osemite
Valley's first residents were Native Americans who inhabited the region
perhaps as long as 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time non-Native Americans
entered the Yosemite region in the mid-19th century, the valley was inhabited
by the Southern Sierra Miwok. The Miwok called Yosemite Valley
Ahwahnee, which translates loosely as "Place of a Gaping Mouth," and
called themselves the Ahwahneechee. They harvested black oak acorns, hunted,
and fished. They traded acorns and other items native to Yosemite Valley with
the Mono Lake Paiute people for obsidian, rabbit skins, pine nuts, and insect
foods.
Early references to Yosemite Valley by non-Indian explorers began appearing
in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1848, the discovery of gold brought scores of
outside gold seekers to the Sierra Nevada. By 1851, thousands of miners had
appropriated Indian lands, which quickly resulted in the Mariposa Indian
War. In an attempt to capture a group of Yosemite Indians, the
state-sanctioned Mariposa Battalion entered Yosemite Valley on March 27, 1851.
Word of Yosemite's beauty gradually spread, and in 1855, the first party of
tourists arrived. Nine years later, a group of influential Californians
persuaded the federal government to grant Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa
Grove to the state as the first public preserve.
National Park Status
The drive for federal protection of the Yosemite region began shortly after
the first non-Native American settlers arrived and before conservationist
John Muir first visited in 1868.
Due, in part, to the tireless efforts of varied individuals such as
Galen Clark, Abraham Lincoln provided the first official protection when
he signed the Yosemite Grant on June 30, 1864. This grant is considered the
foundation upon which national and state parks were later established. The
grant deeded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the
state of California. However, no such protection existed for the vast
wilderness surrounding the valley.
In 1889, John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, the influential editor of
Century magazine, found the high country overrun with flocks of
domestic sheep. Although Muir had been absent from the Yosemite area during
the five years preceding this visit, he had written as early as 1869 of the
devastation that these "hoofed locusts" wrought on the land. They not only
voraciously consumed meadows and wildflowers, but also destroyed the soul of
the land. "Something must be done", Muir urged Johnson, as they camped together
in Tuolumne Meadows. Johnson responded by using his influence on key citizens
and politicians back East to help preserve the region. Johnson's resolve
became as strong as Muir's. Together, they planned a campaign to make the high
country surrounding Yosemite Valley into a national park.
While Johnson lobbied for the park back east, Muir spoke and wrote
eloquently of the need for legislation to set the land aside for a national
park, as was done when Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872.
Remarkably, their efforts were rewarded in just a year. On October 1, 1890,
the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of "reserved forest
lands" soon to be known as Yosemite National Park. It included the area
surrounding Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. It took
a
meeting between President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir (107k gif) in
1903, and the effective lobbying of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman,
however, to have Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove ceded from the state
of California's control and included in Yosemite National Park in 1906.
