When gold miner and wilderness romantic Lafayette Bunnell first rode into Yosemite Valley on March 21, 1851, he thought he had arrived, if not in heaven, in Eden. “I have seen the power and glory of a supreme being,” he wrote, and “the majesty of his handiwork.” Bunnell was not alone that day. In fact, he was accompanying one of the most aggressive militias in western American history, the Mariposa Battalion, commanded by James Savage. A veteran of Indian wars, Savage was there to rid Yosemite Valley of natives so that gold miners would be safe to ply their trade on the banks of the swiftflowing Merced – the River of Mercy.
The natives were Ahwahneechee Indians, a small band of Miwoks who had intermarried with the Paiutes of Mono Lake and settled in the valley some 4,000 years before Bunnell and Savage “discovered” it. Bunnell had mixed feelings about the valley’s inhabitants. At times he romanticized their way of living, but he also said there was no room for them in the West, calling them “yelling demons” and “overgrown vicious children.” The territory, Bunnell wrote in his journal, should be “swept of any scattered bands that might infest it.” And Savage was more than willing to accommodate him. On that early spring day in 1851, Bunnell stood by and watched while Savage and his men burned acorn caches to starve the Ahwahneechee out of the valley. Seventy Indians were physically removed. Twenty-three were later slaughtered at the foot of El Capitan. In his diary Bunnell wrote of being overwrought with emotion at the foot of that majestic edifice. But it was not the massacre that moved him to “tears of emotion,” it was the sight of El Cap itself.
But the Ahwahneechee wouldn’t give up easily. In the years that followed they kept returning to the valley, despite the near certainty that Savage or one of his successors would find them, kill a few, and move the rest to a reservation created for them in the Central Valley of California.
At the behest of Peter Burnett, California’s first elected governor, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Act in 1864 and empowered the U.S. Army to protect the area from illegal settlement. Burnett had previously called for a “war of extermination” against the state’s Indians, but the Army was unwilling to go quite that far. In fact, a few Miwok families were allowed to return to the park to provide amusement for the tourists. By the end of the 19th century there were six small villages scattered between the valley and Tenaya Lake. In 1900 they were merged into one large village situated in the valley.
In 1868 John Muir moved to California. For two years he worked as a shepherd in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at times side by side with natives. In his various writings and journals Muir called them “diggers” and found the Yosemite Indians to be particularly “ugly, some of them altogether hideous.” He said they had “no place in the landscape,” and that he felt none of the “solemn calm” he expected of wilderness while in their presence.
While allowing that the Indians’ way of life had minimal impact on the land, Muir was revolted by their diet of ant and fly larva. But “the worst thing about them is their uncleanliness,” he wrote, “nothing truly wild is unclean.” In 1892 Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, which began almost immediately to lobby to make Yosemite a national park, devoid of all human occupants.
In 1914 Yosemite became a national park, and in 1916 the National Park Service was created inside the U.S. Department of the Interior, which also housed the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the next 50 years park service policy toward Indians in Yosemite vacillated wildly from accommodation to expulsion. In 1969 the last of the Miwoks were removed from Yosemite Park. By then, fortress conservation was a well-established practice that, like most other American inventions, was being aggressively exported.
Read more stories by Eric Nee.