In 1847, gold was discovered in the mill tailings of European settler John Sutter’s sawmill, near present-day Sacramento. Word of that find quickly spread, and soon hundreds of prospectors converged on locations in the Sierra Nevada to try their luck. The Yosemite Valley had been occupied for millennia by Indigenous peoples, particularly the mostly peaceful Ahwahnechee, who lived in wickiups and subsisted on a diet of acorns, root vegetables, and deer meat. European mountain men who explored the West in the early nineteenth century may have seen the Yosemite Valley, but the first documentation of the presence of non-Indigenous people dates to 1851, when members of the vengeful Mariposa Battalion attacked the local native population in retaliation for raids against settler mining camps. The mounted battalion rode into the valley, destroyed the dwellings and stores of resident Ahwahnechee, and chased them from the valley. When the militia returned to their nearby camp they brought with them word of the beauty of the remote valley. In his now-classic One Hundred Years in Yosemite, Carl Parcher Russell—who had many roles in Yosemite, starting out as a part-time naturalist, then serving as park superintendent—details these momentous events and subsequent visits to Yosemite, despite the challenge of travelling there, by early tourists. One such tourist was Thomas Starr King, a New England Unitarian Universalist minister and celebrated orator, who in 1860 was called to serve a church in San Francisco. Among King’s many enthusiasms was wilderness travel, and he regularly sent travelogues back to New England newspapers for publication. In A Vacation among the Sierras, published during the 1860s, King describes the Yosemite Valley he saw then. King’s social and political network in California is documented by Charles Wendte (another Unitarian émigré from New England) in Thomas Starr King: Patriot and Preacher. Wendte describes King’s California career and mentions that the clergyman’s circle included both botanist William Brewer, who worked on the initial geological survey of the state (discussed below), and Frederick Law Olmsted, with whom King collaborated in fund-raising efforts to support the Civil War relief work of the United States Sanitary Commission.
In 1863, Frederic Law Olmsted, one of the renowned designers of New York City’s Central Park, left the East Coast and ventured to California to manage the Rancho Las Mariposas, a large landholding owned by explorer and politician John Charles Frémont. In 1864, following Lincoln’s signing of the bill to provide California with land for a park, Olmsted was appointed to the state’s new park commission, doing work that eventually contributed to the establishment of the national park system. While a member of the Yosemite governing body, Olmsted wrote an influential position paper providing advice on the management of Yosemite and expanding on the philosophical idea of parks for the people. In The Power of Scenery, Dennis Drabelle explores Olmsted’s ideas and folds them into a history of the national park system, focusing first on the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1873, then on subsequent developments that resulted in establishment of the US National Park Service in 1916. Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr, in their book Olmsted and Yosemite, examine Olmsted’s professional and political life during the 1860s, revealing how the US Congress and president, once free of the threat that negative votes might be cast by Southern representatives and senators, were able to push through a number of new ventures, one being the bill establishing Yosemite as a reserve. In 1865, Olmsted returned to New York to continue the work he had started earlier on Central Park. The commission ignored his paper but, as noted by Drabelle, Olmsted’s son later used his father’s essay as a tool for lobbying Congress to establish additional national parks and the park service.1 There are a number of biographies of Olmsted, the most recent being Charles Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau’s Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape, which devotes some attention to Olmsted’s California sojourn. Although Frémont had little to do with Yosemite directly, his hiring of Olmsted to manage his Mariposa property and the fact that the Mariposa big trees were included in the act of Congress signed by Lincoln make Steve Inskeep’s Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War well worth noting.
In 1860, Josiah Whitney was appointed head of the new California Geological Survey. Out of that work came his treatise The Yosemite Guide-Book. Whitney believed Yosemite was formed when the floor of the valley sank. This put him in conflict with John Muir, who provided evidence that the valley and much of the topography of the High Sierra were the result of glacial activity. This controversy and a broader history of the Sierra Nevada range is described in the classic book by Francis Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada. The early work of the California Geological Survey is described in a journal kept by William Brewer and eventually edited by Farquhar and published as Up and Down California in 1860–1864. Brewer had served as Whitney’s second-in-command during the first survey. Although his journal covers the total time he was in California, his entries for 1863 and 1864 describe the Yosemite area. Also part of the survey staff was Clarence King, who went on to become head of the US Geological Survey (1879 to 1881). King wrote about his time in California in Mountaineering in Sierra Nevada, which was also edited by Farquhar. Like Brewer, King devotes a chapter to his time in the Yosemite area. Two works on King are worth noting: Thurman Wilkins’s biography Clarence King and James Moore’s more recent King of the 40th Parallel.
One of the first to exploit Yosemite as a tourist destination was James Mason Hutchings, who first entered the valley in 1855. His relationship to Yosemite is told by Jen Huntley in The Making of Yosemite. Accompanying Hutchings was artist Thomas Ayres, whose paintings of Yosemite Valley appeared in California Monthly (owned by Hutchings) and were the first published images of Yosemite. Dennis Kruska tells the story of Ayres’s paintings in Thomas Almond Ayres: First Artist of Yosemite (1818–1859). Hutchings later established a hotel in the valley, and one of his first employees was John Muir. It was Hutchings’s articles in his own magazine that attracted many early tourists to Yosemite. When the land grant was made law in 1864, Hutchings brought suit to maintain ownership of his holdings, a suit that went to the US Supreme Court, where Hutchings lost his case. Hutchings has since been maligned by many authors, and Huntley maintains, in her Hutchings biography, that Hutchings fell into disfavor because of his suit against the federal government and that he actually deserves as much credit for the protection of Yosemite as is conventionally given to John Muir.
There are many books that describe the establishment and early functioning of Yosemite. One of the best is by independent scholar Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness, which has seen several editions. Runte also published National Parks: The American Experience, which includes information on Yosemite, and he coauthored, with Richard Orsi and Marlene Smith-Baranzini, Yosemite and Sequoia: A Century of California National Parks, which is important for its complete chronology of the two parks. Dayton Duncan (a screenwriter closely associated with the Ken Burns television series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea 2) covers similar territory in his Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea. Also valuable is Margaret Sanborn’s Yosemite: Its Discovery, Its Wonders & Its People.
Given that Yosemite was established as a state reserve in 1864 and Yellowstone as a national park in 1873, readers may wonder how these lands were managed before the official start of the National Park Service in 1916. Although Yosemite had its state commission and Yellowstone an unpaid superintendent, the depredations of tourists, loggers, and sheepherding in Yosemite and of illegal hunting, possible mines, and railroads in Yellowstone bespeak a lack of suitable management. In Nature’s Army: When Soldiers Fought for Yosemite, Harvey Meyerson and Beth Bailey describe how both parks were saved by the “old army,” i.e., the pre-khaki army of blue uniforms and yellow scarves in the pre- and post-Civil War periods. Wherever their posts were located this army provided vital infrastructure, including roads, weather forecasts, communications, food, and protection from autochthonous inhabitants. In 1890, cavalry troops from Arizona were reassigned to the Presidio in San Francisco with the duty to provide these functions for Yosemite National Park. From then until the establishment of the park service in 1916, the Yosemite superintendent was an army officer. The troops chased shepherds out of the park, did boundary and topographic surveys, and provided stable management for the park.
1. Alfred Runte writes about the Olmsteds, father and son, in “Biographical Portrait: Frederick Law Olmsted S. (1822–1903) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870–1957),” published in Forest History Today in 2017. PDF copy freely available at https://foresthistory.org/periodicals/spring-2017/.
2. The National Parks: America’s Best Idea [documentary series, 6 episodes, 2 hrs.]. Directed by Ken Burns. 2009. Available by subscription at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1464482/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm.
History of the Sierra Nevada, Revised and Updated by 
