For thousands of years the Owens River valley was inhabited by the seminomadic Owens Valley Northern Paiute and the Shoshone tribes of Native Americans. The indigenous name for the river was "Wakopee", while they called Owens Lake "Pacheta". In the upper Owens Valley lie traces of some of California's first irrigation systems, created by Paiute groups to water small patches of crops. It is believed that native people in the upper portion of the valley once built dams across the Owens River (and possibly one of its major tributaries, Bishop Creek) to divert water into local canals. The switch from a hunter-gatherer to a settled, agricultural lifestyle is probably the result of the climate of the Owens Valley becoming drier some 1,000 years ago.