The Yosemite Valley is part of the Merced watershed, whereas Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is in Yosemite National Park, is part of the Tuolumne watershed. Ever since its founding, the city of San Francisco has shown a concern for water. With the great earthquake of 1906 and the fires that accompanied the quake, the pressure for an adequate water supply gained ascendency. But even before that event, city managers had looked toward the Sierra watersheds, particularly the Tuolumne River where it flowed through Hetch Hetchy Valley. Like Yosemite Valley, the Hetch Hetchy Valley was glacially formed, with steep walls and magnificent waterfalls. In the wake of the earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco applied to the US Department of the Interior to grant San Francisco water rights to the Hetch Hetchy by damming the Tuolumne River, thus forming a reservoir that would provide water to the city. A seven-year environmental controversy ensued over the question of whether an entity such as a city like San Francisco had the right to use a natural resource extracted from a national park. In 1913 the city won and the dam was built. Several recent books examine the Hetch Hetchy controversy, among them Robert Righter’s The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. Righter starts with a chronology and a “cast of characters” and then provides a detailed account of the historic controversy. According to his introduction, Righter was taken as a child to visit the Pulgas Water Temple, a monument south of San Francisco at the terminus of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, where one can see the end result of the transfer of water from the Tuolumne drainage into the city of San Francisco’s water system. The second book is Dam!: Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park, in which John Simpson devotes considerable space to the history of discovery, settlement, and politics associated with the Yosemite grant of 1864 before describing the Hetch Hetchy conflict. As compared to others, Simpson gives more space to the discovery and early history of Hetch Hetchy Valley. The third book, Hetch Hetchy, by Beverly Hennessey, features multitudes of relevant images accompanied by short snippets of explanatory text. Many of the photos used in this volume are drawn from the archives of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Finally, in Hetch Hetchy and Its Dam Railroad, Ted Wurm tells the “story of the uniquely equipped railroad that serviced the camps, dams, tunnels, and penstocks of the 20-year construction project to bring water from the Sierra to San Francisco,” exactly as announced by the book’s subtitle. The Sierra Club, born in 1892 with Muir as its founding president, was strongly associated from its beginning not only with advocacy for the new national park, but also with conflict over the Hetch Hetchy question. One group of members favored establishment of the dam and reservoir, while another group was opposed, and the controversy split the club for a time.
