The Names the Maps Replaced

Every major feature visible from this visitor center had a name before eighteen fifty-one that the Mariposa Battalion replaced.

El Capitan, the three-thousand-foot granite monolith to the west, was called To-to-kon oo-la, which translates roughly as 'rock chief.' Half Dome, the cleaved granite dome at the valley's eastern end, was Tis-sa-ack. Bridalveil Fall, the waterfall that hangs from the southern wall, was Pohono, meaning 'puffing wind,' a reference to the way the fall moves in the updrafts off the valley floor. Yosemite Falls was Cholock, meaning 'the fall.'

These names appear in Lafayette Houghton Bunnell's memoir, which records the battalion's renaming process in real time. The soldiers rode through the valley and voted on what to call things they were seeing for the first time. The Ahwahneechee names came from people who had been living with these features for thousands of years and had accumulated detailed knowledge of their behavior, their character, the way they changed with seasons and light. The battalion names came from an afternoon's discussion among armed men.

The renaming was not incidental to the dispossession. It was the linguistic dimension of it: once the features had new names, the people who held the original names had less standing in any future argument about the valley's history.

The NPS began adding Ahwahneechee names to interpretive signage in the park during the twenty-tens, a process that is ongoing. The main maps, the ones handed out at the entrance station, still lead with the English names. The phonetic accuracy of the recorded transliterations, spelled out in historical documents by soldiers who spoke no Miwok, is a question the California Language Archive at Berkeley is better positioned to answer than any signage in this building.