplied acorns for meal. A variety of berries, roots and seeds were gathered (the name Hetch Hetchy is a Miwok word for a type of grass in the valley from which seed was harvested¹). And deer came down into the valley in large numbers as the acorns began to fall. Despite incursions by white Americans, Indian use of the valley in this manner continued into the 20th century.

 

White miners and settlers began to move into the region with the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The first known European American visit to Hetch Hetchy was by Joseph Screech and his brother in 1850. Screech reported that:

... up to a very recent date, this valley was disputed ground between the Pah Utah Indians from the eastern slope and the Big Creek Indians from the western slope of the Sierras; they had several fights, in which the Pah Utahs proved victorious. ²

Use of the valley by non native Californians was largely in the form of summer pasture for sheep into the 1890s. John Muir, whose own experience in the Sierras began as a shepherd, noted that:

Sheep are driven into Hetch Hetchy every spring, about the same time that a nearly equal number of tourists are driven into Yosemite; another coincident which is remarkably suggestive.³

When the U.S. Calvary was given responsibility for protecting the new Yosemite National Park beginning in 1891 Hetch Hetchy became a gateway out of the Sierras as troopers would escort shepherds in one direction and their sheep in another across the mountains.

Tourist travel to Hetch Hetchy was limited because of the isolation of the valley. Impressions, though, by those who did visit were vivid as this passage from an 1887 letter by John Wells suggests:

We enter the valley on the southwest, after hours of toil, and feel at once the power of its mingled, yet contrasted, beauty and grandeur. There are, in fact, two valleys, the western -- into which our trail brought us by a sharp descent -- being a mile in length and from an eighth to the half of a mile in width. It was the pasture ground of about twenty mares and their colts, gleaming in the sunlight as if groomed by an hostler every day.

The eastern valley is about two miles long and of ranging width, though nowhere more than half a mile. It was the pasture ground of sheep, and is parted from the western valley by a bold spur of granite from the south, reaching quite to the Tuolumne River. In this spur there is a depression through which a path leads from valley to valley.

Out of these narrow cañons snow waters issue, making up the Tuolumne that waters the valley as a whole. Having done this service, and spread out its beauty to the sun, it passes into a narrow gorge at the west, -- so narrow, indeed, that when the water is high in the spring it is dammed up, and the valley, from end to end, becomes a rock-bound lake. Then, too, a large body of water from the melting snows plunges over the lower rocks on the north, a thousand feet, into the lake below.⁴

There is indication that in addition to annual visits by sheep and tourists that the valley was surveyed as early as the late 1850s for use as a water source by the Tuolumne Valley Water Company.⁶ Interest in Hetch Hetchy's potential as a reservoir grew quickly among hydraulic miners in the Sierra foothills, farmers in California's Sacramento Valley and cities in the central part of the state. Interest by the city of San Francisco was first expressed in 1882.

San Francisco's water was supplied primarily by Spring Valley Water, a private company whose investors included some of California's wealthiest bankers and railroad owners. The return on their investment was substantial as was the friction generated between the company and San Francisco city government. Multiple efforts by the city to buy out Spring Valley failed. Pressure on San Francisco to manage its own water system came to a head with the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire. Damage from the earthquake was substantial, but damage from the fire was catastrophic. Blame was heaped on Spring Valley. In 1901, five years prior to the earthquake, the Roosevelt administration had denied San Francisco's application for a permit to dam Hetch Hetchy. In 1908, despite a new administration and approval from a sympathetic Secretary of Interior, San Francisco's permit was denied by Congress. However, a carefully orchestrated lobbying campaign in 1913 playing on public sympathy resulting from the earthquake and on Progressive political thought that emphasized public ownership of utilities finally won approval for San Francisco to dam the valley.⁷