Up the river of mercy - history of Yosemite Valley

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1992 by Rebecca Solnit

NAMES WERE KEYS to the landscape where I grew up. With names, the patterns of that coastal California landscape emerged: milkmaids that bloomed first, brodiea whose bulbs the Miwok ate, miners lettuce and thimbleberries that I ate, buckeyes that flowered at the same time as Junes feral hedge roses and lost their leaves earliest in the fail. From a riot of green the natural world came into focus as a delicately balanced cycle of events I looked forward to, of dangers, uses, and niches. Place names didn't add much to this picture for decades, until I began reading western history and realized that the larger landscape too was a crazy quilt of names representing cultures, battles, heroes, victims, and real-estate developers.

When I unfurled a map for my first real trip to the Sierra Nevada last summer, the names began to tell their story: Donner Pass for the desperate emigrants of 1846; Truckee for one Paiute chief, and, up Interstate 80 a ways, Winnemucca for another. Carson City for Kit Carson, who defeated the Navajo nation and explored California with John Fremont; Walker Lake east of Lake Tahoe for the trapper Joseph Walker, who in 1833 was perhaps the first white man to look into Yosemite Valley. Mariposa (Spanish for butterfly), the Merced (Spanish for mercy), and Yosemite itself, whose Miwok name had the strangest story of all.

We came to the Sierra from the east, stopping in Lee Vining on the shores of Mono Lake to stretch and buy provisions. Next to the main grocery store in this one-street town is a small monument of rough stones, cement, and bronze. "The name of this community honors Leroy Vining," it reads. "In 1852 Lieutenant Tredwell Moore and soldiers of the Second Infantry pursued Indians of Chief Tenaya's tribe from Yosemite across the Sierra via Bloody Canyon. They took back mineral samples and a prospecting party was organized. In this group were the Vinings, Lee and Dick .... "

We continued west over Tioga Pass, along the paved route that supplanted Bloody Canyon. The heights were still covered with snow. The sun was already setting by the time we reached Lake Tenaya, so we continued our descent, though it was the lake that I'd come to see.

LIEUTENANT MOORE'S SECOND INFANTRY was better known as part of the Mariposa Battalion, after Mariposa County, where the group of about 200 men was organized. It was in pursuit of Indians that the Mariposa Battalion became the first party of whites to enter Yosemite Valley, on March 27, 1851. Most of what we know about the battalion's expedition comes from Lafayette Bumells Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led to That Event, and it was Bumell who gave most of the principal landmarks in the valley the names they still bear.

Bunnell's is a strange account, switching back and forth from the lushest romantic response to the land to cool, journalistic recounting of how the war was conducted. When I read the book, I was shocked to learn that Yosemite had been first explored in the course of a war, that a place always described in terms of its idyllic scenery could have such a brutal history, and shocked most of all by the way Bunnell could be lyrical and coldblooded at the same time. The views moved him to tears, he wrote, and the rocks reaffirmed his faith in the deity. For me the inadvertent climax of the book is a scene at Lake Tenaya, after the old chief and his people have been captured, just before they are marched to a reservation in the flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley.

"When Ten-ie-ya reached the summit, he left his people and approached where the captain and a few of us were halting," Bunnell recounts. "I called him up to us, and told him that we had given his name to the lake and fiver. At first he seemed unable to comprehend our purpose, and pointing to the group of glistening peaks, near the head of the lake, said 'It already has a name; we call it Py-we-ack.' Upon my telling him that we had named it Ten-ieya, because it was upon the shores of the lake that we had found his people, who would never return to it to live, his countenance fell and he at once left our group and joined his family circle. His countenance indicated that he thought the naming of the lake no equivalent for his loss of territory."

Annihilating a culture and romanticizing it are not usually done at the same time, but Bunnell neatly compresses two stages of historical change into one interaction. Bunnell is saying, in effect, that there is no room for these people in the present; instead, they will provide a decorative past in another cukure's future. Pyweack means "shining rocks"; like most of Yosemites original place names, it describes the landscape rather than memorializing a passing human figure. Tenaya is a name given from outside, a name that sheds light on neither the lake nor the man unless one knows its pathetic origin.

I'd passed through the valley only once before, on my way to somewhere else, but for years I'd been working as a landscape historian, and the pictures and literature of Yosemite were familiar to me. Yosemite is a crucible of the American landscape, a catalyst for turning beliefs into tangible effects. It is, among other things, the subject of the first significant landscape photographs. The valley was the first piece of land recognized by the federal government as worthy of protection as a national park. It reigned supreme in John Muir's heart, and was central to the rounding of the Sierra Club. It is the most famous park in the country, and the most photographed.