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Humans in Yosemite

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

—John Muir

Native Americans

The earliest Native Americans arrived in the area about 8,000 years ago. By the time of the European explorers, the Native American tribes in the greater California region included about 90 distinct entities. The Spanish were the dominant foreigners, and they focused their activities on religious conversion and raising cattle. The burgeoning Mexican territory meant they were spread thin in the west. The Native Americans living here were mostly agrarian and did not unify into a strong fighting machine, as did the Sioux, Cherokee, or Lakota of the plains. They did not rebel against the Spaniards. From 1769 to 1823, the Spaniards began a rigorous mission construction program, wherein each of 21 California missions was located about a day’s walk from the next. The missions ranged from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in the south to Mission San Francisco Solano, in Sonoma, to the north. The goal of converting the locals consumed much of the daily life for the Spaniards, and they did not venture deep into the Sierra but instead built settlements in the coastal and central valley areas. In the mid-1800s some of the tribes in the Sierra area were the Po-ho-nee-chees, Po-to-en’-cies, Wil-tuc-um’-nees, Noot’-choos, Chow-chil’-las, Ho-na’-ches, Me’-woos, Monos, and the Chook-chan’-ces. Today some of these names live on at Native American casinos in the area.

The tribe that called Yosemite Valley home was related to the Miwok and Mono Paiute. They called themselves Ahwahneechee, which is believed to mean “place of the gaping mouth.” (The entrance to the valley resembles such.)

Arrival of the Whites

By the early 1800s the American frontier of the time lay to the west of St. Joseph, Missouri. There were no towns or settlements to speak of farther west. The mountains of the High Sierra were unknown to the Anglos who were migrating westward. The exploratory journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark provided the first organized route to the new western continent. Surprisingly, it was the East Coast and European fashion industry that helped drive western exploration. Furs had become the wrap of choice for society women in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Paris. The high price that soft beaver pelts could bring trappers spurred on an industry to seek the mammals. Trails penetrating the Rocky Mountains began to appear, and thousands of beavers and other fur-bearing animals lured rugged trappers onto uncharted lands. The players in this cottage industry would meet annually to trade their bounty for cash with resellers. Yearly meetings (not unlike the buyer-seller conventions of today) were called rendezvous. Trappers, guides, suppliers, and ambitious men would recruit hunting parties to venture into the unknown. Skilled Native Americans were allowed to participate in a gesture of equality. In July 1833 the rendezvous was held on the banks of the Green River in Utah. It was here that a man named Captain Joseph Walker assembled a fur-hunting party. His goal was to find a direct westward route for trappers through the Central Sierra to the Pacific Coast. (The first westward expedition to California was accomplished by Jedediah Smith in 1826, but that route was via the easier southern Sierra and into San Diego.) Historical research into the journals of one member of the Walker party, Zenas Leonard, allows us to reconstruct the Walker route with some confidence. It appears the men traveled west to Salt Lake, and then followed the Humboldt River into western Nevada and on to Mono Lake before attempting to cross the High Sierra. The expedition then passed by the East Fork of the Walker River and by areas we know today as Glen Aulin and Tenaya Lake. Of interest here is the very high probability that they actually continued on and looked down into Yosemite Valley from a vantage at Yosemite Point. Their descriptions appear to accurately reflect this. The party did not descend into the valley but continued on their quest through Crane Flat, Merced Grove, and then along the lower Merced into San Francisco, Gilroy, and finally Monterey. Extensive research, including hiking these trails, by authors Grant Hiskes and John Hiskes (The Discovery of Yosemite 1833) helped confirm these facts.

Today the National Park Service takes care to get the involvement of many tribes when they conduct projects that impact the park. Specifically, the following are consulted: American Indian Council of Mariposa County, Bishop Paiute Tribal Office, North Fork Mono Rancheria, Bridgeport Paiute Indian Colony, Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, Mono Lake Kutzadika’a Paiute Tribe, and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians.

A few others are thought to be the first to see Yosemite Valley. One could have been James Savage. He ran trading posts in the region, managed to marry five Native American women, and spoke their language. When both his Fresno River and South Fork trading posts were raided by Native Americans and some deaths resulted, it is highly probable that he pursued the renegades up the Merced River Valley and eventually into Yosemite Valley. Other candidates are William Penn Abrams and U. N. Reamer, who were seeking possible lumber mill sites on the Merced in 1849. While bear hunting, they became lost and made their way north to what may be Old Inspiration Point on the south rim of the valley. Abrams’s journal, found in 1947, records his description of many key valley features, including Half Dome.

Historic equipment left at Hite’s Cove

SAVAGE’S TRADING POST

The site of one of James Savage’s trading posts is easy to visit. It is located on CA 140, 26 miles from Mariposa. The South Fork merges in from the east, and the site is now a motel. Nothing of the original trading post exists, but it is fun to imagine the early days. Adjacent to Savage’s is a trail to Hite’s Cove. In the 1860s John Hite’s Native American wife led him to a spot where he mined out about $3 million in gold. Today the trail is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, and you can take the easy hike from CA 140 to see Hite’s Cove.

Gold Fever

The growth of the white population in California grew through the 1840s without much exploration of the Sierra. Arrivals came by ship from the East Coast, while others came over land via the lower, safer southern route. To provide lumber for the growing population, John Sutter ventured into the forested foothills of the Sierra east of Sacramento to set up a sawmill. He planned to get rich by selling the raw material, lumber, to feed the coming building boom. In January of 1848, while working at Sutter’s Coloma sawmill (50 miles east of Sacramento), James Marshall came upon shiny flakes of gold. He showed them to Sutter, who decided to keep it quiet until work on a flour mill was finished. However, word leaked out, and a certain shopkeeper named Samuel Brannan in San Francisco heard the news and saw the opportunity to sell shovels, pans, and jeans. He ran though the streets of the city shouting “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

History tells the rest. Men across the country dropped everything and flocked to the foothills in droves. Ships sailed around the horn with anxious easterners ready to stake claims. To speed transit, a railroad was built across Panama. The gold rush was on. Rivers and streams were rerouted to reveal their rich beds; giant sluice boxes sprung up. Towns with names such as Angels Camp, Nevada City, Hornitos, Mariposa, and Garrote (Groveland) became household words. Today’s CA 49 is littered with places that were once thriving gold towns. Sacramento boomed as supply stores, assay offices, banks, and brothels sprung up to support the miners. Newly rich miners found their way to San Francisco to relax and were quickly separated from their money. While many made small fortunes pulling out placer gold (the kind lying in streams), most of the real money was made by dry-goods sellers such as Brannan.

The 1846–1848 Mexican-American War gave California to the United States. Reflective of the boom, California was made a state on September 9, 1850. Many of the men who did not get lucky or hire on with bigger mining companies decided they liked California’s terrain, weather, and freedom and settled in the foothills. Many began farming or working in support industries. It’s relevant to note that during this time, because gold is usually not found in high mountains, there was no reason for further exploration to the east. The High Sierra remained unexplored and Yosemite was unknown.

Relations between the local tribes and the nonnatives became tense. The Native Americans were upset at the whites moving in. Some of the chiefs proposed that if the miners would give them some of the gold found on their lands, they could remain. The whites refused. The majority of the whites treated the natives as though they had no rights to be respected. Often, Native Americans who were working good mining claims were driven away by white miners, who then took possession of their claims and worked them. The Native Americans’ main sources of food supply were being eliminated by the whites as well. Their diet of acorns was impacted as oak trees were cut down and burned by miners. Land was cleared for crops, and deer and other game were being killed off or driven off by farmers. Tensions escalated—the Native Americans began stealing horses and then began a series of attacks on trading posts. The raid of James Savage’s trading post at the confluence of the Merced and the South Fork of the Merced spurred the locals to petition John McDougal, the governor of the new state, for help. In a letter to the governor dated January 13, 1851, Major James Burney, sheriff of Mariposa County, described the situation:

They have invariably murdered and robbed all the small parties they fell in with between here and the San Joaquin. News came here last night that seventy-two men were killed on Rattlesnake Creek; several men have been killed in Bear Valley. The Fine Gold Gulch has been deserted, and the men came in here yesterday. Nearly all the mules and horses in this part of the State have been stolen, both from the mines and the ranches. And I now in the name of the people of this part of the State, and for the good of our country, appeal to Your Excellency for assistance.

This resulted in the formation of the volunteer Mariposa Battalion. James Savage, mentioned earlier, became captain and led the volunteer group. While Federal Indian Commissioners were negotiating with tribes to relocate to reservations along the Fresno River, the soldiers pursued Native Americans who refused to cooperate. During the winter of 1850–1851, they chased a band believed to live farther north. The resultant events were dubbed the Mariposa Indian War. It was on March 27, 1851, that they entered what we now call the Yosemite Valley.

The definitive source for the events of the Mariposa Indian War can be found in the Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, MD book Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, which led to that event. Bunnell was the medical man for the battalion. He wrote his book 30 years after the events because he felt too many magazines and newspapers were “getting it wrong.”

The whites were impressed with what they saw. The soldiers learned much from Chief Tenaya, the leader of the Ahwahneechee, who were made up of renegades from various tribes. The soldiers wanted to honor the Native Americans by naming the place after them. Unfortunately, they mistakenly thought the locals were called the “Yo-Semite.” It seems that through Native American interpreters, the soldiers confused the Sierra Miwok name uz-mati, or “grizzly bear,” with a collective noun yose-met-i, meaning “the killers” or “a band of killers.” The soldiers thought this meant “they are killers of grizzlies”—the bear that lived there. Chief Tenaya said that the name had been given to his band because they occupied the mountains and valleys, which were the favorite habitat of grizzly bears, and his people were expert in killing them. In actuality, the people who lived in the Yosemite Valley called it Ahwahnee. They referred to themselves as the Ahwahneechee. This error is easily understandable since the whites were unfamiliar with the language. Yo-Semite (now Yosemite) was used by early California geologist Josiah Whitney. The soldiers also tried to use Native American names for the rock formations, waterfalls, and sites, but the multisyllabic words were too much for later visitors to master. So today we have Vernal Fall not Yan-o-pah; Bridalveil Fall not Pohono; Yosemite Falls not Cholock; Mirror Lake not Ahwiyah; El Capitan not Tote-ack-ah-noo-la; and Half Dome not Tissiack. The spelling of these Native American words is a guess, as they had no written language. After Tenaya’s death in 1853, the remaining Yosemite Native Americans dispersed and Yosemite Valley became a white man’s settlement.

The Crush Begins

Soon after its discovery, entrepreneurs entered the scene and began to promote Yosemite as a tourist destination. In 1855 James Hutchings led the first organized commercial tours in the valley. He kindled interest through his writings in his illustrated work Hutchings’ California Magazine. Soon artists such as Thomas Hill, Thomas Ayres, and photographers such as Carleton Watkins came to record the wonderful sights for anxious eastern audiences. In the early years, great men, such as Eadweard Muybridge, J. J. Reilly, C. L. Pond, Charles Bierstadt, Charles L. Weed, and George Fiske, brought images of the park to eager audiences. Sadly, many photos and negatives are lost to time due to the many fires that happened at Yosemite.

Being an educated man, Lafayette Bunnell led the naming of many places in the valley. In his book he states:

As I did not take a fancy to any of the names proposed, I remarked that “an American name would be the most appropriate;” that “I could not see any necessity for going to a foreign country for a name for American scenery—the grandest that had ever yet been looked upon. That it would be better to give it an Indian name than to import a strange and inexpressive one; that the name of the tribe who had occupied it, would be more appropriate than any I had heard suggested.” I then proposed “that we give the valley the name of Yo-sem-i-ty, as it was suggestive, euphonious, and certainly American; that by so doing, the name of the tribe of Indians which we met leaving their homes in this valley, perhaps never to return, would be perpetuated.”

Yosemite was charted by the U.S. Geologic Survey of California in 1863. Early visitors originally called Half Dome “South Dome” because they felt it balanced North Dome across the valley. Over the years, it has been called Cleft Rock, the Rock of Ages, and a few others that did not stick. However, Half Dome was soon the common name.

To help protect the pristine environs from commercial interests, in June 1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, which deeded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees (at the southern end) to the state of California. The bill mandated that this land be used for resort and recreation “for all time.” The grant was overseen by the Yosemite Board of Commissioners, which was led by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Galen Clark was the first caretaker of the park. Note that only those two tracts of land were set aside for California to manage; the U.S. government retained the rest. John Muir arrived in 1868, and his writings influenced the country so much that, in 1890, Yosemite obtained federal protection as a national park. At that time the park was comprised only of the land not in the Yosemite Grant. Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees were left under California jurisdiction. In 1905 the legislature of California re-granted Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove back to the U.S. government. Congress accepted the state grant in 1906 and added these lands to Yosemite National Park. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 at Promontory, Utah, provided a fast way for people to get to the west, and the park continued to grow in the 1900s. Today attendance approaches 4 million visitors annually.