Poole's Ferry was the most important of the Kings River's earliest crossings, operated from 1851 to 1857 by William Campbell and John Poole three miles above this point, and the ferry and its trading post served travelers and miners. In July 1852, it became the focus of violence when an armed party led by Walter Harvey, Tulare County's first judge, raided a Choinumni Yocuts Indian village. Yosemite discoverer Major James D. Savage, a famed Indian trader and peacemaker, tried to ease tensions but was shot and killed by Harvey in an argument at the trading post on August 16, 1852. Smith's Ferry operated here from 1855 to 1874 by Mr. and Mrs. James Smith and was the precursor of Reedley's settlement in 1888. It outlasted other Kings River ferries because Smith's was the only boat that could be approached at high water. The Smith family kept a two story, eleven room hotel on what is now the cemetery's north end, where Smith, who died in 1862, rests in the oldest grave. His widow sold the businesses in February 1874, and within months they closed because of the Central Pacific Railroad's construction west of here in 1872. Smith, an early-day assemblyman, is memorialized in the name of a mountain east of here.