The Militia That Called It Discovery

The view that opens in front of you right now, the granite walls, the waterfall hanging in the middle distance, the dome at the back of the valley, was first seen by non-Indigenous men who were under orders to drive people out. Not explorers. Not tourists. A state-authorized militia.

In March of eighteen fifty-one, a force called the Mariposa Battalion entered Yosemite Valley. California was paying their expenses. The commander was James Savage, a trader who had been raided by Sierra Miwok groups resisting the labor conditions at his gold-mining operations. The battalion was not sent here because someone discovered a beautiful place. They were sent here to clear it.

The people they came to remove were the Ahwahneechee, Southern Sierra Miwok and Paiute communities whose ancestors had lived in this valley for at least three thousand years. They called the valley Ahwahnee, a name meaning something close to 'place like a gaping mouth.' When the battalion rode in, they voted on a new name mid-campaign. Battalion member Lafayette Houghton Bunnell wrote a memoir afterward describing the moment they agreed on 'Yosemite,' their garbled version of a Miwok word whose exact meaning remains disputed. Possibly 'those who kill.' Possibly 'grizzly bear.' Bunnell admitted in that same memoir that the valley had been known to local miners and traders for years before the militia arrived. The 'discovery' was invented in the retelling.

Within two decades, the renamed valley had become the most painted, photographed, and written-about landscape in North America. The Ahwahneechee who survived the battalion's attack were relocated to the Fresno River Reservation, recaptured when they returned, and relocated again. Their descendants would continue living in the valley in an informal settlement for another century before the Park Service evicted the last residents in nineteen sixty-nine.

The view from this pullout has been reproduced so many times it feels inevitable, like the landscape itself composed the image. But the framing omits something. What you are looking at is a homeland from which a people were expelled by force, renamed by armed vote, and then declared a wilderness, which is to say, a place without people, by the civilization that removed them.

The interpretive signs here began acknowledging this history in the twenty-tens. The view hasn't changed.