Water drew people to this arid land in the shadow of Mt. Williamson, where the history of Manzanar includes Paiute life, the growth and decline of an orchard town, and the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Paiutes lived here for centuries, building willow huts called novis, hunting wild game, weaving baskets to collect pine nuts and acorns, diverting Sierra streams to nurture wild plants, and crafting obsidian arrowheads. Their way of life was forever changed in the 1860s when miners, ranchers, and homesteaders entered Owens Valley, imposed new ideas of land ownership, damaged native food sources, and, after violence peaked in 1863, the U.S. Army forcibly marched 1,000 local Paiutes 225 miles south to Fort Tejon, though many escaped and returned. John Shepherd established a ranch here in 1864 and hired some Paiutes, and in 1905 he sold it to Charles Chaffey. In 1910 Charles and George Chaffey formed the Owens Valley Improvement Company, subdivided the land, and built a concrete pipe system to bring water from Shepherd Creek to orchards that by 1921 held more than 20,000 apple and pear trees, giving Manzanar its name. The town served about 200 residents, but the orchard economy failed, and in the 1920s the City of Los Angeles began buying land and water rights as Sierra Nevada snowmelt was sent south through the aqueduct; the last resident left in 1935, and the town was declared abandoned on October 6, 1941. In spring 1942 the U.S. Army turned the abandoned townsite into Manzanar War Relocation Center, where 11,070 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants, accused of no crime except their ancestry, were confined from March 21, 1942 to November 21, 1945 within a square-mile housing area enclosed by guard towers, military police, and barbed wire. Outside the fence, incarcerated people farmed 440 acres, raised livestock, and experimented with guayule as a possible wartime rubber source. Descendants of Paiutes and of homesteaders, ranchers, and farmers still live in the valley, and some Japanese Americans return each year on the last Saturday of April, reflecting a landscape shaped by the settlement and displacement of three populations by more powerful groups.