By Jeff Perkin
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
—John Muir
Just by glimpsing a photograph of California’s iconic Yosemite Valley, it’s easy to understand why millions of people from around the world make the pilgrimage to its breathtaking landscapes every year. Yosemite is home to some of the largest waterfalls in North America, one of the biggest exposed-granite monoliths on earth, and a wide range of beautiful scenes indicative of the varied elevations and ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Whether you stand in a scenic meadow, look up the heights of a mighty sequoia, or look down from the edge of a sheer granite monolith, there is no shortage of reasons why Yosemite provided an impetus for the birth of America’s National Park System.
Inspired by its vast geological wonders, influential American historical figures such as President Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir devoted themselves to protecting Yosemite for future generations. In the 19th century, most of the United States was still an undisturbed Eden in the eyes of the young nation’s citizens. Yosemite Valley, with its awe-inspiring walls, lush meadows, and abundant forest groves, was one of the most prized areas of this newly threatened Eden. The controversial battle to conserve Yosemite through government oversight set the precedent for the National Park System we know and love today.
Yosemite’s Dramatic History
The history of Yosemite is a dramatic, dualistic microcosm that includes the violent expulsion of Native Americans, and the subsequent fight to halt the destructive practices of private commercial interests. Evidence of the presence of Native Americans in and around Yosemite Valley dates back thousands of years before non-indigenous settlers arrived. A tribe of Paiute Native Americans, the Ahwahnechee, once lived amid the immense granite monoliths of the epic valley they called Ahwahnee, meaning “large mouth.”
When the California Gold Rush suddenly brought tens of thousands of European Americans to the Sierras in the mid 1800s, life was forever changed for the indigenous people. Violent conflict was one predictable result of the newly arrived settlers claiming land and resources in their pursuit of striking it rich.
Gold provided the motivation for explorers to brave the largely undisturbed and rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains. As a result of growing conflict with the Ahwahnechee, a group of armed settlers known as the Mariposa Battalion pursued the tribe into the valley in 1851, burning their villages and forcing them out. Mariposa Battalion member Dr. Lafayette Bunnell ironically named the valley “Yosemite” in honor of the expelled tribe, without knowing it was a name—created for the Ahwahnechee by surrounding Miwok tribes—that meant “those who kill.”
Despite the dark and morally questionable circumstances of this conflict in Yosemite Valley, Bunnell had these beautiful words to say about the landscape: “As I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation began to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion. I said with some enthusiasm, ‘I have here seen the power and the glory of a Supreme Being, the majesty of His handiwork is in that testimony of the rocks.’”
