Expert answer:Geology analytical essay (3-4) pages

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Read one of the suggested research papers and write a response in the form of an
analytical essay. An essay is part summary and part analysis, based on your own
reflections. However, it should not be written in first-person style. The first page should
include a brief summary of the article and the remainder of your essay should be in an
analytical mode. Use the questions below as guidelines for your written analysis.
Your response should be 3 to 4 pages in length, double-spaced, and in a normal sized font
(Times New Roman 12 suggested). Pages should be numbered. Points will be deducted
for lack of proofreading, errors in spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. You will be
graded on 80% content and 20% writing structure. Remember to provide a full reference to
the paper you are analyzing.
Submit your paper via e-mail to my address at elena.givental@csueastbay.edu in a Word
Document Format. I will not grade papers submitted in a pdf format or via Google Docs.
“Dispossessing the Wilderness: Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal,
1864-1930”, by Mark Spence. Pacific Historical Review, vol. 35, # 1, pp. 27-59, 1996.
Questions to consider in your response: What is the main issue, or reason that the author
wrote this article? Summarize the article briefly, then consider other questions: What is the
“National Park Ideal”? How do concepts of wilderness blend fact and fiction? Should social
justice be considered as part of environmental preservation? What are some common
concepts of wilderness? Are Nature and Culture opposites? In conflict? At different ends of
a continuum? Or part of each other? You may go beyond these topics in your analysis.
Expand upon these ideas in your own way.
Dispossesing the Wilderness: Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal, 1864-1930
Author(s): Mark Spence
Source: The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 27-59
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3640826
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Dispossesing the Wilderness:
Yosemite Indians and the
National Park Ideal, 1864-1930
MARKSPENCE
The author is a doctoralcandidate in historyin the University
of California, Los Angeles. The PHR’s Board of EditorssePrize
lectedthis essay as winner of the W TurrentineJackson
for 1995.
The true ownership of the wilderness belongs in the
highest to those who love it most.
John Muir (1912)
Whit men drive my people out-my Yosemite.
Totuya (1929)
Although every area that later became a national park
was once utilized or inhabited by American Indians, only Yosemite National Park has ever included a native community within
its boundaries. Indeed, Americans are able to cherish their national parks today only because Indians abandoned them involuntarily or were forcibly removed to reservations. Because
Indian removal from YosemiteNational Parkoccurred in the first
half of this century, and not in the dusty old days of Indian wars
and land grabs, the park’searly history presents a unique opportunity for examining the basic ideals underpinning American
conceptions of wilderness and their close links to ideas about
Native Americans. The long presence of Indians in Yosemite is all
the more remarkablewhen compared to the removal and exclusion of Indians from other early national parks like Yellowstone
Pacific Historical Review ?1996 by the Pacific Coast Branch
American Historical Association
27
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Pacific Historical Review
and Glacier, and provides an exceptional case by which to evaluate the policies developed at these and other parks. Such a
comparison not only sheds light on Yosemite’sunique history,but
also demonstrates that the presence of a native community
within a national park eventually proved too exceptional for the
park service. Consequently,in an effort to hasten the “vanishing”
of Yosemite’s Indians and bring the park in line with the rest of
the national park system, Yosemite officials implemented a program of gradual Indian removal in the 1930s.1
The Yosemite Indians’ ability to remain in a national park
resulted in large part from a long history of efforts to both resist
and adapt to the American conquest of their homeland. The first
sustained contact between the Yosemite and whites took place in
the aftermath of the Gold Rush as thousands of “forty-niners”
invaded the central Sierra Nevada. While miners brought epidemic diseases to native communities and destroyed carefully
tended ecosystems in their feverish quest for some trace of the
Mother Lode, the growth of mining camps and settlements also
spawned a series of violent conflicts between whites and displaced Indians. Not surprisingly, the “discovery”of Yosemite
Valley in 1851 occurred during a military campaign to subdue
the Indians of the central SierraNevada and relocate them to the
1. While historians have not examined Indian removal from Yosemite National
Park, two recent works have associated California’s efforts to remove the Yosemite
Indians from the area in the 1850s with the desire to establish Yosemite Park in the
1860s. Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest:Developers,
Destroyers,and Defendersof the Amazon (New York, 1990), 269-276; Rebecca Solnit,
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Warsof the American West(San Francisco,
1994). Much of the documentation for this article comes from the Yosemite National Park Research Library. Unlike most national park archives or libraries,
Yosemite has held onto the bulk of its original holdings. For the most part, those
materials that have been sent to the National Archives, either at Washington, D.C.,
or the Regional Branch in San Bruno, California, have been copied and filed in
Yosemite. Those records pertaining to the Yosemite Indians are generally found in
the internal reports and correspondence of park employees and did not become a
part of the Federal Records system except in those instances when copies of these
documents were forwarded to the director of the National Park Service. Documents
relating to Indians in Yosemite after 1916 are especially well organized and have
remained largely untapped by historians of the park. Although the sources at the
Yosemite National Park Library are especially rich, this article would not have been
possible except for the patience and advice of Yosemite’s librarians and archivists.
Likewise, the comments of several people have greatly improved this article, and I
would especially like to thank Tanis Thorne, Kerwin Klein, Amanda Kate Allaback,
and the referees for the Pacific Historical Review.
Dispossessing the Wilderness
SanJoaquin Valley.Effortsto remove the Indians from the region
ultimately failed, however, and the Yosemite reestablished themselves in the valley after two years of sporadic encounters with
miners and state militia battalions.2
By necessity, the Yosemite developed an accommodating
relationship with nearby mining camps in the mid 1850s, and a
number of Indians started to work for individual argonauts or
panned gold for themselves.3 Yosemite Valley lay outside the
purview of most mining interests, however, and the Indians preserved a degree of distance and autonomy from neighboring
white society that few native groups in the gold country could
ever hope for. Consequently, Yosemite became something of a
cultural island and, as it had been for centuries, remained an
important place for hunting, harvestingvariousfood and medicinal plants, and served as the locale for important religious celebrations. While only a few Indians remained in the valley yearround during these years, most spent the winter months in the
lower country to the west with a few hundred returning to Yosemite each year. In the spring of 1857, for instance, an early
hotelier observed that an especially “largeband of Indians”had
come to the valley “on account of a bounteous acorn crop the
preceding fall.”4A few weeks later, a Belgian gold miner familiar
with the Yosemite region probably encountered the same group
of Indians, which numbered about a hundred, when he noted
that a large encampment he encountered three years earlier had
moved further up the Merced River into the valley.5Yosemite
Indians still lit purposeful fires in the valley in the early 1860s,
and TheIndian Warof 1851,
2. LafayetteH. Bunnell, Discoveryof the Yosemite,
WhichLedto thatEvent(Chicago,1880);CarlP.Russell,OneHundredYearsin Yosemite:
The Storyof a GreatParkand Its Friends(Yosemite, 1957), 36-48; Alfred Runte,
TheEmbattled
Yosemite:
Wilderness
(Lincoln, 1990), 10-12;CraigD. Batesand Martha
Lake
Lee, Traditionand Innovation:A BasketHistoryof theIndiansof theYosemite-Mono
Area(Yosemite, 1991), 26-27. This last book includes the best availablehistory of
the YosemiteIndians.
3. See Jean-NicholasPerlot, GoldSeeker:
Adventures
of a BelgianArgonautduring
the GoldRush Years,translated by Helen Harding Bretnor, edited by Howard R.
Lamar (New Haven, 1985), 228. For a general account of CaliforniaIndians working in the gold country, see JamesJ. Rawls,”GoldDiggers:Indian Miners in the
CaliforniaGold Rush,”CaliforniaHistoricalQuarterly,
LV (1976), 28-48; and Albert
Frontier(New Haven, 1988), 100-117.
Hurtado, Indian Survivalon theCalifornia
4. James M. Hutchings, In theHeartof theSierras(Oakland, 1886), 100.
5. Perlot, GoldSeeker,
294.
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Pacific Historical Review
and one traveler observed that they had started so many small
fires for the purpose of “clearingthe ground, the more readily to
obtain their winter supply of acorns and wild sweet potato root,’
that the fire-glow could be seen from miles away.6
While the gold rush took a severe toll on the Indians of the
central Sierra Nevada, native inhabitants still greatly outnumbered European and American visitors to Yosemite Valley until
the early 1860s. Between 1855, when the first pleasure-seeking
tourists visited Yosemite, and 1863, only 406 visitors entered the
valley. As Yosemite’s fame grew and travel became less arduous,
however, visitation increased exponentially thereafter. In 1864,
the year that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite
Park Act, Yosemite received 147 visitors, but this figure more
than doubled the following year and soon rose above 1,100 with
the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.7 Along
with increasing numbers of visitors, tourist facilities rapidly expanded as early concessionaires built new hotels, planted orchards and vegetable gardens, plowed and fenced hay fields,
blazed trails, and constructed roads.8Between 1874, when Yosemite received 2,711 tourists, and 1875, the Big Oak Flat Road,
the Coulterville Road, and the WawonaRoad opened to wagon
traffic for the first time, bringing wagon loads of supplies and
coaches full of tourists to the valley on a regular basis.9
Despite the dramatic increases in visitation, Indians in Yosemite Valley remained on fairlygood terms with their new neighbors and found in the growing tourist industry a means by which
they could both earn a livelihood within their rapidly changing
world and remain in their ancestral home. A number of small
Indian communities in the Sierra foothills made similar adjustments to the changes wrought by growing white settlements, but
these so-called rancheriasgenerally persisted only as very small
communities of a few families. The Indian population of Yosemite actually grew as tourism increased, however, and a number
6. I. W. Baxley, What I Saw on the WestCoast of South and North America and the
Hawaiian Islands (New York, 1865), 467.
7. Hutchings, In the Heart of the Sierras, 130.
8. Runte, Yosemite,
51-54.
9. Hutchings, In the Heart of the Sierras, 130; Bates and Lee, Tradition and
Innovation, 31.
Dispossessing the Wilderness
of dislocated groups returned to the area to seek employment
during the spring and summer tourist season.10
How one defines a Yosemite Indian has long proven difficult
for anthropologists and park officials, but the group most closely
associated with Yosemite Valley at the time of the park’s establishment was the Ahwahneechee. Part of a larger cultural and linguistic group called the Southern Sierra Miwok, the Ahwahneechee frequently traded and intermarried with other Miwok
tribes as well as Mono-Paiutes from the eastern side of the Sierra
Nevada. Yokuts from the Central Valley, and even some former
mission Indians from the coast, also mixed in with the Ahwahneechee before the 1850s to create a complex Yosemite Indian
culture.11 Such cultural blending, or ethnogenesis, was common
among pre-contact tribes, but became especially pronounced
when various native groups struggled to survive the impact of
American settlements. L. H. Bunnell, one of the first whites to
see Yosemite Valley during the militia campaigns of 1851 and
1852, clearly recognized these processes at work when he referred to the ‘YoSemite Indians [as] a composite race, consisting
of the disaffected of the various tribes from the Tuolumne to
King’s River.”12The processes of cultural blending did not cease
with the end of the gold rush, however, and Yosemite Indian
culture continued to evolve in the decades following the establishment of Yosemite Park. Borrowing items and practices from
surrounding American and Mexican communities, and combining the traditions of various Indian groups, the Yosemite con10. KarenP.Wellsand CraigD. Bates, “Ethnohistoryand MaterialCultureof
Southern Sierra Miwok:1852-1880’ unpublished essay in the YosemiteNational
ParkResearch Library(hereafter YNPRL);C. E.. Kelsey,Censusof Non-Reservation
CaliforniaIndians,1905-1906, edited by RobertHeizer (Berkeley,1971); SamuelA.
Barrett and EdwardW. Gifford, “MiwokMaterial Culture: Bulletinof the Public
Museum of the Cityof Milwaukee,II (1933), 117-376; James Gary Maniery, Six Mile and
Murphy’sRancherias: An Ethnohistoricaland ArchaeologicalStudy of Two CentralSierra
Miwok Village Sites (San Diego, 1987); Eugene L. Conrotto, MiwokMeans People:The
Life and Fate of the Native Inhabitants of the Gold Rush Country (Fresno, 1973). The
WashoIndiansof the LakeTahoe area made similaradaptationsto agriculturaland
mining developments in their homeland.James E Downs, TwoWorldsof the Washo:
An Indian Tribeof California and Nevada (New York, 1966).
11. Bates and Lee, Traditionand Innovation, 23, 25-26.
12. LafayetteH. Bunnell, from a letter quoted in “The Yo-Ham-i-teValley,’
Hutchings’ California Magazine, I (1856), 7.
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Pacific Historical Review
stantly adapted to new conditions and managed to remain a
distinct and viable community within a rapidly changing
world.13
Although they retained a fair amount of their traditional
lifeways, the Yosemite became further integrated into the tourist
economy as more and more visitors arrived in the valley. Increasingly, the Indians’ presence in Yosemite depended upon their
ability to gain employment from hoteliers and concessionaires.
Indian men found work chopping wood and putting up hay,
labored about the hotels, served as guides, drove sight-seeing
wagons, and often provided large private parties with fish and
game.14 The Yosemite succeeded especially well at supplying fish
to tourist parties who, as many sportsmen reported, almost never
had any luck fishing. As one early visitor noted, “trout are abundant in some of the streams, but they are very shy of the hook.
The Indians catch them in traps, and frequently supply travelers
at twenty-five cents per pound'”15 Yosemite women often worked
in the private homes of concessionaires as domestics, and in the
hotels they often found work as maids or washerwomen.16
13. Cultural Systems Research, Inc. (hereafter CSRI), Petitionto the Government
of the United Statesfrom the American Indian Council of Mariposa Countyfor Acknowledgment as the YosemiteIndian Tribe (Menlo Park, Calif., 1984); Wells and Bates,
“Ethnohistory and Material Culture”; Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California
Frontier.Efforts by park officials and scholars to define “true” Yosemite Indians as
directly descended from the Ahwahneechee have always been flawed since such a
definition implies that a static Ahwahneechee culture once existed and then
perished when change arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. In much the same
way that the Puritans of the seventeenth century are gone, one could claim that the
Ahwahneechee of the early 1800s no longer exist. Butjust as there have been New
Englanders for nearly five centuries, so too have there been Yosemite Indians since
the last Ice Age. Though much different than even two generations ago, the
Yosemite Indians remain a distinct and dynamic cultural group today, with close ties
to Yosemite Valley and the surrounding area.
14. See,J. F Campbell, My CircularNotes:ExtractsfromJournals, LettersSent Home,
Geologicaland OtherNotes WrittenWhileTravelingWestwardsRound the WbrldfromJuly 6,
1874-July 6, 1875 (London, 1876), 79; Charles Carleton Coffin, Our New WayRound
the Vbrld(Boston, 1869), 478; Samuel Kneeland, The Ubndersof the YosemiteValley,and
of California (Boston, 1872), 52-53; W. W. Ross, 10,000 Miles by Land and Sea
(Toronto, 1876), 180; A. E. Wood, Annual Reportof the Acting Superintendentof the
YosemiteNational Park to the Secretaryof theInterior(Washington, D. C., 1892); Charles
Francis Saunders, Under the Sky in California (New York, 1913), 69.
15. John S. Hittell, Yosemite:Its Wondersand Its Beauties (San Francisco, 1868),
30.
16. Bates and Lee, Traditionand Innovation, 34.
Disposs.ssing the Wilderness
Women and children also picked the wild strawberriesthat grew
in the valley meadows in late summer and sold them to the
hotels, and even as late as 1913 private parties could still occasionally purchase chickens, fresh fish, and wild strawberriesfrom
them.17
Indian employment in Yosemite reflected patterns established throughout the central Sierra Nevada in the years following the gold rush. The massive invasion of miners who poured
over the mountains brutally devastated whole Indian societies
while the environmentaldestructionwrought by mining practices
undermined seasonal hunting and gathering cycles. Severely
weakened and suddenly homeless in their homelands, most of
California’s shrinking Indian population found the means for
survivalonly in close accommodation with whites.18Many Miwok
families and individuals moved to where they could eke out a
living on the margins of white settlements. Though generally
despised and frequentlyhumiliated by whites, their presence was
tolerated whenever Indian labor could not easily be replaced by
Mexican or Chinese workers. A similar situation developed in
Yosemite, but there the Indians got along much better with their
white neighbors since the valley did not attr …
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