The Miwok of Wawona: A Thousand Years Before the Hotel

Long before any hotel stood in the meadow at Wawona, this was Southern Sierra Miwok country. The Miwok people had lived throughout these foothills and mountain valleys for thousands of years, moving seasonally between lower elevations in winter and higher meadows and forests in summer. The place now called Wawona was a stopping point on those seasonal migrations, a gathering place for families and villages spread throughout the watershed.

The Miwok managed the land with great care, using controlled burning to keep meadows open, hunting deer and fishing the streams, and harvesting acorns from the black oaks that still grow throughout the area. Their knowledge of the landscape was encyclopedic, earned over hundreds of generations. Contact with Spanish missionaries, and then with American gold seekers, devastated Miwok communities throughout the Sierra Nevada.

Disease, violence, and displacement shattered populations that had numbered in the thousands. The Mariposa Battalion's campaign of eighteen fifty one was part of a broader pattern that pushed many Miwok off their traditional lands. Some of the descendants of those communities live in this region today, maintaining connections to places their families have known for a very long time.

The name Wawona is popularly said to come from a Miwok word, though its true origin is unknown, and it was given to the resort by the Washburn family in eighteen eighty-three.