The Mariposa Battalion

In March eighteen fifty-one, a state-authorized militia entered a valley in the Sierra Nevada and became the first group of people of European descent to document it. The militiamen looked at the granite walls, the waterfalls, and the valley floor, and understood that they were seeing something extraordinary. Some of them said so in letters home. This story entered American history as the discovery of Yosemite.

What the story leaves out is what the militia was doing there.

The Mariposa Battalion, as it was called, was led by a mine operator named Major James Savage. Savage had trading posts in the foothills south of here and had arranged commercial relationships with Ahwahneechee villages, a Southern Miwok band who had occupied Yosemite Valley for centuries. When Savage's posts were burned in late eighteen fifty, in retaliation for the land seizures that the Gold Rush was driving through Ahwahneechee territory, the California governor authorized the battalion to conduct a military campaign to force the Ahwahneechee to a reservation in the San Joaquin Valley, below the mountains.

The Ahwahneechee did not want to go. The battalion burned their villages and destroyed their food stores. Most survivors were eventually forced to the Fresno River Reservation. Some escaped and returned to the valley. By eighteen fifty-five, the valley those survivors had returned to was being promoted to the public as a tourist destination, with the Ahwahneechee who remained treated as a scenic curiosity rather than the people the valley actually belonged to.

The discovery narrative has a specific function. It places the beginning of Yosemite's history in the moment when white Americans first saw it. The Ahwahneechee had been there for centuries before Savage's militia arrived. They were not discovered. They were displaced. And then they were written out of the opening chapter of the story about their own home.