Yosemite NP

Indigenous peoples

The Ahwahneechee, a Southern Sierra Miwok tribelet, lived in and around the valley they called Ahwahnee. Gold Rush miners and settlers burned their villages and felled oak groves; Indians had no civil or legal rights. Governor John McDougal — who, Greene writes, had once spoken to the legislature of the inevitability of the extermination of the Indian race — authorized a militia: the 200-man Mariposa Battalion under trader James Savage, mustered in January 1851. Savage threatened to annihilate Chief Tenaya’s people if they resisted, then burned their dwellings and food caches to starve them onto reservations. In May another company shot two captives trying to escape; one was Tenaya’s youngest son. [3]

In June 1852 Army troops shot five Indians found with clothing suspected to be the murdered prospectors’. In 1907 the Army took Koomine, the valley’s largest village, as a camp and forced out its residents; in 1969 the Park Service moved the last family from its 1933 Indian Village and burned it. [3]

Women

Enid Michael, a third-grade teacher from Pasadena, moved to the park in May 1919 and became one of the four members of Yosemite’s first Nature Guide Service. She published 195 articles in Yosemite Nature Notes and from 1931 directed the planting of a wildflower garden behind the Yosemite Museum, funded by a $4,000 gift from Marjorie Montgomery Ward, that came to hold more than a thousand plants. Some male colleagues resented a woman in the job: in 1923 she rallied the California Federation of Women’s Clubs to press for a permanent appointment, and a handwritten note on a 1937 memo said Civilian Conservation Corps boys should work under a male naturalist, the word underlined four times. After twenty-one seasonal reappointments, her service ended on September 30, 1942. [4]

Black history

From 1891 to 1914, before the Park Service existed, the U.S. Army guarded Yosemite and the other Sierra parks. In 1899 the 24th Infantry patrolled the backcountry, and the 9th Cavalry followed in 1903 and 1904 — both regiments of African American soldiers, the Buffalo Soldiers, formed after the Civil War. Shelton Johnson argues that the nearly 500 soldiers who served over those three years were long left out of the park’s histories; Carl Russell’s One Hundred Years in Yosemite never names either regiment. He calls them invisible men and contends that such gaps in history are made, not accidental. The Park Service’s 2016 foundation document now names the Army’s role, including the Buffalo Soldiers, in its statement of the park’s significance. [5] [1]

Climate & environment

The 2019 park brochure points to the pika, a small, heat-intolerant animal of the high-country rock piles, whose habitat is shifting upward as the climate rapidly warms — and asks where pikas will go when they run out of mountain. The 2016 foundation document names climate change a key issue: drought had already killed large numbers of ponderosa pines and other trees at lower elevations, and less snowpack and earlier runoff could bring longer, drier summers, larger and more intense wildfires and more flooding as precipitation falls as rain. The park is restoring meadows, riverbanks and the Mariposa Grove and using prescribed and managed fire; the brochure notes that a century of protecting sequoias from fire had harmed the trees it meant to save. [2] [1]

Labor & the New Deal

Ten Civilian Conservation Corps camps operated in Yosemite between May 1933 and October 1940, with 6,816 enrollees assigned — unemployed, unmarried young men of 18 to 25 typically earning thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went home to their families. Each camp held 225 to 250 men, mostly from cities, alongside local recruits and experienced local men. They built log curbing and paths around Yosemite Village, revived the 250 apple trees settler James Lamon had planted, and replaced the posts of the Half Dome cable route, drilling 41 holes into the rock by hand while roped to the posts. The Cascades camp on Highway 140 was wiped out in the 1937 flood. [6]