Talk:History of the Yosemite area

John Muir

Interesting sidenote: I have a letter from a great uncle who was a ranger at Yosemite and Sequoia parks in the 30s. He relates the utter hatred that local people had for John Muir back then because in preserving the land for the future, he was taking jobs (and homes?) away from the locals. I guess that's one measure of his effectiveness. shoaler 15:04, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The letter is handwritten and I just have a photocopy, but here's part that I've transcribed. Some of it is a little raw:

Mariposa Grove of Big Trees Sept. 24, 1932

Dear Old Nan, et at:

Now the winter is a'comin' on up here, and we begin to wonder where our summer's wages have gone. There is a frosty feel in the air, and I have had to pull up a second blanket and even a third. The poison-oakers, the home guard, the foothill natives, have been predicting a storm for two weeks past. And I reckon we will have a storm eventually; if not, it will be a long dry spell, as the feller says.

Can you or Pol, or any of you, imagine camping and working right near the big trees and getting paid for it? "Big Trees" is the exact English name for them; Sequoia Gigantea the Latin, as you probably know. Anyhow, they are enormous things. Some are three hundred feet tall, & that's almost as tall as a football field is long. It must be about that far from your house to the Village Hall. ¡Figuraselo!

And some are 27 feet in diameter at 10 feet above the ground. Measure the length of your living room and see how it compares. Someone figured out that one tree, the Grizzly Giant, contains enough lumber to make a hanger for the Akron from one-inch boards, with enough lumber remaining to build two average dwelling houses.

So much for statistics; the trees are wonders any way you look at them. Majestic is the word, I guess, and you know I'm not given to slopping over. So shapely, so big, such pretty combination of red-brown bark and green green foliage. The leaves somewhat resemble a cedar, and somewhat a cypress, they say.

Well, in the southwest corner of the Park there is a high valley where there are several hundred of these trees. The geologists say that these trees extended in a belt north and south for many miles a few million years ago. Then came the glaciers moving down westward from the High Sierras and ground out most of the Big Tree belt, leaving only scattered groves which have persisted until now.

In the Mariposa Grove there are roads, and a museum where a ranger-naturalist of the Park Service is stationed from June through Labor Day. The museum is a replica of, and on the site of, the old log cabin built by Galen Clark who is said to have discovered the grove in 1857. By the way, they say that when Clark "discovered" the grove in that year, he found an axe and a shovel leaning against one of the Big Trees. What do you make of that! Furthermore, the natives hereabouts say that John Muir was a lazy bum, a horsethief, a sheepstealer, and that he had a ghost do his writing for him. Thus are our ideas shattered.

By the way, again, these foothill men, many of whom are working here in the Park, seem to be a type of the Simon-pure Californians. So different from the transplanted Iowans, the real-estate ballyhooers, the scramblers to live off each other that infest the Los Angeles country. These birds were born in the foothills, their parents were before them, and probably their grandparents too, maybe. They have worked in the woods, in the gold mines (the foothills below us are in the mother lode country), and know the country & where to hunt & where to catch fish.

We have a comp of tents, arranged in a rectangle, the cook-shack at one end. In the enclosed area, an enormous bonfire burns night & morning. In the evening, and on our double holiday (Saturday & Sunday off - 5 day Hoover week) there are almost endless games of cribbage and pinochle, and a continuous round of discussion and oration about the depression, wages, jobs, Japan, China, Russia, Aimee, Sunny Jim Rolph, and what a big bum Hoover is. Our weekly wage cut 162/3 %, but our board remains the same. True the board-cost was reduced 121/2% in June, by a local change in the Park. And no corresponding 162/3 % increase in the number of men employed; on the day when Hoover made one of his Pollyanna spiels about increase of employment, spreading of work, 4 men (about 10% of the total) were laid off in this camp, and men have been laid off frequently in the last month, throughout the Park.

What's the dope, the inside dope of Kiplinger & all? Is the nadir reached and passed, or is it only made to appear so by the kited stockmarket and the cheerful bits from Youngstown and Bethlehem, all sponsored by the Republican aspirants?

At the Rangers Club, where I stayed in the Valley (Yosemite Valley), they had the S.F. Examiner, which is so sensational. I used to buy the Chronicle, but it proved so prostrate before Hoover, that I finally subscribed for the S.F. Daily News, a Scripps-Howard evening sheet that is not so bad.

Down there in the Valley the summer was wonderful. Broad fields of uncut grass. The Merced River meandering through groves of Yellow Pine and Oak. Deer grazing here & there. A paddock of elk. Sheer granite walls rising a half-mile high in grandeur, until I at best got a little bit of a shut-in feeling. I like to be where I can "see off" to mountains 15 or 50 miles away. A multiplicity of roads, on which tourists mostly from California continuously passed. Every week-end night, a program of volunteer talent at Camp 15, with a whistling fool from Oklahoma U. as master of ceremonies. There an old fiddler who stamped as he sawed Turkey in the Straw & The Arkansas Traveler; a homely fat girl who played accordion rather well, while her homely thin girl-friend played piano, & the two sang "first" & "second" in old Methodist hymns. A round Jew who told funny jokes in Jew & Gentile, Irish and Negro. And everybody singing foolish rounds about "Scotland's Burning" and "Killee Killee Killee Killee Watch Watch Watch Watck Ki O Kinkum Kawa." Old and young, overalls and sport clothes all in a big semi-circle and having just a good time. And every night a Ranger Naturalist to tell about Geology or Trees or Birds or the delights of the High Sierra, or the days of the 49ers. And every night, that bizarre monstrosity, The Fire-fall. At nine o'clock p.m. a stentorian voiced attaché of the Curry company shouts from Camp Curry in the Valley, "Hello-o-o Glacier Point!" It's like hollering from Plandome to Manhasset; it's further, in fact. It's about a mile horizontally and a half mile vertically. Another employee hollers back from the top of Glacier Point, "Hello-o-o-o, Camp Curry," prolonging it like a hog-caller. Then Curry calls up, "Let the fire fall." And in the silence, the bated breath of the hundreds of dudes gathered below, comes back a little from Glacier Point, "All right" trailing downward in the end. Then the men up above, having had a roaring fire burning for hours on top of the cliff, begin to push the glowing embers over, and they are seen as a glowing red cascade, as the coals fall a thousand feet or more thru the air. As they push more embers over, this firefall continues for 3, 4, 5 minutes, during which time someone sings a weird nature song of McDowell or whatnot, everybody cranes his neck upward, or exclaims or remains silent in awe, according to his nature; cars parked at vantage points dim their lights; the young summer lovers wish it would end, for then the music would start in the dance hall, the nightly dance would begin; the employees who are here regularly soon begin to go about their business, letting the fire fall as it will.

Shoaler 12:32, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yosemite Indians were Paiute

The reference that suggests that the original Ahwahneechees were Miwok is not correct. The first account written by Lafayette Bunnell states "Ten-ie-ya was recognized, by the Mono tribe, as one of their number, as he was born and lived among them until his ambition made him a leader and founder of the Pai-Ute colony in Ah-wah-ne. His history and warlike exploits formed a part of the traditionary lore of the Monos. They were proud of his successes and boasted of his descent from their tribe, although Ten-ie-ya himself claimed that his father was the chief of an independent people, whose ancestors were of a different race."[1]Which meant that Ahwahneechees were a totally seperate tribe from any around, including the Miwoks. Chief Tenaya's mother was documented to be Mono Paiute. Tenaya married a Mono Lake Paiute woman and had children with her. That would indicate that Chief Tenaya's children would be mainly Paiute and not Miwok as mistakenly written. The undisputable Paiute territory included the mountain regions of the Sierra, from north to south. Miwoks held the lower ground from the foothills and lower. They were not friends. If you'd like more information on this, please read some of the posts at www.yosemitecampers.com in the Yosemite Indian categories,[2] where the Yosemite area Indians have discussed this at length. Some of the posters are actually directly related to Chief Tenaya.

1910 Map of Miwok territory by noted California Indian anthropologist C. Hart Merriam.[3]

Note that east of the Miwok territory is Paiute area. This is the earliest map of the Indian territory around Yosemite. Note that most of the Yosemite area is in Paiute land except around El Portal. Which is the entrance of Yosemite park.

By this time Miwoks had moved into the area. Before 1910 Merriam wrote that there was not a Miwok camp there twenty years before.

New definition of Yosemite

New definition of Yosemite was created in 1978 by one Craig D. Bates and is not correct. He did this to explain why his wife's tribe, the Miwoks, were afraid of the Yosemite Indians. He was employed as the official Yosemite Indian ethnologist, but many Native Yosemite Indians believe he created this new definition for his own reasons.

Inline links

Just a thought, should the inline links in this article be there, or are they better off being converted to Template:Cite web with <ref> tags? MyNameIsNotBob 10:52, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

California bear

The official "State Animal" is the "California Grizzly Bear." The following is the quote from the official State of California website about the State Animal:

"The California grizzly bear (Ursus californicus) was designated official State Animal in 1953. Before dying out in California, this largest and most powerful of carnivores thrived in the great valleys and low mountains of the state, probably in greater numbers than anywhere else in the United States. As humans began to populate California, the grizzly stood its ground, refusing to retreat in the face of advancing civilization. It killed livestock and interfered with settlers. Less than 75 years after the discovery of gold, every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed. The last one was killed in Tulare County in August 1922, more than 20 years before the authority to regulate the take of fish and wildlife was delegated to the California Fish and Game Commission by the State Legislature."

See Official State website

In addition, the following is the quote from the official State of California website about the California state flag:

"On June 14, 1846, a small band of settlers marched on the Mexican garrison at Sonoma and took the commandant, Mariano Vallejo, prisoner, They issued a proclamation which declared California to be a Republic independent of Mexico. This uprising became known as the Bear Flag Revolt after the hastily designed flag depicting a grizzly bear and a five pointed star over a red bar and the words "California Republic." The grizzly bear was a symbol of great strength while the lone star made reference to the lone Star of Texas. The flag only flew until July 9, 1846 when it was learned that Mexico and the United States were already at war. Soon after, the Bear Flag was replaced with the American flag. It was adopted as the State Flag by the State Legislature in 1911." (Emphasis supplied.)

See Official State website. NorCalHistory 07:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC)