Before the East Bay Municipal Utility District built Camanche Dam, a small town called Camanche existed there in the early 1960s. During the Gold Rush, the area in today's West Calaveras south of the Mokelumne River claimed towns called Poverty Bar, Clay's Bar, Winters Bar and Limerick, the latter after the many Irish immigrants who settled there. In the mid-1860s, as camps and settlements dwindled, pioneers from Iowa named their most significant town Camanche, after the Iowa town of the same name–and misspelled the name of the Native American tribe (Comanche) in the same way.