The one resource extraction industry that succeeded in the Kaweah basin was timber; many logging camps sprang up in the heavily forested western slopes of the Sierra, including in the watershed's sequoia groves. The Kaweah Colony was a utopian socialist community founded in 1886, along the Kaweah River in what is now Sequoia National Park. Although giant sequoia wood is generally too soft to be useful in construction, many sequoias were felled between the 1860s and the 1880s when the U.S. government began establishing timber reserves in the area, under pressure from conservationists, including John Muir, who visited the Kaweah's Marble Fork and named Giant Forest in 1875. Logging mostly ended after Sequoia National Park was founded in 1890; the bill establishing the park was pushed through in part due to the actions of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which saw the Kaweah colony as a competitor to logging operations that it owned elsewhere. Some settlers in the Kaweah Colony attempted to continue their operations but were later convicted of illegal logging, after which the colony dissolved in 1892.