The Ahwahnechee: Before the Valley Had a Tourist Season

Before the gold rush, the foothills around Mariposa and the high valleys to the east were home to the Ahwahnechee, a Southern Miwok and Paiute people who had lived in the great valley now called Yosemite and in the surrounding mountains for many generations. The word Ahwahnee, which the valley's original inhabitants used for their home, is generally translated as place of the gaping mouth, a reference to the valley's dramatic granite entrance. The Ahwahnechee gathered acorns from the black oak groves that grew on the valley floor, a food source they managed carefully with fire, and they traded with the Paiute people across the mountains to the east and with Miwok communities to the west.

Their chief at the time of contact with American settlers was called Tenaya, and a lake in the high country still carries his name. What is clear is that by eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty-one, military expeditions from Mariposa County had entered the valley, the Ahwahnechee had been forced from their home and marched to reservation land in the San Joaquin Valley, and Tenaya had been killed in a dispute with Mono Paiute people in eighteen fifty-three. The first tourist party from Mariposa, organized by the publisher James Hutchings, arrived in the valley in eighteen fifty-five, just four years after the people who had managed it for generations were forced out.

The valley that would become synonymous with American wilderness had been someone's home.