Tenaya and the Lake That Carries His Name

The lake ahead of you is named for a man who did not want it to be.

Tenaya was the leader of the Ahwahneechee when the Mariposa Battalion rode into their valley in eighteen fifty-one. He negotiated. He resisted. He refused to lead his people to the Fresno River Reservation. When battalion member Lafayette Houghton Bunnell proposed naming this lake after him, Tenaya objected. He told them the lake already had a name. He told them his people had always lived here.

Bunnell recorded the exchange in his memoir. He and the other soldiers named it Tenaya Lake anyway. They voted on it. Bunnell wrote that he hoped the name would serve as a kind of memorial, a way of preserving Tenaya's memory for the historical record. He did not appear to notice the irony of memorializing a living man by taking his name from him and attaching it to the land he was being expelled from.

Tenaya was captured twice. The second time was in eighteen fifty-two, after a battalion member was killed during his attempted return to the valley his people had occupied for thousands of years. After his second capture, he was moved east of the Sierra Nevada to live with Mono Paiute relatives. He died in a dispute with that community in the early eighteen fifties. The exact date is not established in any source this recording has access to. The general period is not in doubt.

His name now marks a lake, a creek, a canyon, and several other Sierra Nevada features. The Ahwahneechee names for these places, the names his people used before the battalion arrived, are recorded in the California Language Archive at Berkeley and have been added to some NPS interpretive materials since the twenty-tens. They do not appear on most maps.

Tenaya Lake at eight thousand one hundred fifty feet elevation is among the clearest bodies of water in the Sierra Nevada. It has been called, by several accounts, one of the most beautiful lakes in North America.

It was already named.