Next: Title

Yosemite Tales and Trails (1934) by Katherine Ames Taylor

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Cover

- Title and front matter

- Table of Contents

- 1. Discovering Yosemite for Yourself

- 2. Highlights of the Yosemite Story

- 1. The Indians of Ahwahnee and the Medicine Man’s Prophecy

- 2. Discovery of the Yosemite

- 3. Return of the Mariposa Battalion and Death of Tenaya

- 4. Enter the Tourist

- 5. Stage Coaches and Bandits

- 6. Old-Timers and Pioneers

- 3. In the Beginning

- 4. Making a National Park

- 5. Big and Little Trees of Yosemite

- 6. Travelling the Trails

- 7. Indian Legends

About the Author

Katherine Ames was born April 8, 1895 in Michigan. She married Frank J. Taylor June 30, 1919 and they had 3 sons. Katherine Ames Taylor wrote books for H. S. Crocker Co., which include:

- Lights and Shadows of Yosemite (1926). Yosemite Indian folklore and photographs by Ansel Adams, George E. Stone, Bert Studio, Charles Hiller, F. J. Taylor, and others. Reprinted 2004.

- Los Angeles Tripbook (1928). Sightseeing guide

- Romance of Stanford (1927). Camera studies by George E. Stone

Katherine Taylor also wrote magazine articles.

Her husband Frank J. Taylor was a newspaper reporter and author. He was born October 8, 1894 in South Dakota. His photographs appeared in her 1926 book. Frank J. Taylor also wrote The Yosemite Trip Book (1929, 1938), co-wrote Oh Ranger! with NPS Director Horace Albright in 1929, and also wrote several other books, mostly travel and history, and magazine articles. During World Wars I and II he was a war correspondent. He died October 23, 1972. His biography appears in Gale’s Contemporary Authors.

Katherine Ames Taylor died July 5, 1979 in Santa Clara Co., California, but was residing at Arcade, Sacramento Co., California at her death.

Bibliographical Information

Katherine Ames Taylor (1895-1979), Yosemite Tales and Trails (H. S. Crocker Co., Inc., 1934), Photographs by Ansel Adams (1902-1984). Copyright 1934 by Katherine Ames Taylor. LCCN 35030043. 5+78 pages, illustrated, 28 cm. Bound in green cloth-covered board. Library of Congress call number F868.Y6 T26.

A second, expanded edition of this book was published in 1948 by Stanford University Press. The copyright for the second edition, but not the first, was renewed (in 1976).

Converted to HTML by Dan Anderson, November 2007, from a copy at UCSD. These files may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice is left intact.
—Dan Anderson, www.yosemite.ca.us

Next: Title

YOSEMITE
Tales and Trails

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After the storm Yosemite Valley emerges
in its rarest mood, flooded with lights and
shadows and fleeting fragments of rainbows

YOSEMITE
Tales and Trails

BY
KATHERINE AMES TAYLOR

SAN FRANCISCO
H. S. CROCKER CO., INC.
1934

COPYRIGHT 1934 BY
KATHERINE AMES TAYLOR

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
ANSEL ADAMS
SAN FRANCISCO

YOSEMITE
Tales and Trails

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

DISCOVERING YOSEMITE FOR YOURSELF

Chapter Two

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YOSEMITE STORY
1. The Indians of Ahwahnee and the Medicine Man’s Prophecy
2. Discovery of Yosemite
3. Return of the Mariposa Battalion and Death of Tenaya
4. Enter the Tourist
5. Stage-Coaches and Bandits
6. Old-Timers and Pioneers

Chapter Three

IN THE BEGINNING

Chapter Four

MAKING A NATIONAL PARK

Chapter Five

BIG AND LITTLE TREES OF YOSEMITE

Chapter Six

TRAVELING THE TRAILS

Chapter Seven

INDIAN LEGENDS

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Against a sky of cobalt blue,
Sentinel Rock raises its turrets
above a world of dazzling white

WHY CLIMB A MOUNTAIN?

“Why climb a mountain?” queried my neighbor.
“And is the recompense worth the labor?”

My neighbor, a man who is quite content
Adventuring asphalt and cement.

Why climb a mountain? I explained first of all
That climb is a gamble, a peak is a call—

A glove in the face, from the fists of the gods;
A challenge to try, in spite of the odds.

As for reward, I mentioned the slice
Of earth under the sky, the sliver of ice—

The trophy which few have achieved, or none,
A goal the length of a shout from the sun.

I mentioned the four far corners of space,
Wind on the mouth, clouds on the face,

The blue and green sparkle of stars in snow—
My neighbor looked blank and answered me—“So?”

By Ethel Romig Fuller
sunset magazine

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El Capitan, the Chief, guards
the entrance to Yosemite Valley

CHAPTER ONE
DISCOVERING YOSEMITE FOR YOURSELF

IF THERE is anything of the discoverer in you, by all means go to Yosemite! For there, in the heart of the Sierras, straddling the top of the world, lies a land of sky and water, green forests and granite domes, waiting for you to discover it.

No matter, of course, how many have preceded you. No matter that almost a century has passed since the first white man looked down into the depths of that valley. Yosemite, like the Grand Canyon, happens individually to everyone.

So buckle on your seven-league boots and be off to the largest single mountain in the world, the Sierra Nevada, one long granite block which piles its peaks four hundred and fifty miles along the eastern boundary of California. In its western flank are tucked two of the great National Parks of the West—Sequoia and Yosemite—all but lost in the magnitude of this mountain, towering so high that even the rain-clouds cannot clear its crests. Greedily the western slopes absorb all the rain, clothing themselves handsomely in forests of fir and pine, while over the ridge to the east lies the parched desert of Mono.

Yosemite, you will discover, is one vast land of such opposites and contrasts. When Nature carved a granite mountain a mile high, at its base she hid wild strawberries and wood-violets. On her heights she planted pigmy pines, clinging like matted moss to the wind-swept cliffs, while in her valleys grow the giant Sequoias, beneath whose lowest branches a cathedral could stand. With her right hand she traced the course of a clear mountain stream, with her left a bubbling soda spring. Humming-birds and eagles soar in this Park, and over her walls water and fire fall!

Even the climate plays tricks in Yosemite. Contrary to the usual laws of Nature the north side of the Valley is the warm and sunny side, and plants and flowers thrive there which are usually found far to the south. Under the southern wall it is cool and shady, because of the deep shadows cast by the cliffs, and naturalists were puzzled to find flowers there which ordinarily grew at a much higher altitude. Taking their cue from the flora, even the people of Yosemite have transplanted themselves, moving their old village with its administration offices from a southern to a northern exposure that they might have sun in winter!

Within the boundaries of the Park, with an elevation ranging from 3,500 feet to 10,000, you can generally find two seasons at a time. When the oaks are budding in the Valley you can still ski in the High Sierras; when it is summer below, up above the aspens have turned to gold, and dogwood flickers like a flame along the river’s edge. Calendar months mean little where you can step from one season to another as you would cross a state boundary line.

And Yosemite is practically a state within a state. About the size of Rhode Island, it has its own administrators who determine its policies. Its capital is Yosemite Valley. Few realize yet, however, that the Valley comprises but eight square miles out of a grand total of one thousand one hundred and twenty-six, leaving something like one thousand one hundred and eighteen square miles still to discover.

Yet without all the rest of the Park the Valley would always remain a rare bargain in scenery. Architecturally it is a masterpiece of beauty and balance. No builder could improve upon it, with El Capitan commanding one end of the Valley and Half Dome the other. An inner and an outer guard, placed with an eye for the greatest effectiveness of either. Rising from flat, open meadows, the strength and massiveness of The Chief is emphasized, while Half Dome is so placed that it catches the afterglow of the setting sun on its dome each day like a valedictory blessing.

Even the waterfalls are nicely distributed. With great impartiality Bridal Veil is festooned over one wall, while Yosemite crashes over another. On the third, and perhaps because there is no fourth wall, Vernal and Nevada are piled capriciously one above the other in a grand gesture, and a scenic climax. To a Californian, to whom water is the breath of life, such prodigality seems almost vulgar!

Each has its own beauty and its own charms, but somehow the glory of Yosemite Falls dominates all the others. Born of snow-fields, high in the shadow of Mount Hoffman, it idles its way over glacial rock, through fragrant forests for eighteen miles, to the very brink of its great plunge. Gathering itself together in a deep cut just above the rim of the Valley, it leaps with amazing suddenness 1,430 feet in the upper falls. That is two hundred feet more than the height of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building of New York. An elevator going up the face of the cliff would travel more than one hundred and two stories paralleling the upper falls alone.

In a series of foaming cascades, hidden for the most part, it drops another six hundred feet before making its final tumble of 320 feet in the lower falls. Its Big Moment over, it slips unobtrusively away across the floor of the Valley to lose itself in the Merced River, and to end, eventually and prosaically, by watering the prune and pear orchards of the San Joaquin Valley. The booming of these falls fills every hour of the day and night and every day and night of the early season, setting the tempo for the whole Yosemite symphony.

Robert Sterling Yard tells of a woman tourist he encountered once standing transfixed at the foot of Yosemite Falls. She turned and asked him if it were true that these were the highest falls in the world. He assured her that they were. Then he called her attention to the apparent deliberateness of the water’s fall, a trick of the senses resulting from failure to realize height and distance. For everything is so exaggerated in Yosemite nothing seems exaggerated at all. Unimpressed, she mused again:

“To think they are the highest in the world!”

He then went on, in a friendly way, to tell her how the water had carved the valley, and estimated roughly for her the ages since the Merced River flowed at the level of the cataract’s brink. To all of which she replied dreamily: “I have seen the tallest building in the world and the longest railroad, the largest lake and the biggest department store, and now I have seen the highest waterfall! Just think of that!”

And a thoroughly satisfied customer left Yosemite Park that day.

John Muir points out how much Yosemite owes to its “floods of water and floods of light.” The voice of Yosemite is in her rivers and waterfalls; her spirit is in her ever-changing lights and shadows. Without one she would be inarticulate;

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Happy Isles, where the waters of the
Merced River and Illilouette Creek
rush together in perpetual song

without the other, inanimate. On a sunless day her walls become bleak and overwhelming, and her forests somber. Then, through a rift in the clouds comes a ray of light and Yosemite changes as a smile illuminates a face.

Once I saw Yosemite clear after a snow-storm, and a gray world give way to one of dazzling blue and white. The blue of that sky, arching above snow cliffs streaked with black shadows, was unbelievable, indescribable. It was the blue of Crater and Como lakes combined. Everywhere beneath it was the glitter and dazzle of ice particles, caught on pine-needles, on rock castles, on furry fences, reflecting like prisms a rainbow of light. With the first glint of sun Yosemite was radiant, quivering with light and with life.

Beyond the walls of Yosemite lie the High Sierras, landscaped on a lavish scale. Up there, waiting for you, is a land of far-flung mountain peaks, of sky meadows and rushing rivers. There is a playground for giants, a home for valkyries. Swooping from pinnacle to peak, how their haunting cry would resound as they bore mortals like you and me from an everyday world to that promised Valhalla!

Up there is a Public Domain you will find strangely private as you wander among its solitudes, with only the sound of the wind and the water to distract you. A Public Domain you will he glad to share with your fellow men at night as you gather about the High Sierra campfires, to exchange tales of prowess which would do justice to the bards of old. Only Yesterday’s dragons have become Today’s trout; Yesterday’s moats, Today’s mountains!

Up there is enough beauty to engulf you for weeks. To the north, in this High Country, is the Tuolumne Meadows, well known to fishermen and mountain climbers of the West. And the Tuolumne Canyon, with its swirling, acrobatic river, which tosses water in huge arcs to make the celebrated waterwheel falls of the Tuolumne, a breath-taking spectacle. Not far away is Hetch-Hetchy, the changeling. Once a valley it was turned, ages ago, into a lake by the melting glaciers. After long centuries it became a valley once more, only to be converted again into a man-made lake that the people of San Francisco, hundreds of miles away, may drink and bathe. There are hundred-mile panoramas in the High Sierras, spattered with snowy peaks, shining lakes, and flowery meadows, where you can lose yourself, skimping well on dollars but not on days.

Up there, somewhere, is a new world to discover, a new frontier to explore. Nobody can describe it to you, for what one person sees, another might miss. What appears most beautiful to you on one trip may be utterly eclipsed on the next. So go and find Yosemite for yourself. With all the zest of its first discoverer explore its canyons and its peaks. Cast out your trout flies in the very streams the Indians once fished, and hike over prehistoric pavement made by crushing tons of glacial ice. Wherever you wander, whatever you see, you will discover, like the multitude before you, and the multitudes to come, that to have lived apart, even for an hour or so, among the Big Trees or on a mountain top, adds a touch of the immortal to the most prosaic of lives.

CHAPTER TWO
2. HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YOSEMITE STORY

1. The Indians of Ahwahnee and the Medicine Man’s Prophecy

2. Discovery of the Yosemite

3. Return of the Mariposa Battalion and Death of Tenaya

4. Enter the Tourist

5. Stage Coaches and Bandits

6. Old-Timers and Pioneers

YOSEMITE INDIANS

THE STORY of Yosemite begins back generations ago when a large and prosperous race of Indians known as the Ahwaneechees lived in the “deep, grassy Valley” they called Ahwahnee. In this Indian Paradise acorns grew in abundance. Sweet clover and tender grasses covered the floor of the valley. Fish were plentiful in the streams and the forests were alive with game. It was Yosemite’s heydey.

Every fall the Ahwaneechees held a great hunting festival in the Valley, to which they invited their neighbors, the Monos and the Paiutes, from across the Skye Mountains. Down from the crests of the Sierras they came, three and four hundred strong, to exchange their flints and salt and larvae paste for the acorns of Yosemite, and reeds for weaving baskets. For weeks at a time the braves hunted while the women gathered acorns and ground them into meal. Between hunts they played games of chance and skill, and at night, about the council fires, they told stories about the spirits which inhabited the rocks and the waterfalls, and the great chiefs swore undying fidelity to each other with an oratory which made the very walls ring.

Then came a mysterious illness, or “black sickness,” which spread through Ahwahnee and all but exterminated the tribe. Those who survived fled from the Valley, fearing the wrath of the gods they must have offended. And for years Yosemite was avoided. No human being went near it, and it was the golden era for the grizzly bears and the black-tailed deer.

Among those who escaped the epidemic was the great chief of the Ahwaneechees, who took refuge with the Mono Indians and was adopted into their tribe. His son, Tenaya, was born of a Mono woman and lived when a boy among his mother’s people.

When he reached manhood he was persuaded by the Medicine Man of his father’s tribe to return to the valley of his ancestors, taking with him the few descendants of the Ahwaneechees and outcasts from other tribes, and establish

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Winter makes magic
in Yosemite Valley

himself as their chief. And since it was customary among Indians to change the name of a locality or a people when some disaster had overtaken it, Tenaya and his followers adopted the tribal name of Yosemite, meaning grizzly bear.

Returning to Ahwahnee with Tenaya, the old Medicine Man prophesied that as long as the young Chief retained possession of the Valley his tribe would flourish and increase. That if he befriended those who sought his protection no other tribe would come to make war upon him or attempt to drive him from his stronghold. That if he obeyed the patriarch’s counsel he would put a spell upon Ahwahnee which would hold it sacred to him and to his people alone, so that none would dare to intrude there. But he solemnly warned Tenaya against the horsemen of the lowlands, and declared that should they ever enter his valley his tribe would soon be scattered and destroyed, his people taken captive, and he, himself, would be the last chieftain in Ahwahnee.

Arrogant though he was, this warning of the Medicine Man disturbed Tenaya, and the dread of its fulfillment obsessed him, leading, ironically enough, to his downfall—and to the discovery of Yosemite!

For with the discovery of gold in California and the arrival of the gold-diggers in the foothills of the Sierras, trouble with the Indians began. The white men, they claimed, with their hogs and cattle were destroying their acorn crops. They were plowing under fields of grass and clover to plant their own seeds. They fished out the streams and frightened off the wild game.

To retaliate, the natives stole horses and cattle from the miners. They plundered and burned their trading posts. Incited and aroused by the anxious Tenaya, whom they feared, Indians from other tribes joined the Yosemites in plaguing their common enemy, the white man, in an open effort to drive him from the country.

Among the early settlers in that region was one James D. Savage, who had befriended the Indians. It was the burning of his trading post on the Fresno River and the cold-blooded murder of his three assistants there which led to the organization of the Mariposa Battalion to punish and prevent such outrages.

Commissioners were sent out from Washington to try to treat with the Indians,

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Clouds’ Rest and Half Dome as
they burst upon you, in winter, from
the new tunnel road into Yosemite

and persuade them to come into the reservations the Great White Father had established for them. But the Yosemites, most warlike of these mountain tribes and the greatest trouble-makers, refused to treat with the Commissioners. Beef and gaudy presents they scorned in exchange for their freedom and their mountain home. Nor did they care, for obvious reasons, to meet and mix on the reservation with members of the tribes they had abandoned or been turned out of. They fled instead to their stronghold, their remote valley, where, they boasted, “one Indian was as good as ten white men.”

But the prophecy of the Medicine Man weighed heavily on Tenaya’s mind. When his runners brought word that the attack upon Savage was leading to reprisals, and that the Mariposa Battalion was then on its way into Yosemite to bring him and his people into the Commissioner’s camp, the wily Chief made one last desperate effort to keep the white man out of his valley. He shrewdly decided to conciliate the Americans by taking his tribe into the White Father’s camp to make peace, intending, always, to return to the mountains as soon as the excitement from the recent outbreaks had subsided.

A few days earlier and he might have succeeded in this strategem. But he delayed too long. Major Savage and his troops were already encamped where Wawona stands today, and there Tenaya encountered them. The old Chief said he had come to give himself up, and that his people were on their way in, but had been delayed by a snow-storm, which had made travel difficult.

For three days Major Savage waited for the Yosemites to appear, then becoming impatient and suspicious he decided to go on. Tenaya did all he could to restrain him, explaining that if the Indians could not get out of the Valley, the horsemen could never get through the drifts to get in. But Savage turned a deaf ear and gave the order to march on, with Tenaya as their guide.

Half-way between their camp and the Valley they met a little band of Indians, men, women, and children, plodding wearily through the deep drifts, silent and disheartened. They were Tenaya’s people. Savage counted seventy-two as they filed past.

“Where are the rest of them?” he asked their chief.

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From Glacier Point the flash of
Yosemite Falls and the sound of its
thunder dominate the entire Valley

Tenaya shook his head, indicating that was all that was left of his tribe. The rest, he said, had scattered and gone back to their own people. But Major Savage had learned something of the ways of the Yosemites. Observing that there were no young braves among the band, he gave the order to proceed, sending a grim and disgruntled Tenaya back into camp with the guards and their captives.

DISCOVERY OF YOSEMITE

Those men of the Mariposa Battalion, approaching Yosemite for the first time, had only the vaguest idea of what lay ahead of them. In an effort to keep the white men out of their mountains the Yosemites had painted a lurid picture of their valley.

“It must be the very devil of a place!” one of the soldiers commented as he listened to the gloomy recital of Tenaya.

“A hell of a hole!” opined another, his appetite whetted to see this inferno.

So it was with the worst possible expectations that these discoverers of Yosemite first looked down into the Valley from Inspiration Point.

For long hours the troops had marched over rugged passes and through deep defiles covered with snow, suffering from the cold and exposure, liable to a surprise attack from Indians at any time, slipping on the edge of precipices where one misstep meant almost certain death. Floundering through the drifts they stumbled out upon Inspiration Point late in the afternoon of March 25, 1851, and Yosemite Valley lay below them, half veiled in a bluish haze.

What a moment in human history! Yet, only one out of all that company of men stopped to give the view more than a passing thought. One look and the rest were away already swinging down the trail with their minds full of a camp to make, supper to prepare, wood to cut, horses to feed, and possible Indians to round up before nightfall. If there was any thrill connected with the first look it was largely one of curiosity satisfied and triumph at reaching, at last, the old Chief’s hide-out. Not for one moment did they suspect that in entering Yosemite that day they were making history or fulfilling a prophecy.

Only Dr. Lafayette Bunnell had any real appreciation of that moment. Dismounting

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Yosemite Falls is not only one
of the highest in the world,
but one of the most beautiful

from his horse he wallowed through snow to his hips to reach a projecting ledge from which he could see more of the Valley. Oblivious of all else, he was even unaware that his companions had gone on until Major Savage, riding in the rear of the column, hailed him from the trail below, urging him on before he lost his scalp as well as his wits.

That night, late in March, white men pitched their first camp in Yosemite, not far from Bridal Veil Falls and across the meadows from El Capitan. A bronze plaque marks the spot today near a large overhanging rock on the banks of the Merced River. That rock, blackened by countless campfires since, still poignantly suggests the blaze about which those men gathered that night, tired but good-natured, joking with each other as they sprawled on the ground, while not far away hostile and stealthy Indians watched their every move.

It was that night, too, around the campfire, that the Valley was given a name. Doctor Bunnell suggested they call it Yosemite, for the Indians who lived there. Several protested “honoring the devils who caused us all this trouble” and offered “Paradise Valley” and a number of Biblical and foreign names. But Doctor Bunnell’s suggestion carried, and Yosemite was christened in high spirits and with fire-water.

The next day a thorough search of the Valley was made, and although there was evidence everywhere of Indians having hastily abandoned their villages, with embers still warm from fires of the night before, only one Indian was found, a decrepit old squaw, crouched in a cave near the Royal Arches. Too old to scramble up the rocks with her kinsmen, she had been left behind, “thrown away,” as Tenaya nonchalantly put it. Hostile and taciturn she would give no information about the tribe.

So Major Savage and his men had to content themselves on that visit with burning the several villages they found scattered throughout the Valley, destroying the large caches of acorns they found, hoping to starve the defiant Indians into the reservations.

The second night they made their camp in the Indian Caves, where so many barbecues are held now, and the men compared notes on what they had seen in the

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There is a sense of power and
excitement about the Nevada Falls
which is tremendously exhilarating

various scouting parties. It had been a hard day for men and horses, as the water in the Merced River and its tributaries was so high that in their frequent crossings all had been soaked to the skin in the icy water. And though the men of that first battalion may have had little appreciation for the mile-high cliffs which surrounded them, they were thoroughly impressed by the water of Yosemite!

The general verdict seemed to be that the Indians had not greatly exaggerated their stories. Yosemite was gloomy indeed, and the men were not sorry to leave. Major Savage admitted, however, that they were in no condition to judge the Valley fairly. The annoyances and disappointments of a fruitless search, together with their many wettings, overcast skies, and an approaching snow-storm, would dampen the ardor of more enthusiastic men than they pretended to be. Nevertheless, they were glad to have seen for themselves this much-vaunted refuge of the Yosemites, and they were cheered by the thought of all the destruction they had wrought there.

The following day they were back in camp at Wawona, and during that three days’ absence from headquarters, as Doctor Bunnell points out, they had entered, named, and partially explored one of the geographical wonders of the world. And little except the exploration of Yosemite was accomplished by that first expedition, for on returning to camp they learned that between Wawona and the Commissioner’s camp all of the seventy-two Indians the battalion had captured had escaped from their guards, made over-confident by the Indians’ seeming resignation and desire to make peace, and had returned with Tenaya to their snow-bound “grassy Valley.”

RETURN OF THE MARIPOSA BATTALION

Several months passed before any effort was made to recapture the Yosemites. But by early May of that same year all of the Indian tribes except Tenaya’s had made treaties with the Commissioners. Secure in his mountains once more, vain and arrogant because no immediate disaster had overtaken him by the invasion of his valley, he refused to deal with the Commissioners. And as long as the Yosemites remained at large there was always the danger of their stirring up discontent

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Vernal Falls is remarkable for its
symmetry and volume of water and for the
rainbow mists which foam at its feet

among the more friendly Indians and they continued to menace the peace of the white men.

Again the Mariposa Battalion was ordered out to bring the Yosemites to terms. There were many in that second battalion who had been with the first, and on their first day in the Valley they surprised and captured five Indians, three being sons of Chief Tenaya. Not long after, the old Chief himself was captured up in a narrow canyon, where he was busily rolling stones upon his pursuers. Two weeks later the rest of the tribe were surrounded where they camped on the shores of Lake Tenaya and taken prisoners before they could escape. Pursued into their final refuge, far above the floor of the Valley where they felt sure no white man would ever come, the disheartened Yosemites put up little resistance as they were herded down into the reservation on the Fresno River.

But this seeming submission did not last. Chief Tenaya was so unhappy on the reservation and pined so for his mountain home, his acorn and grasshopper diet, that he was released upon promise of good behavior, swearing eternal friendliness to the white man. In a short time his loyal followers quietly slipped away from the reservation, too, and rejoined him. No effort was made to bring them back, for it was believed they had learned their lesson and would no longer molest the white settlers.

MURDER IN YOSEMITE

For a year all was quiet, then trouble broke out once more. A party of eight prospectors, made bold by reports of the friendliness of the Indians, made their way into Yosemite Valley looking for gold. Dr. Carl Russell, Field Naturalist in the National Parks Service, publishes in his “100 Years in Yosemite” a thrilling account of what took place there.

The miners, it seems, camped for the night where the Mariposa Battalion first camped, near the foot of Bridal Veil Falls. Early in the morning, as five of them left to prospect for gold, they were attacked by Indians and two of them were killed. The others fled through a shower of arrows to a narrow ledge in the wall, where, partially protected from the rocks the Indians hurled from above and the

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There is a delicacy and fragility
about the Bridal Veil Falls which
distinguishes it from all the others

arrows aimed at them from below, they fought for their lives with the two rifles they had caught up in their flight. All day long they were besieged. One of the participants, recalling the adventure years later, writes:

“We could see the old Chief Tenaya way up in the valley, in an open space, with fully one hundred and fifty Indians around him to whom he gave his orders which were passed to another chief just below us. These two directed those around them, and shouted orders to those on the top of the bluff who were rolling rocks over on us. Fully believing ourselves doomed men we never relaxed our vigilance, but with two rifles we still kept them at bay, determined to sell our lives as dearly as possible.

“We were crowded together beneath this little projecting rock, every nerve strung to its highest tension. I was wounded with an arrow through my sleeve, and another through my hat. All of a sudden, the chief just below us, about fifty yards distant, suddenly threw up his hands and with a terrible yell fell over backwards, a bullet through his body. Immediately the firing of arrows ceased, and the savages were thrown into confusion. Notes of alarm were sounded and answered far up the Valley, and from the high bluffs above us. They began to withdraw, and we could hear the twigs crackle as they crept away.”

After nightfall the surviving six made their way painfully and cautiously up the cliff and escaped.

Tenaya, established, apparently, with quite a band once more, had broken his word to the white man. But it was his last offense. For a punitive expedition was dispatched at once into Yosemite, where five Indians were seized, all wearing articles of clothing of the dead miners, and they were summarily shot. Thoroughly frightened now, the rest of the tribe fled to the protection of their allies at Mono Lake, and the Yosemites as a tribe disappeared forever.

DEATH OF TENAYA

There are two versions of the death of old Chief Tenaya, neither a glorious nor romantic ending for an Indian chief, son of a chief. Until recently the story went that, after a long stay with the Monos, the Yosemites returned to their valley.

[click to enlarge]

Half Dome rears its granite crest more
than a mile above the floor of the Yosemite
Vatley, surviving the storms of the ages

Shortly after, a party of young Yosemites slipped back to the camp of their former hosts and returned stealthily with some of the Monos’ finest horses.

For this gross breach of etiquette the Monos returned the call of the Yosemites —in war-paint and head-feathers! Finding their erstwhile guests stuffed and stupid from gorging on stolen horse-flesh, the incensed Monos attacked and stoned to death Tenaya and all but eight of his band, who escaped down the canyon of the Merced River.

Not long ago, however, Mr. Russell talked with “Maria” Lebrado, last of the Yosemite Indians. She was one of that small band of seventy-two that Major Savage encountered on his first trip into Yosemite Valley with the Mariposa Battalion, and was with that last remnant of Indians captured on the shores of Lake Tenaya. Only a child then, she was as old as the squaw the soldiers found in the Indian Caves when she talked to Mr. Russell. She denied the story of the stolen horses, and declared Tenaya was not killed in the Valley at all, but that while visiting the Monos, after the murder of the miners, an argument arose in the heat and excitement of a hand game and Tenaya was killed in the brawl by a rock hurled by an angry Mono.

Whatever the truth may be, and there is little to choose between them, the prophecy of the Medicine Man was all fulfilled. Horsemen from the lowlands entered Ahwahnee, and from that time on Tenaya’s tribe was scattered, or taken captive, and he was, in truth, the last chief of the Yosemites.

TOURIST TRAVEL

The year 1854 is interesting in Yosemite history for being the only year since its discovery in which no white man visited it. Frightened by the murder of the miners, and absorbed in their own affairs, Californians forgot it for that brief interval of time.

It was not until 1855 that the first pleasure party entered the Valley. Vague and almost incredible reports of this region had been circulated by the Mariposa Battalion and members of the punitive expedition. Some of these stories had reached the ears of James M. Hutchings, publisher of the California Magazine. Scenting good material here for his periodical he hired a well-known San Francisco artist, Thomas Ayers, to go with him and several friends on that first tourist party into Yosemite.

He engaged two Yosemite Indians to guide him to the very place their old chief had tried to keep hidden. Trails, of course, were indistinct and difficult to follow, and it took three days of hard riding to reach Yosemite from Stockton, a trip which can be made in little over three hours today. Yet the party felt well rewarded. For in Yosemite Hutchings found a scoop whose possibilities he was quick to realize. After five days of “scenic banqueting” the men returned, bursting to broadcast the wonders of that valley. The lyric descriptions of Mr. Hutchings and the amazing pictures of Thomas Ayers inaugurated Yosemite’s first publicity campaign. They did much to arouse widespread interest in the region. Ten of the originals of those first sketches of Yosemite are now on display in the Yosemite Museum, the first efforts of any man to convey a picture of those walls and waterfalls to a skeptical world.

But even this new evidence of an “eighth wonder” in their own state failed to fire the imagination of the people, and for years only a few stragglers led that long, long procession of tourists who have been trekking to Yosemite ever since. Californians were too busy creating miracles to view them. They had neither the time nor the money for pleasure jaunts. Gold and the Civil War were the concerns of the day. There was, too, the instinctive fear of being “sold.” Too many amazing tales had been told. Any story which smacked of exaggeration was received with great skepticism, and cliffs a mile high and waterfalls of a thousand feet were certainly classed as exaggerations, if not outright “whoppers.” Consequently, nine-tenths of those earlier visitors to Yosemite were recruited either from Europe or from the Atlantic seaboard. Men would cross an ocean and a continent to visit such a place, and return home to spread the gospel of Yosemite. Horace Greeley was one of these. He visited Yosemite in 1857, suffering terrific discomfort, but returned East one of its most ardent boosters.

SADDLE DAYS

Dr. Carl Russell has estimated that the first 12,000 visitors to Yosemite went either on horseback or afoot. It was almost a quarter of a century after its discovery before a wagon road was completed into the Valley, and a trip to Yosemite in those days was something of an Odyssey. Only the hardiest undertook it, and the annual average for the first ten years was thirty or forty visitors. Three long days in the saddle over ungraded trails was hard going, and one can sympathize with the muscle-bound pilgrim who sighed wearily at the end of her trip, too stiff to dismount, “Can’t you just hold me up, perhaps, and sort of shove the horse out from under?”

About the time the Civil War was ending, in 1864, Congress made Yosemite a State Park and attracted some attention to it. In that year the number of visitors increased to 147. And from then on until 1875, when the first wagon road was built, the number grew by fifty or a hundred each year. In 1875, three thousand visitors registered in the Park. Yosemite had arrived!

STAGE-COACHES—BANDITS!

Not so long ago a cry was heard in the wilderness, “What Yosemite needs is one good carriage road the entire length of the Valley!” and immediately the answer came hack, “Impossible! That would spoil Yosemite! Make it too civilized!”

Nevertheless, this dream was realized, and by 1875 there was not only one good carriage road extending the length of the Valley, but there were three roads into the Valley over which stage-coaches might travel. Lurching, swaying, creaking, dust-enveloped or rain-soaked, Concord Coaches or “Mud-Wagons,” those were the days of real sport, the days of the Cannonball Express, and the days of bandits!

Travel on wheels was really de luxe and one writer tells enthusiastically of improved transportation facilities which enabled one to reach Yosemite in three days from San Francisco, the round trip costing only sixty dollars! And those

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Up in the Yosemite ski country
anyone can blaze his own trail
through a landscape of virgin snow

were the good old days the Old-Timers sigh for, the days before Yosemite was “vulgarized” by too many improvements!

Until the Horseshoe Route was established the trip took two days from Stockton, cutting down the saddle days by one. But with the coming of the Cannonball Express, via the Horseshoe Route, this time was reduced to one day, though a long and strenuous one. Horses were changed at ten-mile intervals along the entire route, which is followed today by the Horseshoe Auto Stages. Hurtling down mountain sides, over perilous roads, fording rivers with the water hub-deep, thumping and bumping a chained log behind down the steepest grades where brakes alone would not hold, flashing around hairpin turns to encounter a freight wagon on a narrow road, those are some of the thrills tourists to Yosemite are spared today.

Though the hold-ups on those stages were not frequent, they occurred often enough to spice the trip with real adventure. And their conversational value, for ever after, was well worth the cost of the experience. The Bad Men of the West in that day had something of an operatic charm about them which often compensated for the inconvenience of being robbed. For example, a bandit holding up one Yosemite stage remarked, generously, before taking up his collection:

“Boys, if any of you haven’t got more than fifteen dollars you can keep it, for I’ve got that much myself!”

A story is told of one highwayman who, alone, held up a string of five Yosemite stages. After he had thoroughly fleeced his victims he presented each with his card, on which was printed “The Black Kid.”

“Thanks!” remarked one of the passengers wryly, “always nice to know where to get hold of a professional.”

“Black Bart,” one of the most famous bandits of the early eighties, made his last hold-up in the Yosemite region. He always worked alone, but one of his favorite stunts was to prop the muzzles of empty guns over the top of surrounding rocks, and talk occasionally to these supposed confederates as he robbed the stages. His last hold-up occurred three miles out of Copperopolis. He robbed a stage of a Wells Fargo treasure-box containing $5,000. But in his escape he dropped his handkerchief, which contained a laundry mark. This led to his identification. With a record of twenty-eight hold-ups to his credit he had never taken a single life, and usually operated with a sawed-off shotgun which was unloaded.

AUTOMOBILES

Before the novelty and comparative comfort of stage-coaches had worn off, a railroad had been built into Yosemite, and soon after automobiles began rolling in. Not rolling, perhaps, but chugging. For those earliest automobiles were little short of the wonders they had come to see.

In 1907 the Yosemite Valley Railroad was completed and an end had come to the stage-coach era, but it was another six years before the Government allowed automobiles to drive into the Valley. In 1900 one intrepid motorist had entered Yosemite, but no others were allowed until 1913. Even after pressure had been brought to bear and the Government had removed the ban against them, they were admitted very grudgingly and regarded with frank disfavor. Immediately they appeared in the Valley they were pounced upon and chained to a log for the duration of their stay.

The Commandments regarding automobiles were very strict. Five minutes were allowed for the loading and unloading of passengers and baggage, after which the car was rushed, like an infectious case, to the garage, or out of the Park.

No person could smoke while driving an automobile in the Park.

Speed limit was six miles an hour, except on straight stretches, where, if no approaching team was visible, ten miles was tolerated.

On the El Portal road the speed limit was five miles an hour inbound and six outbound!

Pioneers of the Covered-Wagon Days were no braver than the drivers of the first automobiles into Yosemite. Our worst mountain roads today are probably better than the best then. The small light cars of those days could neither straddle nor ride in the wagon ruts. Roads were so narrow that I know of one instance, at least, where two motorists met and before they could pass each had to unscrew his license plate. Another motorist tells of reaching the Valley on her last gallon of gasoline and having to wait in Yosemite for three weeks before anyone would risk bringing more in on a freight wagon, fearing it would explode. Others tell of pouring sardine oil into the carburetors and White Rock water into the radiator to finish that long last mile into camp.

One by one the difficulties governing travel into Yosemite have been overcome until today, with the choice of a train, luxurious motor buses, a paved All-Year Highway over which you can drive your own car any day of the year, a landing field at Wawona for airplanes, and the shortened and improved road to the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, registration of visitors to the Park has mounted from that original tourist party of five to half a million annually—and the number is always increasing.

The whole Yosemite story is told in its transportation system. For every moving thing across the Sierras has left its trail. First the rivers, which carved the valleys. Next the glaciers, slow-moving ice packs which left behind them the shining pavements of the High Sierras. After them came the wild-game trails, faintest traces through the forests. In time these were widened by Indian feet, and later, pounded deeper by horses’ hoofs. Next came the wagon ruts, then iron rails, and finally the smooth paved highways for automobiles; and at the end these pavements peter out again into horse trails, horse trails to footpaths, footpaths to game trails, back to the shining glacial pavements where travel all began.

The Yosemite cycle is complete.

YESTERDAY IN YOSEMITE

Though the early tourists to Yosemite may have had to put up with such discomforts as muslin curtains between the bedrooms instead of walls, their lot was not such a hard one. There were compensations in royal breakfasts of brook trout, venison, and bowls of wild strawberries, which the Indians used to gather, and in the ten dollars a week one used to pay for room and board at Hutchings House.

In the Valley then there was that friendliness and informality which you still find around the High Sierra Camps. For the camaraderie of shipboard is equaled only by that found out upon the open trail, or fostered around a crackling campfire.

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Cathedral Spires suggest the ruins
of some mighty temple of the gods

Friendships bloom easily, and those made in Yosemite have often lasted a lifetime.

A glance at the Grand Register of the old Cosmopolitan Hotel, loaned to the Yosemite Museum, will prove what a magnet the Park was for all kinds and conditions of people. This register is one of the great relics of Yosemite’s Past. A foot in thickness, morocco-bound and silver-mounted, it was made to order for the proprietor of the Cosmopolitan Hotel by H. S. Crocker Company of San Francisco in 1873. In it are the names of four United States Presidents, U. S. Grant, R. B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Theodore Roosevelt. Under the signatures of Isabelle Jones or Tommy Black are those of distinguished generals, foreign lords, counts and dukes, including Duke Alex of Russia, and Lily Langtry, London’s darling. Yosemite attracted them all, even as it does now, and there was no telling what kind of adventure might be sitting to the right or left of you in those days of rude shelter and general baths. And after all the other glories of Yosemite had been admired, there wasn’t anything more appreciated than those bathtubs and full-length mirrors of the Cosmopolitan Hotel which had all been carried in on mule-back over fifty miles of mountain trails.

In the winter of 1932 a fire destroyed this famous old hotel, which for years had been used as company general offices in the “Old Village.” Along with Black’s and Leidig’s, Barnard’s and Stoneman House, Casa Nevada and the old Hutchings House, it is now only a memory. Yet in its day the Cosmopolitan Hotel was the Ahwahnee of Yosemite Valley, and who knows what will succeed the present Ahwahnee Hotel fifty years from now!

OLD-TIMERS

Every region has its Grand Old Men who have shaped its histories and shared in its fortunes, and in Yosemite the roster is a long and illustrious one.

J. M. HUTCHINGS

Among the first of these was J. M. Hutchings, for forty-seven years one of the Park’s most enthusiastic publicists. Besides organizing the first tourist party into the Valley, he owned and operated a hotel there, Hutchings House, which he made famous in his day. A part of this building still stands, now called Cedar Cottage, oldest building in the Valley. Its hand-hewn timbers were put up during Lincoln’s administration in 1858, and one room completely encloses the trunk of a large, growing cedar tree, where Hutchings and his guests used to gather in the evening to discuss the Civil War, the height of Half Dome, and the fish they would catch on the morrow.

It was in Hutchings’ sawmill, which he erected to cut lumber to replace the flimsy curtains which partitioned off his bedrooms, that John Muir once worked. Hutchings was one of the most famous and enthusiastic guides the Valley has ever known and he wrote one of the earliest books on Yosemite. Another living reminder of him today is the row of elm trees which border the road crossing Sentinel Meadows. He planted these from Massachusetts seeds and they are one of the few exotic species permitted in the Park today. He was killed in the Valley he loved so well, on the zigzags of the Big Oak Flat road while driving with his wife, and now lies in the little cemetery in the Valley.

J. C. LAMON

Another planter of trees in Yosemite was J. C. Lamon, who laid out the first orchard and garden patch in this Indian retreat. Many had come to look, but Lamon was the first who remained to live. The smoke curling up from the chimney of his log cabin near the Camp Curry stables was the first sign of permanent human habitation in the Valley since the desertion of the Indian villages and the destruction of their wigwams. He helped build Cedar Cottage and while so engaged built his own cabin in 1859 and became Yosemite’s first winter resident. That winter he spent entirely alone in the Valley, without even a dog for companionship. Curious to think now, with all the gayety and excitement of winter sport enthusiasts in the Valley, what that lone winter must have been like, with even the waterfalls hushed and not a human being within miles and miles of the Valley.

The apple orchards Lamon set out in that early day still bear fruit. Abloom in the springtime, or weighted with snow on a moonlight night, those trees add a human touch to the grandeur of their setting which has endeared them to generations of tourists. Visitors were always welcome in Lamon’s gardens. If the proprietor was not at home to sell his fruit it was understood that any comer might pick and eat as much as he could stow away inside, but not carry any off the premises otherwise, leaving a silver quarter or half dollar on the window sill, according to his capacity!

For fourteen years Lamon lived in Yosemite, first homesteader and neighbor, and when he died, he too was laid to rest in the little cemetery in the good fellowship of Galen Clark, Hutchings, and other Yosemite pioneers.

GALEN CLARK

Perhaps Galen Clark, more than any other, deserves the title of The Grand Old Man of Yosemite. He was first Guardian of the Valley, and held that post for fourteen years, and for twenty-four years he served on the Board of Commissioners who were custodians of the Park.

He visited Yosemite the same year Hutchings did, and seeing the possibilities of tourist trade he established a camp at Wawona, known then as Clark’s Station, where he accommodated travelers on their way in and out of the Valley. Suffering from a serious infection of the lungs he built his cabin in the forest in 1857, hoping to prolong his life. He succeeded quite admirably in this, living to the vigorous old age of ninety-six.

At ninety years of age he turned author, and wrote three authoritative books about Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, which, undoubtedly, he knew and loved better than anyone of his time. Though not the actual discoverer of the Mariposa Grove, he made it known to the world. He built the trail from his camp to the grove, and conducted hundreds of people to the Big Trees, which were one of the absorbing elements of his life, and from which he drew great peace and quiet strength.

He lived for fifty years in the Valley of Wawona, and spent twenty summers in Yosemite Valley, knowing it first as public lands, then as a State Park, and finally as a National Park. He lies now in a plot he selected in the Yosemite cemetery, shaded by the sequoia seedlings he himself planted twenty years before he was laid to rest beneath them. Neither rude nor crude, he was a “very perfect gentle knight” of the High Sierras. Across the meadows from the Sentinel Hotel, commanding a fine view of Yosemite Falls, a stone bench has been placed as a memorial to him.

JOHN MUIR

The bard of Yosemite was John Muir. Just as he made Yosemite his, so does Yosemite claim him for her own. A man who could ride on snow avalanches and explore behind waterfalls! Who roamed through the Sierras with a piece of dry bread in his pocket, adventuring where no man had ventured before. He was an explorer and discoverer of the first order, who left behind him for posterity a thrilling record of what he read there in that “great page of mountain manuscript.”

He first came to Yosemite in 1868 for a brief visit, tending sheep in the lowlands for a living, working when he could in Hutchings’ sawmill to provide bread for his long jaunts in the Sierras when the day’s work was done. As president of the Sierra Club for twenty-two years, he fought constantly to save Yosemite and all the wilderness from wanton destruction by mining, lumber, and sheep interests.

He had something of the physical endurance of the Sierra peaks, something of the mental energy and crystal clearness of Yosemite Falls. The spot where his cabin stood on the Lost Arrow trail, near the foot of Yosemite Falls, is now a shrine to all lovers of John Muir, all lovers of the out-of-doors. Not content merely to live by the side of the stream, he deflected it a bit so it might flow through one corner of his cabin, that he might listen more closely to its song.

W. P. Bartlett, in “An Afternoon With John Muir,” tells of how this poet of the Sierras once kidnapped President Theodore Roosevelt from under the noses of an official party and played hookey with him in the woods.

When Roosevelt announced his intentions of visiting Yosemite a committee hastily prepared an elaborate program for him—banqueting, speeches, and all. It was even proposed to light up Yosemite Falls, but Roosevelt vetoed that as “nature-faking.”

All went according to plan until the stages bearing the President and his party arrived at Chinquapin summit, where all alighted for a rest. But when the stages went on again, the President was missing. Each auto load supposed he was in the car ahead, and not until they were well out of sight did Mr. Roosevelt and John Muir emerge from behind a stable where two horses and a packed mule had been waiting for them, and like mischievous schoolboys they galloped off on the trail for Glacier Point.

The President was not missed until the party arrived in the Valley, and while the chagrined banqueters solemnly ate without their guest of honor, he and John Muir were squatting happily about a campfire in the forests, reveling in thick porterhouse steaks and corn pones buttered in the pan.

“This is bully!” chuckled Roosevelt, thinking delightedly of the pompous party in the Valley below.

For three and a half days the two of them wandered contentedly through the Sierras before rejoining the party. And as a result of this clandestine outing, Roosevelt during his term in office set aside vast areas of virgin timber for forest reserves and doubled the number of National Parks.

MR. AND MRS. DAVID A. CURRY

Mr. and Mrs. D. A. Curry were Mine Hosts of Yosemite. With the establishment of Camp Curry, known the world over, they became the founders of a new hotel system, an informal camp entertainment which has become one of the attractions of Yosemite.

Their beginning was humble. “D. A.” and his wife were both school-teachers, who had learned to make their vacations pay by managing small camping tours in the summer. One of their first experiments was made in Yellowstone Park. The following year they decided to try the system nearer home, and in 1899 they ventured into Yosemite, bearing with them seven tents, a paid cook, and a brand-new idea in camp hotels. Despite the many difficulties of transportation, for it took freight wagons two weeks to make the round trip from Merced, the experiment succeeded beyond their fondest hopes. Two hundred and ninety-two guests registered that first year.

The famous Camp Curry bonfire is still built on the very spot of that first fire. Although the entertainment is more elaborate now than those earlier faggot parties, where a guest threw a small piece of wood on the fire and told a story while it burned, there is still a friendliness and ease about those gatherings which dates back to the beginning.

Though “D. A.” did not originate the firefall, he was the first to use it regularly. At the end of the evening’s entertainment he would raise his prodigious voice, which earned him the name of the Stentor, and call to the Irishman on the cliff above:

“Let ‘er go, Gallagher!” which is the origin of that well-known phrase.

Camp Curry grew until it had accommodations for about 1,300 guests. In 1925 the “Curry Camping Company” consolidated with the “Yosemite National Park Company” to form the “Yosemite Park and Curry Company,” which company now operates all hotels in the Park as well as transportation lines, stables, stores, etc. The Curry family continue in the active management of the consolidated company, and in the last year they have purchased the hotel at Wawona and have built a new lodge in the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees where Galen Clark’s humble cabin once stood.

“Mother Curry,” as she is affectionately known to hundreds of thousands of Camp Curry guests, still carries on where David Curry left off. In spite of its mushroom growth, Camp Curry is still her especial interest, which she continues to supervise and manage. When there is any matter of importance to take up with the authorities in Washington, D. C., Mother Curry is first consulted. Small, gentle, and white-haired, she is beloved by all, and reigns undisputedly as Yosemite’s one and only Grand Lady.

GABRIEL SOVULEWSKI

Last of the Grand Old Men who belong definitely to Yosemite, and only survivor today, is Gabriel Sovulewski, trail-blazer! In the push of civilization to the edge of a continent, and the top of a mountain range, Mr. Sovulewski has played an important and thrilling part. Under his supervision were built most of the six hundred miles of trails which now spider-web Yosemite Park.

Mr. Sovulewski first came to Yosemite in 1895 as quartermaster-sergeant in the United States Army. In 1906 he returned to the Park as a civilian employe of the United States Army. In 1908-09 and again in 1914 he was acting Superintendent of the Park. For twenty-eight years he has been actively engaged in making all parts of Yosemite’s 1,125 square miles accessible, and in keeping them so. He came into that thousand square miles of wilderness with no maps, and few reliable guides, with only cattle and sheep trails, and burro passes zigzagging through the forests, threading their way over granite peaks. From these bare beginnings he has constructed veritable mountain highways, half a hundred avenues by which city-wearied people can escape on horseback, or afoot, into such glamorous realms as Cloud’s Rest, Ten Lakes, Pate Valley, and Forsythe Pass. A trail-blazer who pushes his way around mountains and across rivers, overcoming insurmountable obstacles, cajoling his crews, loved by his men, that is Gabriel Sovulewski, who has earned the gratitude of thousands who travel the trails of Yosemite each year.

When his work is done, Gabriel Sovulewski will need no momument, for his trails and roads will go marching on.

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On Mount Lyell still remain remnants
of ancient glaciers which once swept
down into the canyons of Yosemite, reshaping the mountains as they moved

CHAPTER THREE
IN THE BEGINNING

ALL of the human history of Yosemite can be compressed into a trifling two or three centuries, but the drama of its creation stretches grandly over millions and multi-millions of years. All that man has done and seen in Yosemite, from Indian days until now, is but a paragraph in that more colossal story. From a handful of rocks taken from the summit and the base of a mountain and from a study of its fissures, scientists have unfolded a story of mountain-making and canyon-carving in the Sierras which staggers the imagination.

Long ago, they say, in our dim geologic past, a great block of the earth’s crust was tilted up on edge due to some tremendous internal pressure, making the Sierra Nevada, one solid granite block three hundred miles long and eighty miles wide. Like a cement sidewalk which has been upended by an earthquake, one side of this mountain rose sharp and steep, while the other sloped gradually towards the west. Accompanying this lift came a sinking and caving in the earth’s central portion, which finally settled thousands of feet below its outer edge, making the Great Basin of California.

This pushing up of a mountain range caused the rivers which had been flowing lazily across the plains to tilt too and become raging mountain torrents which cut deeply into their former channels. In this way river-beds were converted into small canyons and small canyons, in thousands of years, widened out into mountain valleys.

The two largest of these rivers in the Yosemite region were the Merced and the Tuolumne, which immediately began a race against each other and against Time. Deeper and deeper they scoured and sandpapered their way into the mountain’s side.

By the end of a hundred thousand years or so they had run their first lap and slowed down a bit. Water is always seeking its own level and eventually these two rivers had cut their way through the mountain until they were flowing more horizontal than vertical. Then Nature gave another lurch and tilted them up once more, starting the race again, setting the rivers to cutting deeper and faster through the granite walls. A third time this happened, and that final convulsion hoisted the crest of the Sierras eight thousand feet in one series of movements, twice the height of Half Dome as it towers above the floor of the Valley!

For thousands and thousands of years then the old battle for supremacy between land and water was waged in the Sierras. Rivers ground down and pulverized mountain peaks, only to carry the sediment in mountain dust down into the ocean, where, layer upon shifting layer, new mountains were slowly being built up again. Out over the ocean the rain-clouds were born which dropped their moisture in the mountains, swelling the rivers, which carried the earth into the sea again. It is a battle which goes on forever.

Then water in another form came to complete the story of Yosemite. Snows packed on the summits of the Sierras, year after year, gradually turned into ice and spread in great tongues down into the canyons, filling the channels where water once flowed with rivers of sluggishly moving ice. Ice, ice, everywhere! Like a wrinkled cloak it covered all the Sierras except the loftiest peaks, pushing and grinding down into the valleys.

Tenaya, Illilouette, and Merced canyons all had their own glaciers which met and formed one of the first Yosemite mergers, at the upper end of the Valley, packing it from wall to wall with its weight of grinding ice and embedded rock as it flowed slowly towards El Portal. And as it moved, that clumsy, frozen sea fashioned of a rugged, humpy mountain a splendor of pinnacles, spires, domes, and arches. Scraping at the base of cliffs, plucking away the less resistant quartz and slate which overlay the granite core of the world, it loosened disjointed rocks, planing and chiseling as it went until it broadened the Valley from the letter V to a U. Sloping walls were smoothed perpendicular, and cascades were turned into plunging waterfalls.

Picture the scene! Somber gray skies above a world of ice, with here and there a stark granite peak like Half Dome or El Capitan thrusting through! Ice and stone, and not a living thing, a twisted tree or a blade of grass, as far as the eye could see! That was Yosemite in the making!

Two and probably three major glaciers visited Yosemite Valley, with long intervals of milder climate between. For the seasons in Yosemite then were only two, the ice years and the nice years. One of these glaciers which filled the Valley ended in Bridal Veil Meadows, stopped by El Capitan on one side and Cathedral Rock on the other. The second pushed through these barriers almost as far as El Portal. And as they came and went they cut giant stairways in the river-beds. Vernal and Nevada Falls are a splendid example of these steps, with a hollow or tread beneath each which once held a lake as the ice melted and receded. Tenaya Canyon descended in four levels, in each of which a lake once stood, the lowest and longest being Mirror Lake, which is slowly filling in now with sediment brought down by the river. Little Yosemite Valley, like Yosemite Valley itself, was once filled to the brim with water left in the wake of the melting glaciers. The High Sierras are still dotted with glacial tarns which are slowly giving way to meadows. Infinitesimal changes become drastic when they accumulate through thousands of years. Marshes become meadows, and meadows give way to the forests, which in turn climb up the granite peaks. Time is unmeasured in the mountains, where Nature moves majestically, a hundred years to one of Man’s brief days.

Roughly speaking, then, Yosemite was formed first by an uplift which made the Sierras, then by stream erosion which cut the Valley, and finally by ice, which carved it deeper and scraped it smoother. But in its final analysis the features of Yosemite as we know them today, Cathedral Spires, Three Brothers, El Capitan, and the Royal Arches, were determined by the very substance of which they are made, their rocky structure, or “bones.”

Granite is one of the hardest substances in the world, pushed up from the very heart of the earth. Where the rock was pushed up in great solid masses, with few fissures, or cracks, it was better able to stand erosion, grinding, and weathering, and by the tearing away of less resistant rocks around them such masses as El Capitan and Sentinel Rock were etched out against the skyline.

Where those fissures or cleavage joints were vertical, great slabs of stone were more easily plucked out, forming the sheer, straight cliffs. Where the joints were curved we find the domes and spires and arches of Yosemite, which resisted the glacial plucking. Hummocks, too, have been rounded into domes by the action of water freezing in the joint cracks, causing expansion and the shaling off of thick layers of rock like a peeling.

“What happened to Half Dome?”

Everyone wonders that, of course, for there is something so fragmentary about its shape it is difficult to believe it wasn’t formed by some special cataclysm. The Indians tried to explain it through their legends. Scientists have explained it repeatedly, but for a long time they could not agree upon which explanation to accept! Rangers have even explained it to credulous tourists by telling them it was made by a glacier, which has gone back now for the other half!

But the simple explanation seems to be that Half Dome is made up of two systems of joints, one curved, the other vertical. Double-jointed! And so it presents a flat surface on one side, smoothed off by the glaciers, and a rounded one on the other, which, through long weathering, has cast off successive shells, like an onion, or an artichoke.

This process of exfoliation is going on all the time, and some day the world will awaken to discover that the overhang or eyebrow on Half Dome has vanished, for that, scientists believe, is the next scale to fall. But when this happens it will no longer concern us, or our children, and probably not even our children’s children.

CHAPTER FOUR
MAKING A NATIONAL PARK

NATIONAL PARKS don’t just grow. They are made at tremendous cost and effort. Few realize, perhaps, the obstacles which have been overcome, the battles fought, that we might roll into these National Wildernesses today, over good highways or railroads, to find perfect accommodations, plenty of food, Rangers to guide us, trails to follow, a telephone, even, on some mountain top to connect us with home a thousand miles away. Creating a National Park is a long and painful process, and the story lies not only in what has been accomplished, but in the many evils which have been prevented.

In Yosemite, for example, it has been proposed, at one time or another, to:

1. Dam the valley and flood it with water, like Hetch-Hetchy, to furnish power for the Mariposa region.

2. To raffle the valley off for a dollar a chance.

3. To surrender it to homesteaders who would have exploited it with toll-roads, bridges, and trails, and overrun it with chickens and live stock.

4. To relinquish the High Sierras to the sheep-herders for range for their flocks.

5. To erect a great hotel on the top of Half Dome, letting the Vernal Falls furnish power to run elevators through tunnels to the top!

All of these enterprises, and many others, have been thwarted, but it has meant fighting every step of the way. Everything accomplished in Yosemite has been bitterly and violently opposed by some faction, and the wonder is we have any National Park at all.

Trouble began first with the homesteaders. Several families were already established and living in the Valley when, with the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, it was set aside as a State Park. Among these were J. M. Hutchings and J. C. Lamon. And though the Government offered to lease a hundred and sixty acres to each of them at a nominal rent, they refused, and fought ten years to maintain their holdings. Eventually the courts won out and they came to terms, receiving compensation for their claims. But the delay and the wrangles had created bad feeling, making the people of California either hostile or indifferent to the fate of the Park.

[click to enlarge]

A unique close-up of Half Dome, showing
the formation of this monumental rock

As a State Park, Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove were governed by a board of commissioners who appointed Galen Clark as guardian of these wonders. But for all the gold which had been taken from the state and from that very region it was always a problem to wrest sufficient funds from the legislature to make the most necessary improvements in Yosemite, or even to pay the guardian’s wages, which were small but often ran years in arrears.

Sheep-herders presented the next problem. For years sheep- and cattlemen had been grazing their flocks and their herds in the High Sierra meadows, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. Not only did these animals denude the forests and meadows, like the “hooved locusts” John Muir called them, but the sheep-herders were careless about their campfires, and forest fires were a constant menace, ravaging whole mountain sides. It was even suspected that many of these fires were set deliberately to assure a plentiful grass crop the following spring.

It was sheep, then, as Doctor Carl Russell points out, which were largely responsible for the creation of a National Park. For years John Muir and Robert Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, fought to have that country immediately adjacent to the State Park set aside as a National Forest or Reservation to preserve and protect it from the depredations of the sheep- and cattlemen. In 1890 they succeeded, and Congress established a Reservation which included most of the Park of today, a region of forests, glaciers, mountain peaks, and lakes surrounding Yosemite Valley.

For sixteen years following there were really two Yosemite Parks one, the Valley and the Mariposa Grove, state owned; the other, surrounding it, a National Park. Military troops patrolled and administered one; State Commissioners and a Guardian patrolled and operated the other. And the result, of course, was constant friction and trouble.

Galen Clark never became reconciled to Uncle Sam’s troops, who made their headquarters at Wawona, on the site of his former camp. When a fire broke out in Yosemite there was usually an argument as to whether it was the duty of the state or Federal government to put it out, and while they argued the fire burned. Galen Clark thought little of the troopers as fire-fighters. He tells of one fire which burned in the Park Reservation for six weeks one summer, running over a territory thirty-five miles square. For the whole six weeks the Valley was full of smoke and tourists who came could see little of it. Finally the fire burned into Galen Clark’s region. He took ten men, and in three days put it out.

“With a dozen of these California foothill boys,” he declared, “I can do everything five hundred soldiers with a brigadier general in command of ‘em can do, and do it a blamed sight better, too!”

He tells a story, too, about the way the troops enforced and prevented poaching in the National Park. Five soldiers caught an old-timer one day who had been deer-hunting. They disarmed the hunter and started marching him into camp. On the way a deer crossed their path, and each of the soldiers in turn shot at it and missed!

“If you want that deer,” laconically remarked their prisoner, “give me my gun and I’ll get him for you.”

Amusedly the soldiers handed the gun over. One shot, and the deer was dead.

“Keep your gun,” remarked the leader admiringly, “and hike out.”

Yet life was not all hunting and fishing and fire-fighting for Uncle Sam’s troops. Mr. Sovulewski, who was with that early unit, tells of the difficulties they had in covering that thousand of square miles of territory, with practically no trails, and only inadequate maps to guide them. Underpaid as these men were, they were often in the saddle sixteen to twenty hours a day, covering sixty miles of riding in the day’s work. It was not easy going, for their problem was to outwit men who knew every foot of the country, and drive them from the Park.

Even after they caught these trespassers the law provided no punishment for them. But the troopers solved that matter very ingeniously. They would escort the guilty herder across the mountains to some far boundary of the Park and let him go, turning his sheep loose at an equally distant point. By the time the two got together again the sheep-herder had suffered enough losses to realize it was cheaper to find another range.

The duplication in effort and expense incurred by this dual administration finally convinced the people of California that they would be better off if they receded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove back to the Government to be administered as one National Park. This was accomplished in 1905, but only after another long, long battle led again by John Muir and the Sierra Club of California, to whom the world owes a great debt of gratitude.

In 1906 Congress formally accepted the State Park and the following year Major Benson moved his troops from Wawona into the Valley and established Fort Yosemite where the Yosemite Lodge stands today.

For seven years the military continued to govern the Park, keeping the troops there during the spring and summer and early fall. In the winter the park was abandoned, except for Galen Clark and a civilian assistant or so. Under the able administration of Colonel Benson the beginnings of our present road and trail systems were laid and much was accomplished in the way of mapping the terrain to make it more accessible.

In 1916 the National Park Service was created as a division of the U. S. Department of the Interior, with Stephen T. Mather as first Director of all the National Parks. Since that time Yosemite has been under the direction of a civilian superintendent representing the National Park Service, in charge of a force of civilian rangers, engineers, and other employes. Their task is a big one, that of maintaining order and protecting the wild life, building roads and bridges, keeping others in repair, providing water, electricity, telephone service, and sanitary facilities for the tens of thousands who make Yosemite their temporary home each year.

And they continue to fight our battles for us. Through their unremitting efforts they have succeeded in taking over all of the toll-roads into the Valley and making them free. They have accomplished miracles in buying up private holdings in the Park, or trading National Forest stands for those they could not buy outright. Mr. Mather, when he failed to get the appropriations he needed to save some special tract, frequently dipped into his own pocket to provide the funds. In this way he gave the Tioga road to the Government and saved large groves of Big Trees in Sequoia National Park. He spent more than twice the amount of his salary to provide a personnel to work with and for him on this great job of preserving the wilderness.

And his successor, Horace M. Albright, has followed faithfully in his footsteps. Largely through his efforts in 1930 alone fifteen thousand five hundred and seventy acres of private holdings were returned to the Government at the cost of $3,300,000. Half of this cost was assumed by one man, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the remainder coming from Congress.

Having achieved these National Parks for you, the administration’s policy now is to make them as enjoyable as possible. To their many other duties they have added that of educating the public to what lies in these preservations. A Ranger Naturalist Service has been inaugurated to take any who are interested on nature trips of one, two, or three days, studying geologic formations, wild life, and wild flowers. The Yosemite Museum is a treasure-house of exhibits which will make Yosemite’s Past and Present many times more vivid and real to you.

The next time you pay your taxes, then, console yourself a bit by the knowledge that you have one investment in the National Parks which will always bring returns. To clip a coupon just take to the high trails of any one of these and you will find you have a country estate no king could own!

CHAPTER FIVE
BIG AND LITTLE TREES OF YOSEMITE

EVER so often do you feel a hankering for trees, a fever for the sight and the sound and the smell of them? Do cities crowd upon you, elevators and office buildings, asphalt and cement, until it seems as if you had to escape to some forest where the pine-needles are spongy underfoot and the wind soft overhead?

When you feel the first symptom of this tree-itis breaking out in you it is time to be off to the Sierras. For Horace Greeley once said, “They surpass any mountains I ever saw in wealth and grace of trees. Look down from almost any of their peaks and your range of vision is filled, bounded, satisfied by what might be termed a tempest-tossed sea of evergreens, filling every upland valley, covering every hillside, crowning every peak but the highest with their unfading luxuriance. I have never enjoyed such a tree feast before.”

Man’s interest in trees is an old one. It goes back to that day in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge. According to Darwin, it goes back even farther! But from whatever it springs, in Yosemite you can satisfy that tree hunger completely, for you will find there nearly every species of tree which grows in the Sierras, from the stunted, tortured growths at timberline to the Giant Sequoias in the canyons.

Those trees at timberline tell a tremendous story. Beaten by gales, burned by the sun, bowed beneath blankets of snow, they are the hardy survivors who have fought their way to the very summit of the Sierras, to that last frontier beyond which even the most venturesome dare not go. Up there, near timberline, you will find species of the scrub pine, spruce, fir, aspen, birch, willow, and juniper. Gaunt, gnarled, and grotesque, those doughty old warriors command as much admiration and respect as the giants which tower in the valleys below. Clinging precariously to rocky ridges they have held their own for hundreds of years in the face of overwhelming odds.

Many of those gnomes at timberline are as old as the majestic yellow and sugar pines which grow in more sheltered places. Enos Mills examined one dwarf pine,

[click to enlarge]

The Big Tines Lodge lies in the
shadow of giant Sequoias which
were old when this nation was born

four hundred and twenty-six years old, which was only three feet high and six inches in diameter and so tough he could tie it into knots. Yet this midget was a contemporary of a sugar pine which grew not far below and measured seven feet in diameter and stood two hundred feet tall!

Many of those trees up there, like human beings, look older than they are because of the storms they have weathered. But the juniper tree, most spectacular of all, has been known to live a thousand and even two thousand years. Sturdy and storm-enduring it clings to rocky domes and ridges seven to ten thousand feet above sea-level. It is a solitary and individual tree, never grows in forests and seldom in groves. When killed, the juniper is said to waste away about as slowly as granite. In early days it was believed that the shadow it cast was harmful to human beings, yet its berries were a panacea for all ills. That belief must survive, for today they are used chiefly for the flavoring of gin! The wood of the juniper was a symbol of faith, for its heart was always sound, and its branches were often burned on funeral pyres. Indians used the tough, stringy bark to weave matting and coarse cloth. A useful and historic tree, the juniper.

From this outpost of pines, silver firs, hemlock, humpbacked juniper, and tamarack, the trees straggle down from the timberline, becoming larger and more imposing as they go. In the more temperate, middle regions of the Sierras, the real monarchs of the forest are found, the sugar pine, the yellow pine, the Douglas fir, live oaks, bays, cottonwood, aspens, dogwood, maples, cedars, and king of all trees, the Sequoia Gigantea.

The yellow pine, “clad in thick bark like a warrior in mail,” is a nomad among trees, for it is found anywhere from British Columbia to the Mexican border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Hills of Dakota. Like the true traveler it is, it accommodates itself to granite slopes, lush valley bottoms, hot sands, and dry highlands. It is a grand old tree with bark like an alligator’s skin, which peels off in small segments, or scales, like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. One of the finest specimens of yellow pine stands not far from Sentinel Rock in Yosemite Valley. It is more than five hundred years old and was standing there long before Columbus was born, and will probably continue to watch over Yosemite destinies for centuries to come. The trunk of this tree is twenty-five feet around, and its branches form a canopy one hundred and three feet across. Yet it is doubtful if one out of twenty visitors to Yosemite even knows of its existence.

The yellow pine has a rival in popularity in the sugar pine, which is generally conceded to be the largest and noblest of the seventy or eighty species of pine trees in the world. That puts it, in majesty, second only to the Sequoia. Curiously enough the flowers of this mighty tree are no larger than those on the puny dwarf pines at timberline, and far less showy. So Nature distributes her favors! John Muir has said that a pine forest in bloom is a rare treat, but one few people ever enjoy because when the tree blooms the high mountain passes are still choked with snow.

The Douglas spruce is a relative of the well-known Norway spruce, which, because of its long, straight shaft, has been used so long in making masts. From the depths of distant forests the trunks of these trees have gone out to sail the seven seas. Our term “spruce-looking” may well have come from this trim, neat shaft.

The incense cedar is interesting not only because it grows to a venerable old age, but because of a peculiarity it has of blooming months ahead of its fellow trees. Late in the autumn, or in early winter, it puts out masses of yellow blossoms which often poke up through snow on its branches, and is said to resemble a golden-rod against a snowy background.

The oak trees of the Sierras were the pantry shelves of the Indians. They depended a lot upon the harvest of acorns to get them through the winter and it was a good or a bad season according to the yield of acorns. They formed one of the chief products of barter and trade with the other tribes, and because of the number of oak trees in Ahwahnee the Yosemite Indians had a corner on this commodity. The two most common species of oak are the white, or live, oak and the black, or deciduous, oak, which drops its leaves in the fall after turning yellow, rust, and orange to add to the glory of fall.

The quaking aspen is another of the triumphs of a fall in the Sierras, or the Rockies, or wherever you may find them. Its leaves turn the yellow of gold and flaunt their colors like gay scarfs draped over the mountain’s shoulder, trailing through shadowy forests, reflecting themselves again in the streams and lakes. According to the Highlanders of Scotland the cross on which Christ was crucified was made of aspen, and a curse was laid upon the tree, causing its leaves to tremble until they dropped from the branches. Whether quaking in terror or trembling with joy, the aspen’s leaves are always astir, twinkling, murmuring, rustling, even on the stillest day. And whatever the cause of their movement there is an excitement about their fluttering which lifts the spirit a bit and always attracts more attention to them than to the more dignified companions standing staid and erect beside them.

Mary Austin claims that all the trees of the Sierras have a voice of their own. Each has a characteristic note, she says, by which a traveler in the dark of a mountain night can learn to know his way among them as other men do by the street noises of their own city. There is the creaking of the firs, the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the lodge-pole pine, and the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in the wind, each as different as the voice of a companion once you have learned to distinguish between them.

THE SEQUOIA GIGANTEA

In the deep peace of the solemn old woods stand the Big Trees, the Sequoias Gigantea, just as they have stood from time immemorial, defying the storms of thousands of years, impervious to the rise and fall of ant-like nations, living, growing, blossoming and germinating again, century upon century. They are the ancients of the world, ageless, raceless, for all time and all peoples. Mary Curry Tresidder, in her “Trees of Yosemite,” says of these oldest living things: “They were seedlings when Alexander sighed for more worlds to conquer, had become mere saplings when Christ was born, and had attained the grandeur of their prime long before Columbus set eyes upon this continent. It is not merely an ordinary tree raised to the nth power, but is the apotheosis of a tree.”

And still they stand, high priests of the Sierras, that we of the twentieth

[click to enlarge]

The Grizzly Giant, monarch of the Mariposa
Grove of Big Trees, measures ninety-four feet at
its base, and towers two hundred feet high. It may
have been living when the pyramids were built

century may prowl about at their feet, trying to comprehend their great size, their great age, their unconquerable serenity.

At one time the genus of this tree spread over three continents, Europe, Asia, and North America, but all have perished now except those two species found in California, the Sequoia Gigantea and the Sequoia Sempervirens, or Coast Redwood.

There are three groves of Big Trees in Yosemite Park—the Mariposa Grove, the largest and best known, containing something over two hundred giants; the Tuolumne Grove, on the Big Oak Flat road, with twenty-five of the larger trees; and the Merced Grove, near Hazel Green, with twenty or more.

There have been many controversies over the age of the Big Trees and a conservative estimate seems to be that the oldest have lived between three and five thousand years, with unlimited life ahead. It is certain, according to Colonel White, of Sequoia National Park, that they live four thousand years, reasonably certain that they can live five thousand or six thousand years, probable that they may live seven thousand or eight thousand years, and not improbable that they may live ten thousand years if protected. At any rate they are older now than any other living thing on earth, having long outlived the dinosaurs and the ichthyosaurs of their youth, and appear to be as vigorous now as they were in their first thousand of years.

It is amazing to think that a tree the size of the Grizzly Giant, largest of Yosemite trees, sprang from a seed no larger than a spinach seed. From that infinitesimal germ grew a tree which measures ninety-four feet at the base of its trunk and stands two hundred feet high. The General Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park is 102 feet at its base and towers 273 feet towards the sky. Such a tiny seed, as Colonel White and Judge Fry point out in their book “Big Trees,” can produce a tree which contains enough lumber to build a village of one hundred and fifty houses of five rooms each!

One of the great beauties of the Big Tree is its deeply fluted, reddish brown trunk which rises so straight and free of encumbering branches to a height of a hundred feet or more. As the tree ages it drops its lower branches and those remaining often become as large around as the trunk of an ordinary tree. The bark which protects the heart of these monarchs is often a foot and a half in thickness. As it is the outer and most important defense of the tree it was especially designed by Nature to resist fire, insects, and disease. For all its thickness it is spongy and almost as light and resistant to fire as asbestos because it contains so little resin. It is filled, too, with a dust which has a high percentage of tannin in it. This discourages the inroads of insects and helps to insulate the tree against extremes of heat and cold.

The Big Tree is certainly an outstanding example of the survival of the fittest. For of the millions of seeds each tree sows every year only a very few germinate. And of these few still fewer survive the ravages of birds, cutworms, wood-ants, rodents, and forest fires. Literally the first hundred years are the hardest with the Sequoias!

Lofty and aloof these trees stand in dignified stateliness. No fantastic, wind-blown contours here, or picturesquely gnarled branches. Their great trunks rise like fluted columns, and though the crowns of most of the oldest have been damaged by fire they maintain a majesty which makes them one of the wonders of the world. There lives a world beneath them and a world above. Deer and bear and a kingdom of smaller, scuttling animals live and die at their feet, while above their heads birds soar and sing, and die; clouds gather, storms rage, still the Sequoia stands calm and mysterious, in a green eternity, with its head in the clouds and its roots deep, deep in the soil, a link between heaven and earth.

And as you wander through the aisles of the Big Tree forests you understand why the ancient priests and philosophers chose the groves for their first temples, planting trees in a circle to make their amphitheaters. While Pliny and his followers were meditating in some distant woods the Big Trees were already growing on the slopes of the Sierras, gathering their peace and quiet and strength to share with all who walk beneath them.

CHAPTER SIX
TRAVELING THE TRAILS

WHEN YOU start collecting road maps and tracing High Sierra Camps with a blue pencil, you might just as well wind the office clock, tear a week or a month off the calendar, and be on your way. For, to all intents and purposes, you have begun traveling the trails of Yosemite.

That is the magic of maps. Cause and effect become blurred, and it is only a step from following a dotted black line across white paper, looking like a fever or population chart, to jogging along a mountain trail, skirting the skyline of the Sierras, or sauntering down by some still, forgotten lake.

The call of the trail is irresistible, as Horace Albright points out in his chapter on “Hikers” in “Oh, Ranger!” “Some lingering spark from the days when our ancestors were trail-blazing flares up in each of us once or twice or thrice a year, and there burns that longing for the winding trail that leads now over mountain passes, now through fragrant forests, now by rushing waters, or past ramparts of rocks.”

Hikers, like all Gaul, they divide into three parts. There are the mountain climbers, who come either in bevies and clubs, or as free-lances, and adopt some mountain temporarily and cannot rest until they have scaled its peak, before going on to conquer new heights. There are the nature-lovers who don’t care a hang what is on top of the mountain, who are lured by a trail not because it leads to the earth’s high spots, but because it winds through woods and meadows and dells, across carpets of blossoms where wild flowers and wild animals can be stalked and studied at leisure. And “there is the plain and lowly hiker, with his camera in his hand and perspiration on his brow, who outnumbers all the aforementioned gentry of the trail something like four to one. They are the ordinary folk, sick of the sight of old brick walls, longing for a look at the wilderness, hoofing it along a narrow path for no other reason than the sheer fun of it. All he asks is a well-marked trail, leading somewhere at the end of the day. All the service he demands is an extra pair of socks, a roll of adhesive tape, a big bite of lunch, and a camera to shoot the stag which stares pop-eyed at him from the azaleas.”

After the hikers go the trail-riders, those aristocrats of the mountains who travel first class where travel de luxe is still aboard the broad back of a trail pony or mountain mule. As they pass the plodding hikers along the way, each feels a peculiar superiority to the other, and each a sneaking envy. For as David Curry used to say, when he announced about the Curry campfire that reservations were being made for horses leaving in the morning for the Glacier Point trail, “Those of you who walk will probably wish you had ridden, and those of you who ride will wish you had walked.”

But they are all brothers under the dust, and it is a great fellowship that camaraderie of the trail. When they gather about the same board at night, hiker, trail-rider, or motorist (low caste though he is!) or share their bread and campfire in some sequestered spot, world politics and economic depressions are of little importance as compared to the number of miles covered that day, the steepness of the climb planned for the morrow, or the number and variety of wild flowers blooming along the Pohono trail at that time of year.

Motorists, too, have a fraternity of their own in the Sierras, with an A and B grading. Those B motorists who whiz-bang through the country, boasting of having made the Lee Vining grade in high, or of having covered more territory in less time than anyone in camp, are not popular with the “Poison-Oakers,” or experienced mountaineers, who have just humped over some stupendous pass under their own steam. But that great motor caravan of campers who use roads as they are intended to be used, as a means of getting into the wilderness to enjoy it at leisure, are admitted into the clan of trail buddies on an almost equal footing. Only circumstances set them a little below the one hundred per cent hikers, who, of course, really own the mountains.

The old cry still echoes through the canyons that automobile roads are spoiling the wilderness and ruining Americans for walking. Yet for every mile of highway which penetrates those wildernesses two miles of trail are made more accessible. As roads push farther and farther into the forests, trails push ahead of them, opening new hinterlands of beauty which have never been explored. Just look at the map of Yosemite. In spite of the six hundred miles of trail which crisscross the Park, consider the thousands of acres of grandeur which have not yet been scratched. So that great and growing company of trail-trekkers will be safe for many years to come. Uncle Sam is attending to that. For he has limited the number of roads which can be built into any National Park, while increasing the trail projects. The balance of beauty still lies with the hiker, and he has only to shoulder his pack and swing up the trail to lose himself in an hour in as profound a solitude as the Lord ever created in his six days of world-making.

Yet to anyone who feels keenly on this subject of roads, I recommend just one trip over the new highway into Yosemite by way of Wawona and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. There’s a road which is, in reality, a glorified trail. It winds its way in broad curves through one of the finest stands of timber in America, and its approach to Yosemite Valley is without equal. You emerge from a mile-long mountain tunnel, a wonder in itself, and the Valley bursts upon you. One moment it is not there, and the next it is, in all its entirety. It is like the first view of Death Valley from Dante’s Point, or the sudden stepping out upon the rim of the Grand Canyon. You have no preparation, no fugitive glimpses. There it is, abrupt and breath-taking. And it is a grand way to step onto the Yosemite stage for the first time, very much as it happened to those first discoverers of the Valley who first saw it from practically the same vantage-point. It is a moment you will be glad to store in the archives of memory. And one which may convert you to road-making.

Before you start traveling the trails in Yosemite, it is a good idea to visit the Museum in the Valley and study the relief map of the Park. You will find it interesting to trace your route over mountain and through canyons, beside rivers and across meadows. And you will go with a much more vivid idea of the sort of country you are planning to discover. Then, when you return, visit the map again and you will find that impersonal black line leading across ridges and dipping into hollows has taken on new meaning, conjuring up pictures of scalloped peaks against a sunset sky, wooded valleys filled with the sound of rushing waters,

[click to enlarge]

At Merced Lake trail-riders leave
the workaday world far behind

amphitheaters of granite bulking at the end of the trail. And you will believe there is something in Second Sight after all!

Up there in the Sierras time is the coin of the realm. You are rich or poor, not according to the dollars, but to the days and the nights you have to spend. So hoard your hours like a miser, till you arrive, then spend them like a mountain millionaire, paying out a day to stroll across the roof of the world, an hour to lie beneath a tree which has taken three thousand years in the growing! Budget your time, so that none of it is squandered, then spend like a prodigal, and your interest will be compounded every year for the rest of your life.

You will have to allow quite a bit of time for the Valley itself. Before you leave to skirmish on high, explore the Indian Caves under the Royal Arches, where the first and only Yosemite Indian was found by the Mariposa Battalion. Mono chiefs once smoked the pipe of peace there with the Ahwaneechees. Major Savage and the men of his battalion spent a night there.

If it is spring, or early summer, look for water-ouzels bobbing along the rocks which border Happy Isles as the Merced River rushes by, flashing white diamonds in the air. In late afternoon drive down to the foot of Bridal Veil Falls to see the ethereal rainbow arching across the water. If it is summer, and the moon is full, climb to the bottom of Yosemite’s upper falls to see the lunar rainbow. Then, if you can turn your back on this moon enchantment, look down upon the Valley where the twinkling lights flicker in the trees below like myriad fireflies. Along the banks of the Merced River, near Pohono Bridge, the dogwood is loveliest in the spring and brilliant again in October. In June azaleas bloom in El Capitan meadows, filling the air with their fragrance. On a moonlit winter night, Lamon’s apple orchard, white with snow, is a vision you will never forget.

It is fun to prowl among the camp grounds in the evening, stopping now and then at some friendly fireside, to exchange data with the campers. You will learn that the roads are good, and the roads are bad. Fishin’ is fine, or there’s no fishin’ at all! Bears at the feeding ground are one thing, bears feeding in your own camp are another.

There are nice, flat rocks near the foot of Yosemite Falls where you can lie and listen to the water as you watch the stars in their courses. There is the Lost Arrow trail, where you can wander in the freshness of the early morning, cooking bacon, if you have permission, in the rocky stream-bed. And there is the museum, chock-full of treasures, where you can identify that strange bird or flower which puzzled you along the trail. Every morning and every afternoon there is an auto caravan tour of the Valley which you make in your own car with the aid of a guide who explains the interesting features of Yosemite.

Then there are the trails! The long ones and the short ones. The steep ones, and the steeper ones. The most traveled from the floor of the Valley are those to Vernal and Nevada Falls, the Four-Mile trail to Glacier, and the Ledge trail. Fewer seem to know about the Sierra Point trail, which is a fairly steep scramble, but a most rewarding one. It branches off from the Vernal Falls trail just above Happy Isles and spirals upward for three-quarters of a mile to a rocky promontory opposite Illilouette Falls, with Vernal and Nevada tumbling to the left of you, Yosemite plunging to the right. You are suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth, looking down upon the Valley, looking up to the Sierra peaks. For a short hike it is one of the most comprehensive and satisfying of all.

Another easy half-day jaunt is up Tenaya Canyon to the Cascades. There is little climbing on this trail as it follows the river closely and is well shaded all the way. It begins at Mirror Lake and meanders through the canyon for several wooded miles.

“If you had only one day in Yosemite what would you do?”

I heard a tourist ask a Ranger this question, and he shook his head sadly and answered, “Madam, I’d weep!”

But if I had only one day in Yosemite, I think I would drive to Glacier Point twenty-eight miles over an oiled highway, taking about an hour and a half each way. There I would climb to Sentinel Dome, a short ten minutes’ drive from the main road. And under that curiously wind-blown Jeffrey Pine, hundreds of years old, I would settle down for one hour’s contemplation of the roof of the world. For nowhere will you find such an unsurpassed view of the High Sierras. “Cycle upon cycle of Sierra peaks, lonely looking, though so many.” Rolling ridges of stone, stretching off into illimitable space. Some are snow-crowned, some are cloud-shadowed. Battalion after battalion they march across the sky, files of pinnacles, domes, and ragged crests. There is lots of room to breathe in up there, lots of time to think. And as you look to the horizon on every side of you, recall those lines—

I inhale great draughts of space,
And the East and the West are mine,
And the North and the South are mine.

And after a while I would wander back to Glacier Point, for the comfort of people, and standing on the top of that sheer cliff which rises straight from the floor of the Valley to the soles of my shoes, almost a mile above it, I would look down into that canyon carved by the silver trickle of water, spilling now over Vernal and Nevada Falls, and marvel that human beings could matter in a universe planned on such a scale.

From Glacier Point I would back-track a little on my way to the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. I would plan to arrive there late in the afternoon when the shadows were long enough to cast “sun-dogs,” or streamers of light through the trees, and I would walk quietly among them till sundown, as you would walk in the presence of Patriarchs. I would not bother about their size or their age or their cubic contents. I would simply enjoy their peace and their beauty. And after supper on the terrace made from mosaics of Sequoia, I would listen to the wind stir in their needles, so high above, and watch their silhouettes appear against the starlight or moonlight before returning to the Valley in time to see the firefall from the very point at Glacier on which I had stood that morning. And that would be a day of days.

If you have two days in Yosemite you could plan a trip to the Big Trees in the morning and go on to Glacier Point to spend the night. You could have a sunset then from Sentinel Dome or Glacier Point, when the whole world is bathed in color, and in the evening you could participate in that ceremony of shoving the firefall over the cliff, and hearing the embers tinkle as they dropped. In the morning you could return to the Valley either by way of Vernal and Nevada

[click to enlarge]

In the Tuolumne Canyon through fir
forests, beside rushing waters, trails lead
from one High Sierra camp to another

Falls, an eight-mile hike, or by way of the Pohono trail, which follows the southern rim of the Valley to the tunnel on the new Wawona road. The peculiar beauty of the Pohono trail lies in the forests through which it passes, through groves of cedar, sugar pine, yellow pine, white fir, and Douglas spruce, interspersed with flowering meadows and carpets of wild flowers in the summer months. Now and again the trail swings out of the forest to the very brink of Yosemite Valley at points like Union and Stanford, commanding a magnificent sweep of valley, canyon, cliffs, and granite domes. Forests and flowers, streams and waterfalls, vast panoramas and secret dells, the Pohono trail samples them all as it descends from Glacier Point to the floor of the Valley.

You cannot sit and watch Yosemite Falls booming over the cliffs without feeling the urge to climb to the top and peer behind the scenes. Particularly if you have seen the canyon of Yosemite Creek from the Pohono trail, tracing the river from the falls back to where it was born on Mount Hoffman. So if you have a third day in Yosemite, don’t miss that experience. There is no way of describing the sensation you have as you stand beside that deafening roar of falling water where it slips over the brink of the precipice. It terrifies and exhilarates. And there is no better way to gauge the height of the cliffs than to climb up or down that trail in the shadow of those towering walls. From the top of Yosemite Falls it is about a mile to Yosemite Point, a rise which gives a more extended view of the Valley. A supper on Yosemite Point, when the shadows descend on the Valley engulfing it bit by bit, then a hike down the trail in the moonlight is an adventure you’ll boast of for many long years to come.

From the top of Yosemite Falls a trail leads to the summit of Eagle Peak, highest of the Three Brothers, through forests, like those of the Pohono trail, through gardens of wild roses, evening primroses, lupins, shooting-stars, Mariposa lilies, larkspur, and penstamons.

Half Dome is a challenge to both seasoned and tenderfoot hikers alike. Its very bulk and its polished dome seem to defy them. So, to assert man’s superiority, they feel compelled to scale it, even as George Anderson did, back in 1875, when he so laboriously cut steps in the granite to insert the iron pegs by which he eventually hauled himself by means of a rope ladder to its untrodden top. Since then, the egg-shells of thousands of picnickers have blown down its crevices, and still it stands beckoning. On the top of its rounded dome there are about eight acres of flat surface. A few scrubby tree bushes have found root-hold and here and there a tiny alpine lichen relieves the starkness of its barren dome. It is eight miles to the top of Half Dome, and eight miles down again!

Supposing, though, you did not have to count your days by twos or threes. Then what a bit of traveling you could do! You could roll up a map, and a bit of moleskin for blistered heels, and start off on a tour of the High Sierra Camps. You could hike it or ride it, with or without companions, allowing six days, or sixty, according to your blessings.

There are five of these High Sierra Camps, established just a comfortable day’s jaunt apart, approximately ten miles, where simple but highly appreciated food and shelter are provided for a dollar a meal, a dollar a night. And when you have completed a tour of those camps, from Yosemite Valley to Lake Merced, Vogelsang Pass to Tuolumne Meadows, Glen Aulin to Tenaya Lake, and from Tenaya Lake back to the Valley, you have had one of the finest vacations that money can buy. At the top of every mountain pass you have somehow dropped a worry. Fresh winds from the four corners of the earth have blown the cobwebs from your mind. You have burned your nose and hardened your body. You have seen the glories of a mountain morning, heard the music of wind and water, smelled the fragrance of pine forests. In short, you have been places and seen things.

Merced Lake Camp lies in a high, wooded valley on the shores of a beautiful lake, where the fishing is excellent. Because of its ideal location, and its proximity to other fishing streams, it is one of the favorite High Sierra Camps.

Vogelsang Camp is the highest of all, perched on the top of a pass at an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea-level. It lies above timberline, stark and impressive in its austere beauty, up where the winds and the clouds are born. Above the camp and one mile to the east lies Bernice Lake, cradled in an amphitheater of rock, and several hundred feet above is a chain of lakes where the trout flash temptingly.

Tuolumne Meadows is known to all lovers of the Sierras. It is the hub of the High Sierras, a sort of Grand Concourse from which many trails radiate. Like the Grand Central Station in New York, if you stay there long enough you will encounter all of your trailside buddies. Surrounded by such imposing peaks as Dana, Mount Conness, Lyell, Cathedral, Echo, and McClure, crossed by the mighty Tuolumne River, twin to the Merced, the Meadows attracts thousands of fishermen, mountain climbers, campers, and hikers each year. As in Yosemite Valley, there in the heart of the Sierras you will find that combination of almost forbidding grandeur and ethereal beauty; noble ranges and fantastically shaped peaks, granite knobs, polished to shining glory, rising out of wild-flower meadows and sylvan groves. And through it all races the Tuolumne River, “one of the most songful rivers in the world,” as John Muir declares.

Glen Aulin is beautifully located beside the White Cascade Fall on the Tuolumne River. It is one of the newer camps to be established, opening to new worshipers each season miles of that tumultuous canyon where the Waterwheel Falls leap in the air. Fishing is extraordinarily good in this region, and the aspens, in the late season, are a sight for your soul.

From Glen Aulin it is only a little over seven miles to Lake Tenaya, “Lake of the Shining Rocks,” as the Indians named it. Wooded on one side, with a tree-fringed shore on the other, and glacial domes rising from its waters to brush the skies, this is one of those ideal pictures with which vacation pamphlets lure you. Here the last of Tenaya’s tribe were surrounded and captured by government soldiers. The waters of this lake seem particularly blue, perhaps because of the glacial dust. For as dust makes the sunsets by light reflection and refraction, so does finely powdered rock in the mountain lakes account in part for their intense blues and greens. The trip from Glen Aulin to Tenaya Lake passes not far from May Lake, at the base of Mount Hoffman, where a winter camp for ski enthusiasts is being planned.

From Tenaya Lake you return to the Valley by way of Tenaya Canyon and the zigzags. But if you can manage to commandeer a ride down the Tioga road, for a few miles, to the junction of the Yosemite Falls trail, you will have a glorious hike along Yosemite Creek, through magnificent forests, to the top of Yosemite Falls, then down into the Valley. That is as grand a finale for such a tour as the most exacting could ask.

When you have toured the High Sierra Camps, however, you have only made a bowing acquaintance with the Park. For there is just as much more in comparison to what you have seen, as you have now seen in comparison to those who never left the floor of the Valley. Over every ridge you passed lies another ridge. Beyond every lake and stream gleams another. There is Pate Valley and Hetch-Hetchy, Benson Lake and the Devil’s Post Pile. There is the Isberg Pass and the Forsythe trail, the Sunrise trail and Thousand Island Lake. There is Cold Canyon trail and Babcock Lake trail, and trails too numerous to mention. And there is Shadow Lake and Shadow Creek, Ten-Mile Meadows and Jackass Mountain, Piute Creek and Matterhorn Canyon. Names to conjure with, places to explore!

But once you get the bacilli in your blood stream rest assured you will be back. For there is no cure for mountain-itis except mountains; no allaying that trail-fever except by trail-trekking. And of all the treatments under the sun and the stars, there is none easier to take than that of traveling the trails of Yosemite!

CHAPTER SEVEN
INDIAN LEGENDS

PRIMITIVE MAN has always had a reverence for stone. It was his first oracle and god, his first token of a life longer than his own. For man grasped the immortality of stone images before he dared dream of immortality for himself. Even today we make much of our Rock of Ages, our Gibraltar, our Sugar Loaf, our Diamond Head, and our pyramids.

So it is not surprising that the Indians should have deified Half Dome, El Capitan, and Sentinel Rock. Anything a savage can not understand he fears and worships. In his effort to explain the granite cliffs and the mountain peaks, woods, valleys, streams, and waterfalls, he peopled them with spiritual occupants, and attributed to them supernatural powers second only to those of the Great Spirit. And then about them he wove many legends.

Through many repetitions these legends have become so embroidered and embellished by the white man that only a flavor of the original remains. Included in the following pages are a few of the most characteristic of these stories still current in the Valley. And because the different versions of the same legend vary so in detail, in one or two instances a composite of the various accounts has been made, adhering always to the underlying motif, while risking the embroidering of one more eyelet in this fabric of fancy.

THE LEGEND OF TU-TOK-A-NU-LA AND TIS-SA-ACK

[Editor’s note: this “legend” “was almost certainly fabricated” according to NPS Ethnologist Craig D. Bates. It was first published in Hutchings “The Great Yo-Semite Valley” (1859) and reprinted in Hutchings Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity (1862) and In the Heart of the Sierras (1888) —dea.]

If you look closely upon the massive face of El Capitan, you will see there the fancied likeness of a man, in flowing robes, hastening westward. The Indians know him as Tu-tok-a-nu-la and have woven about him the following legend:

When the Great Spirit first made Ah-wah-nee, known today as Yosemite, and led the children of the sun into it, he placed the great god Tu-tok-a-nu-la on his granite tower as guardian of the Valley, to watch over and care for them.

Tu-tok-a-nu-la intervened with the Great Spirit to bring rains when they were needed to ripen the acorns and fatten the tender grass-roots. He drove the deer from their thickets that the hunters might bring home venison to their

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Mount Lyell and Mount Maclure from
Mount Dana, an empire of stark granite
peaks tumbled together in desolate grandeur

women. He kept the streams filled that the fish might abound there. He was beloved of all the children of Ah-wah-nee, for he brought happiness and prosperity to the Valley.

Then one morning at dawn he heard a voice in the breeze, calling to him in tones as sweet as the ripple of water.

“Tu-tok-a-nu-la! ”

And as he looked in wonder, he saw, for a fleeting moment, a beautiful maiden, not like the dark children of Ah-wah-nee, but radiant and fair, with eyes blue as the mountain lakes, and hair golden as sunlight. Eagerly he reached out to her, but she vanished in a mist, and he knew her to be Tis-sa-ack, who dwelt upon Half Dome.

From that day he could think of nothing but this vision. As he roamed the mountain peaks and the forests, in search of her, neglect and desolation fell upon Ah-wah-nee. His people called to him in vain, imploring him to bring rain to revive the parched earth. The streams shriveled up and the fishermen returned empty-handed. No longer did the deer come from the mountains, and sickness and starvation came to the Ah-wah-nee-chees.

Still Tu-tok-a-nu-la forgot them. He was consumed only with a desire to see Tis-sa-ack once more. But she had vanished, and when she returned and saw the distress that Tu-tok-a-nu-la’s love for her had brought upon his people, her heart was heavy, and she called upon the Great Spirit to bring rain to Ah-wah-nee.

At once there came an answer to her prayer, for with a mighty crash the Great Spirit split in two the throne rock upon which she had stood, and water flowed from its sides, filling the streams and the Valley. And Tis-sa-ack’s tears flowed down the cleft rock, leaving at its foot a little lake, so that the streams might ever be replenished. And Tis-sa-ack was banished forever into the mists which often hover about her throne rock.

Tu-tok-a-nu-la returned at last from his vain searchings, and with his hunting-knife he carved his face upon El Capitan to show the people he had gone West again, always seeking his vanished Tis-sa-ack, leaving only his image to guard in his absence the Gates of Ah-wah-nee.

[click to enlarge]

At Vogelsang Pass, high above
the timberline, the trail crosses
the backbone of the Sierras

And occasionally, it is said, just as the last rays of the sun creep over the crest of Half Dome, Tis-sa-ack comes back, wreathed in a cloud, to gaze once more into the valley she loved so well and to make sure that the children of Ah-wah-nee still live in peace and plenty.

LEGEND OF PO-HO-NO

Savages, it seems, were seldom able to trace to themselves the cause of their misfortunes, so they conveniently fixed the responsibilities and the sufferings upon the evil spirits. A spirit which had incurred the wrath of the Great Spirit was obliged to serve a term of expiation upon this earth. But if one of these demons could lure another to destruction, the victim had to serve as a proxy in place of the original, who was thus released to join his family.

Particularly dreaded by the Indians of Yosemite was that region directly below Bridal Veil Falls which was infested with those spirits. Even on the warmest days a capricious wind is often felt there, which the Indians called “Po-ho-no,” or “Evil Wind.” And while thousands of visitors pause there to admire the gossamer veil of spray, the Indian hurries past, face averted, a dread fear in his heart because of the following myth:

One soft spring day, while the women of Ah-wah-nee were gathering grasses for basket-weaving above the top of Po-Ho-No, or Bridal Veil Falls, one of the maidens ventured near the edge of the water to pick an overhanging grass. She stepped upon a mossy rock, set there to entrap her, by Po-Ho-No, the Evil One who inhabits the mist, and in a twinkling she was snatched into the falls never to return. Her companions, horrified, and fearing the same fate, hastened back to the Valley to spread the alarm. Instantly a band of young braves sped to the foot of the falls. But no sign of the maiden was to be found. Her spirit, with many others, was imprisoned in the water by Po-Ho-No, there to stay until she had lured some other victim to its doom, and not until then would it be released to wander on to the home of the Great Spirit in the West.

And that is why an Indian shudders as he feels the breath of Po-Ho-No upon

[click to enlarge]

On the Glacier Point Trail one looks
down upon the top of Yosemite Falls
and up towards mountains higher

him, and hastens by, lest he be called upon to pay the forfeit for some tortured spirit.

Mr. Bunnell, in his “Discovery of Yosemite” claims, however, that when the Mariposa Battalion first entered the Valley they found an Indian Village located not far from the foot of the falls. So he is inclined to think that their fear of the region occurred after that, and that the vicinity became haunted ground after the murder there of the two unfortunate miners, because of the death and disaster which promptly followed the commission of that crime.

LEGEND OF HUM-MO, THE LOST ARROW

[Editor’s note: this “legend” “is almost certainly fictitious” according to NPS Ethnologist Craig D. Bates. It was first printed in Hutchings In the Heart of the Sierras (1888) —dea.]

A little to the left of the upper Yosemite Falls, standing alone from the edge of the cliff, is a great shaft of granite rock which the Indians explained as follows:

It was the day of the marriage of Tee-hee-nay, fairest of Ah-wah-nee-chee maidens, to Kos-soo-kah, bravest of the warriors. But before the bride could go with the bridegroom to his lodge, there must be a great feast, and all day long Ah-wah-nee was astir with preparations.

Early in the morning Kos-soo-kah gathered about him the strongest of his young braves to hunt with him for the marriage feast. He parted from his beloved with the promise that, at the end of the day’s hunt, he would drop an arrow from the cliff above the falls. By the number of feathers it bore Tee-hee-nay should tell what the kill had been.

The day sped quickly while Tee-hee-nay and her women gathered acorns and young grasses, and when the long shadows stretched across the meadows she made her way with a light heart to the foot of Yosemite Falls to receive the message from Kos-soo-kah.

The shadows deepened to night, but still Tee-bee-nay received no sign from her lover. Becoming fearful, she climbed the cliff to meet him, and there, at the top of the cliff, she saw fresh footprints in the moist earth which led over the cliff—but failed to return!

Slowly she crept to the edge of the rock, and leaning far over she saw on a mound of fallen rock the motionless body of Kos-soo-kah, spent how in hand.

[click to enlarge]

Dana Meadows on the Tioga Road, where
you will find “The four far corners of space,
wind on the mouth, clouds in the face”

She knew then that as he had drawn his bow to speed his love message to her the ground beneath his feet had given way, carrying him with the avalanche.

By means of a signal fire she brought the old men from the Valley to her, and the young warriors from the woods, bearing on their backs Kos-soo-kah’s kill for the wedding feast. Slowly she was lowered over the cliff to his side, for she would allow no others to go.

As they were both raised to the cliff above, there beneath the stars of her wedding night she fell quietly forward upon his breast and the spirit of Tee-hee-nay followed that of Kos-soo-kah’s.

The arrow was never found, but in its stead appeared the granite shaft to the left of Yosemite Falls, in token of Kos-soo-kah’s last message to Tee-hee-nay, and it was called by the children of Ahwahnee Hum-mo, or Lost Arrow.

LEGEND OF TIS-SA-ACK

Long, long ago, before the Great Spirit had peopled Ahwahnee, an Indian woman, called Tis-sa-ack, and her husband, Nangas, left the plains of the Merced Valley to cross the high mountains before them. Weary from long days of climbing and laden with burdens, they reached Ah-wah-nee at last, parched for water, and eagerly they stumbled on to Ah-wei-ya, or Mirror Lake, to refresh themselves.

Tis-sa-ack, arriving first, set her papoose in its basket on the ground beside her and bending over drank thirstily from the lake. Again and again she filled her basket and drank deeply from it. So great was her thirst that by the time her husband arrived not a basketful of water remained.

In great anger, Nangas turned upon his wife and began to beat her. Tis-sa-ack in fright ran from him, but he pursued her, striking as he ran. At last in pain and humiliation Tis-sa-ack turned upon her husband and threw her burden-basket at him.

The Great Spirit, angered by all this tumult in his peaceful Ah-wah-nee, straightway turned them all to stone. Nangas became Washington Column. The upturned burden-basket, hurled by his weeping wife, became Basket Dome. The forgotten papoose, in his basket, became the Royal Arches, while Tis-sa-ack herself became that great monument, Half Dome, which is still streaked with the tears of shame which streamed down her face at her husband’s beating.

Just what relation this Tis-sa-ack has to the maiden of the other legend has never been explained, but the two stories run concurrently in the Valley today.

LEGEND OF TU-TOK-A’NA

“When El Capitan was but a boulder,” is an expression sometimes heard in Yosemite. This refers to a time before Tu-tok-a-na distinguished himself among all the wild folk of Yosemite. El Capitan, according to legend, was not always the massive cliff it is today. Mythically speaking, it achieved its growth, as well as its name, in the following manner:

One warm, summer day, when there were only animal people in the world, two little bear cubs ran away from their home to go swimming. Scrambling out of the water they lay upon a warm rock to dry. The sun, and their swim, made them drowsy, and they soon fell fast asleep, in what later proved to be a regular Rip Van Winkle sleep. For while they were sleeping the rock upon which they lay began to grow. It grew and grew until it towered up into the very clouds, with the bear cubs asleep on its top.

When the mother bear learned what had happened she was overcome with grief. All the animals in the woods gathered about the foot of the great rock and each in turn tried to scale it. One after another they failed, even to the agile cougar and the powerful grizzly bear. Finally the Measuring-Worm, humblest of all the mountain people, began to climb up the face of the cliff. Inch by inch he made his way until he reached the top. There he found the bear cubs and took them back to their waiting mother. Overjoyed by the rescue, the animals hereafter called the cliff by the name of the valiant measuring-worm, and it is still known as Tu-tok-a-na.

A sequel to this story, no less amazing, is that Tu-tok-a-na, elated by his prowess, began now to “show off” a bit. He climbed again to the top of the cliff and stretching himself clear across the Valley drew himself over. Then he returned, repeating his acrobatics until he so weakened the walls of the Valley that they caved in, thus widening the canyon at this point quite noticeably!

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