Yosemite Forum

Some time ago, I became interested in John B. Lembert, after whom the Lembert Dome was named. In 1896, he was found murdered in his winter shack in the Merced River Gorge, a few miles below Yosemite Valley. He was in his mid-fifties at the time of his death. That crime remains unsolved to this day, almost 130 years later. However, it turned out that life and achievements of this "Yosemite Hermit", as he was called, were so much more interesting than his mysterious death. For months I had been collecting little-known (or until now completely unknown) pieces of his life story. And what an amazing story it was! Shortly after arriving in Yosemite, in the mid-1870s, Lembert discovered the incomparable charm of the lush pastures of Tuolumne Meadows, far from the hustle and bustle of Yosemite Valley. At that time, Tuolumne Meadows area was not part of the original Yosemite Grant, and homesteading was still permitted. By 1878, Lembert already had a small hand-built cabin at the Meadows, north of the Tuolumne River, which he would use as his summer residence for the rest of his life. For some visitors to the high country, Lembert's solitary living in this mountain paradise painted a romantic halo around the edges of his aloneness. Others may have found him a bit odd. In the late 1880s a series of terrible setbacks befell him one after another. In the winter of 1890/1891, John Lembert has probably reached the lowest point of his life. Then, in September 1891, a chance meeting with the noted East Coast entomologist Harrison Dyar changed his fortunes again. Over the next four years, this 'hermit', who in his youth probably had only a basic education and whose library/study/lab was a small one-room windowless cabin far from civilization, transformed himself into a respected naturalist. From 1892 to 1895, he published about two dozen articles and commentaries in leading entomological journals. And then, in April 1896, as the snow in the mountains above Yosemite began to melt, a fatal shot by an unknown assassin took his life. In Lembert's obituary, the editor of the "Canadian Entomologist" wrote: "His untimely death is a loss to entomology, as he was a keen observer and a diligent collector in a little-known locality, and had only just begun a work which would have been of great value". A beautiful iridescent green butterfly, and at least two other insects and two plants were named after Lembert.

If you are interested, learn more about John Lembert's life and death on my webpage, http://starr-king.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/LembertSecret.html