Page "Inyo County, California" Paragraph 6

The local Paiutes responded that that was the land of Inyo.

They meant by this that those lands belonged to the Shoshone tribe headed by a man whose name was Inyo.

Inyo was the name of the headman of the Panamint band of Paiute-Shoshone people at the time of contact when the first whites, the Manly expedition of 1849, wandered, lost, into Death Valley on their expedition to the gold fields of western California.

The Owens Valley whites misunderstood the local Paiute 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.