For Land’s Sake: Preserving the Land and Evicting the Man
Part of America’s vision to preserve the wilderness meant “civilizing” those who utilized it for thousands of years. Although Native Americans manipulated the land, nothing they did rivaled the destruction from miners and settlers. Indians roamed America’s wild places for thousands of years without unleashing a wave of irreparable destruction. Miners in the Gold Rush jammed rivers and streams with giant dredgers, and used explosives to mine underground and demolish hillsides. The Yosemite Indian tribes shaped the land through controlled undergrowth burning, planting acorn trees for diet, and through sustainable predation of game. These practices ensured rich bio-diversity and species balance.[1]
Conservationists and preservationists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century disagreed about how to manage natural resources. John Muir valued nature for its spiritual and transcendental qualities while Gifford Pinchot argued for using the wilderness for long-term sustainable commercial use. Both beliefs, however, did not see Native Americans as part of the romanticism of nature. To Muir, the holy temple of nature was threatened by Indians. Muir did oppose the oppression of the Miwoks in Yosemite, but he also considered them to be a lazy, dirty people. It seemed that Muir felt more empathy for the wild animals than man. In 1901, Muir wrote, “Bears are a peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour. Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”[2]
Every National Park has its own story just as each Native American tribe has its tale. For many years, the NPS reports rarely mentioned Indians, but they were not invisible. Indian displacement in Yellowstone was based on peace treaties while Yosemite violently displaced its inhabitants. In each case the tribes lost nearly all of their aboriginal use. In the great battle to protect the land the National Parks won, but in some instances, not without a fight.
Yellowstone National Park
Before Yellowstone became the first National Park in 1872, the four great tribes of Yellowstone territory hunted, prayed, and traversed the park annually, although few dared to live near the “Evil Spirit” who roamed among the geysers and hot springs.[3] This old yarn remained a belief among tourists and park administrators. The myth that Indians were fearful of the superstitious geysers were fueled in Yellowstone guidebooks. This belief helped justify the exclusion of Indians in national parks. Yellowstone was not only living and hunting ground for the four great tribes, but also a sacred place for vision quests and medicinal purposes. It was an ideal resource for drying food, preparing sweat lodges, and soaking in hot springs for nearly 11,500 years.[4]
The Tukudeka, or Sheep Eaters, a small band of the Shoshones, were permanent dwellers in the northern, eastern, and the southern regions of Yellowstone.[5] The Crows, or Absaroka, resided east of Yellowstone, near the Big Horn Valley and mountains. The Blackfeet, enemies of the whites and Crows, lived in the Glacier Park region in northern Idaho and Montana. The Bannocks lived in what is now Idaho and crossed Yellowstone every summer to reach buffalo country.[6] The Bannock trail was a two-hundred mile trek that began in Idaho’s Camas Meadows, crossed the Madison River Valley, and crossed the Gallatin Range. From there, it crossed the Yellowstone River and climbed into the Absaroka Mountains, ending in the buffalo plains near the Shoshone and Clark Fork rivers. Other, scattered bands relied on Yellowstone land were the Lakota, Nez Percé, Flathead, and Umatilla.
By 1837, smallpox greatly reduced the number of Indians living in Yellowstone. Both the Mountain Crow and the Eastern Shoshone had a population of eight thousand before the epidemics of the eighteenth century, and both tribes declined to nearly two thousand by the 1870s.[7] This, coupled with the higher elevations of the park which deterred many tribes from living there year-round, gave an illusion of vacant wilderness.[8] Hiram Martin Chittenden, leading historian of the American West and engineer in Yellowstone in 1891, stated that “It was singular fact in the history of the Yellowstone National Park that there was no knowledge of that country seems to have been derived from the Indians.” Chittenden propagated the myth that Indians were afraid of the geysers. In his book, The Yellowstone National Park, he wrote, “The explanation ordinarily advanced is that the Indians had a supernatural fear of the geyser regions and always avoided them.”[9] Osborne Russell wrote about his encounter with the Sheep Eaters in his 1914 book, The Journal of a Trapper, 1834-1843: “Here we found a few Snake Indians comprising 6 men 7 women and 8 or 10 children who were the only inhabitants of this lonely place and secluded spot.” Philetus W. Norris, the second Superintendent of Yellowstone, considered the Sheep Eaters a harmless pygmy tribe, but nevertheless, acknowledged that they did reside in Yellowstone.[10] He, too, believed the Indians feared the geysers. Norris claimed that tribes stayed away from the geysers because of a “superstitious awe concerning the rumbling and hissing sulfur fumes of the spouting geysers and other hot springs, which they imagined to be he wails and groans of departed Indian warriors who were suffering punishment for their early sins.”[11]
Norris wrote about the retreat of the Nez Percé in his Annual Reports of the Superintendents of Yellowstone. “The Nez Percé have acquired sufficient civilization and Christianity to at least overpower their pagan superstitious fear of earthly fire-hole basins and brimstone pits.”[12] Hunts to Die, a Mountain Crow born in 1838, refuted these claims. His people called the great geysers Bide-Mahpe, meaning “sacred,” or “powerful” water.[13] The relationship between the Crow and the geo-thermal basins was spiritual. Indians who went there to fast saw “strange beings,” but there was no fear.
Indians had many enemies: diseases, enemy tribes, mining encroachment, broken treaties, and the railroads. Between 1851 and 1868, the Blackfoot, Crow, and Shoshone negotiated treaties with the United States Federal Government which initially allowed the tribes to continue hunting on the federal land. But in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, Crow Country became three/fourths of its original size, located in what was to become Yellowstone National Park.[14] The Treaty defined territory for tribal groups and it permitted travelers and railroad workers on the Platte River Road, a popular emigrant trail. The Crows were left with 115,000 acres in the easternmost region of Yellowstone, while the U.S. government kept 1.7 million acres.[15] The Crow finally accepted the deal, but in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, they gave up all of their Wyoming land and lost all territory north of the Yellowstone river and east of 107th meridian.[16] Sits in the Middle of the Land was sorry to end up with eight million acres out of their original forty-six million. The first Fort Laramie treaty caused the Teton Sioux to intensify military pressure on the Crow.[17] Blackfoot raiders also wreaked havoc on Crow tribes, who were displaced near trading posts, which were common targets.[18] There was so much intertribal fighting that the American Fur Company closed Fort Sarpy which forced the Crows to travel to Fort Union along the upper Missouri.
In 1872, the Crow distanced itself from disease prevalent among the Gros Ventra tribes along the Milk River, and the enemy Sioux tribes. The “Montana Strip,” the small part of land remaining under Crow territory, was all that was left for the Crow to cling to. An 1882 agreement extinguished Crow rights to the remaining segment of the park north of the 45-degree latitude and east of the Yellowstone River.
The last enemy was the final stroke. The Northern Pacific railroad entered into the scene and railroad promoters persuaded the federal government to ban Native Americans from the park, and they were successful.[19] In arrogant fashion, the Northern Pacific railroad invited the Crow to the last spike ceremony, to celebrate Indian loss, with requests to dress in full regalia. Their dance at Gray Cliff was symbolic “of the loss to all Indians of Yellowstone.”[20] Crow leader Iron Bull, second in rank to Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land, was assigned to hand the last spike to Henry Villard, president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. After handing over the spike, he addressed the crowd:
“This is the last of it. This is the last thing for me to do. I am glad to see you here, and hope my people of the Crow nation are glad to see you, too. There is a meeting in my part of the ceremony, and I understand it. The end of our lives is near at hand. The days of my people are almost numbered; already they are dropping off like the rays of sunlight in the western sky. Of our once powerful nation there are now few left—just a little handful, and we, too, will soon be gone.”[21]
In 1891 the Montana and the Wyoming Railroad Company laid rails across the remaining Crow country.
Yellowstone Park Superintendent Norris thought the Indians were an annoyance to the park and blamed them for low tourist turn-outs. He was able to relocate the Sheep Eaters to Fort Hall and the Wind River Reservations. After an 1877 Nez Percé incident, Norris decreed that all Indians must leave Yellowstone. He declared, “Yellowstone is not Indian country and no natives lived in the park, any that did were ‘harmless hermits.’”[22] Yellowstone was signed away by treaties even though many of tribes never participate in the signing. For example, the equestrian Shoshone never negotiated with the United States, but the treaties defined the northern and eastern boundaries of the Park upon their removal.[23] The Eastern Shoshone gave up their land and moved to reservations near Wind River Valley. But two-hundred Sheep Eaters initially refused to leave the park, as they never met to negotiate the treaties, but were inevitably escorted out. Another Reservation was set up for the Northern Shoshone, Bannocks, and Sheep Eaters on the Lemhi River in 1875. After the territory became a National Park in 1872, Indians were allowed to return, for the tourist’s amusement.[24]
Celebrating the spirit of the American West, Yellowstone National Park created Buffalo Bill-style entertainment. Indians were hired to perform in a spectacle that illustrated how the cowboys conquered them. Capitalism and conservation met head to head in Yellowstone. Tourists drove to the National Parks to be with nature, but it was a sanitized nature, according to some scholars. Indians were replaced by bears who tourists could feed out of their car windows, and the painted artworks of the natural wonders told only one version of Yellowstone- the romantic notion that wildlife did not include displacing Indians.[25]
Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation is 2.2 million acres, the third-largest in total size of all reservations in the United States. The Northern Arapaho arrived after the Eastern Shoshone on a temporary basis, en route to a promised reservation in Idaho. But the new reservation was never established, and the two tribes now jointly administer the area.
Yosemite National Park
By the late nineteenth century, most of the tribes near Yosemite National Park had negotiated treaties, but it took a small army to conquer the Ahwahneechees. Sparked by the California Gold Rush, the sudden influx of ‘forty-niners’ ended in Indian genocides. Between 1848 to 1855, over half a million people travelled to the Sierra Foothills in search of their fortune. Indians who occupied what is now Yosemite National Park did not go down without a fight. Their story is one of tragedy and oppression, but also of pride. Major James Savage and the Mariposa Battalion were called to Southern California to settle disputes between miners and Indians. They marched into the Valley and “discovered” Yosemite in 1851. The Indians had been calling the Valley Ahwahnee, or gaping mouth-like place, for nearly six thousand years.[26] The Ahwahneechees, part of the Southern Sierra Miwok family, were given the name “Yosemites” by the soldiers, who not only found it easier to pronounce, but also because of the murderous reputation of the tribe. Yosemite means literally “those who kill.” (Yos, “to kill,” the modifier e, “one who,” and the plural suffix -meti).[27]
On an early winter morning in 1850, two of Major Savage’s men ambushed a group of Ahwahneechee hunters. Chief Tenaya anxiously preformed the Cry Ceremony, a five-night tradition honoring the dead, while deciding his next move. White men were not a new concept for the chief and his people. Tenaya had seen them in Mono country and they had all been friendly. He heard of missionaries who brought gifts, different methods to grow food, and strange stories of other worlds.[28] He also heard of deceptive white men, who brought disease and violence. Tenaya knew little about Major Savage: That he bought multiple Indian wives from the Nootchoo, Pohonochees, Eekino, and Homut and treated them like servants, and that he frightened away the game. Tenaya had to make a decision: fight the white men or retreat to reservations. He remembered the fate of his neighbors: Located on the Western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, the Chumash Indians planned revenge on Spanish and Mexicans who invaded their ancestral land. When invaders heard of their plan to kill them, they rode to the Chumash villages, killing their children and burning their dwellings. When the fighting was nearly over, forty women and children, starved and weary, took shelter on a mountaintop. Surrounded by invaders who told them to jump or be shot, the Chumash held hands, sang their last Cry song, and jumped. Tenaya was likely remembering the Chumash massacre in 1769 by Spanish soldiers who executed hundreds of thousands of Indians.[29] This memory caused immediate distrust among neighboring tribes.
Tenaya realized his people could not ride horses and their arrows were inferior to the invader’s guns. Fearing a massacre would occur to his own people, the Yosemites fled to the Ahwahnee caves where they waited for their chief to decide their fate.
Major Savage was legendry among miners and Indians. With blonde hair and blue eyes, he was called the White Chief, the Blonde King, and the White Father. He traveled south, settled among various Indians tribes, and earned the trust of José and Jesus, two of the most powerful chiefs in the valley of the San Joaquin.[30] He was elected chief of several of the tribes and often tried to resolve feuds between miners and Indians. Savage, who mined for gold himself, began paying Indians to do his “diggins” and paid them with knives, blankets, and provisions. When Savage realized he may be threatened by an Indian attack, he invited Indians from various tribes to meet with him. He warned them:
“I know that some of the Indians do not wish to be friends with the white men and that they are trying to unite the different tribes for the purpose of a war. It is better for the Indians and white men to be friends. If the Indians make war on the white men, every tribe will be exterminated; not one will be left. I have just been where the white men are more numerous than the wasps and ants; and if war is made and the Americans are aroused to anger, every Indian engaged in the war will be killed before the whites will be satisfied.”[31] Savage was worried about the Indian wars, especially if it affected his business.
He warned the Yosemites, who refused to work for him, “Tell them they must come down to the government reservations that are ready for them. They will no longer know hunger … the land is no longer theirs.”[32] Tenaya allowed his people to accept defeat and move to the San Joaquin Valley reservations, but as for himself, he would stay and fight. That evening, Tenaya looked into his daughter’s eyes and cried, “A new blackness, a new destruction threatens the Ahwahneechees.” As the people left their ancestral lands he called out, “We will not go down. May the peace of our mountains go with you.”[33] Tenaya and those who chose to fight, retreated into the mountains.
Major Savage captured Tenaya’s sons, Till, Seethkil, and Latta, but Latta escaped and found his way to his father in the mountains. While climbing to capture Tenaya, a boulder fell onto a guard’s head, killing him. This accident proved to be fatal for Tenaya as well. Meanwhile, a guard named Chic Walker grew angry watching Seethkil and Till try to untie themselves. He ordered the boys to run away, with the understanding that he would try to shoot them as they ran. Sprinting toward their freedom, Walker shot Tenaya’s youngest son in the back. Then he proudly sneered, “If the bag of shot hadn’t a bin on the muzzle I’d a gotten the other one, too. I gave ‘em a fair chance to run away.”[34] Dr. Lafayette of the Mariposa Battalion tried to offer help but it was too late.
Late in the afternoon of March 27, 1851, Savage chased Tenaya into the mountains to Old Inspiration Point, and from this spot across from Majestic El Capitan, Savage “discovered” the Yosemite Valley. On July 1, 1851, the Mariposa Battalion was mustered out and the fight was over. Savage returned to cattle ranching and trading operations on the Fresno River near Coarse Gold, only to be shot and killed one month later by Major Harvey, who took offence to some of Savage’s strong words. [35] His enemies believed he was a liar who exploited the Indians but his friends were inconsolable at the news of his death. In a September 4th, 1852 Daily Herald, it said, “He could do more to keep the Indians in subjection than all the forces Uncle Sam could send here. Some of them reached the scene of the tragedy soon after it occurred … They clung to his body, and swore they would die with their father.”[36]
Chief Tenaya outlived Major Savage, but he grieved for his son. He grieved for the land. He was a broken man, led around on a rope. In his last plea to the captain before his murder, he begged:
“Captain, kill me, as you have killed my Seethkil, letting him run, and then shooting him in the back, with no way to defend himself. Then the Captain will have the dear land of Ahwahnee free of its rightful possessors: The people who know and love it. Destroy all of the people, for that seems to be your wish. With your guns, your horses, and your many men, you can take whatever you want and the people cannot stop you. All the people will die. When I die, my spirit will make trouble for the Captain, his Great Father government and all of their people. You may destroy me, but you cannot destroy the spirit of the old chief and his Ahwhaneechees. They will return to Ahwahnee. Their spirits will be in the rocks, the waterfalls, the trees, animals, and in the very pohonos, the cool, puffy winds that blow across and drive in cold blasts of ice crystals. You may kill us, but our spirits will never leave our home. Our spirits will follow in your footsteps.”[37]
Dr. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion, who had tried to help Seethkil, wrote about his march through the scenic Sierra Nevada Mountains in his book, Discovery of Yosemite: An Indian War of 1851. Although Dr. Bunnell bragged about his murder sprees, he also acknowledged the unlucky fate of the Indians. “As for myself, I freely confess that my feelings of hostility against the Indians was overcome by a sense of exaltation; and although I had suffered losses of property and friends, the natural right of the Indians to their inheritance forced itself upon my mind.”[38]
Major Savage incorrectly believed that Yosemite meant grizzly bear, named for the “lawless and predatory character of Chief Tenaya’s band,” wrote Dr. Bunnell. Dr. Bunnell suggested naming the Valley “Yosemite” as a tribute to Tenaya’s people. He wrote, “the name of the tribe of Indians which we met leaving their homes, perhaps never to return, would be perpetuated.”[39] He did not know that Tenaya never wanted the Valley named after him. After this time, two conflicting stories emerged. According to Dr. Bunnell, the Ahwahneechees were allowed to return to their Valley in 1853, but peace was short lived. A few young Ahwahneechees stole horses from the nearby Mono Indians and in an act of revenge, were mostly killed, including Chief Tenaya. Dr. Bunnell wrote from second and third-hand accounts. Tenaya’s granddaughter, Totuya, challenged his story. Totuya remembered returning to the Valley after her grandfather died playing a round of hand game, popular among Native Americans. After an argument broke out while playing the game, Tenaya and five other Ahwahneechees were stoned to death. Their bodies were cremated and scattered at Hite’s Cove in Yosemite.[40] Most of the remaining Indians joined neighboring bands like the Monos or the Miwok tribes along the Tuolumne River. The few Indians that stayed relied on white management and lost most of their traditional ways of life.[41]
A new era of tourism arose in Yosemite. If the tourists were looking for Ahwahneechees, they could look no further than the park, as many of the Indians worked as tour guides or sold crafts. More Indians were employed as the tourism economy grew, working as wood choppers, sight-seeing wagon drivers, and especially as fishermen for unlucky sportsmen.[42] Other Miwok families eked out a living by gathering strawberries or working as domestics. Many early tourists had a great interest in Indians and, due to railroad advertisements, attached the idea of wilderness with Indians. James Hutchings, an early park promoter, advertised the park as well as the natives. He pitched the camp as a place to see “real Indians in their natural environment.”[43]
In 1916, the National Park Service created a new tourist attraction: Indian Field Days. The NPS staff held this annual event in order to "revive and maintain interest of Indians in their own games and industries, particularly basketry and bead work."[44] Accuracy of the event was not considered, and Yosemite Indians were instructed to wear regalia from the Great Plains Indians. Their culture slowly eroded while their umuchas, or traditional conical cedar bark houses, were replaced with tipis and braided rabbit skins were replaced with wools and quilts.[45] Indians participated in parades, rodeos, and bareback horse races. In Spence's words, "the Field Days often degenerated into little more than an excuse for tourists and park officials to pose in buckskin and feathered headdress." Indian Field Days continued into the 1920's.
Only 406 tourists traveled to Yosemite the first decade, beginning in 1855, but by the time President Lincoln signed the Yosemite Park Act in 1864, as well as the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the figure rose to 1,100 tourists per year.[46] After tourists complained about the “unsightly poverty of the native houses” park superintendent Charles Thompson explained to the Indians that it was a privilege, not a right, to remain at Yosemite. He ruled that if anyone was unable to find work in the winter months, they would be evicted.[47] Thompson’s plan to clean up native “eye sores” was not confined to their dwellings. Thompson believed their removal would “break them up as a racial unit and, in time, to diffuse their blood with the great American mass.”[48] According to Thomas, as well as the Yosemite Board of Expert Advisers, “Indian residence in the Valley depended less on ancestry and more on usefulness to the community.”[49] And while fewer Yosemites found park employment, greater numbers moved out of the valley to Mariposa county. By 1940, the remaining Yosemite natives were only half the population they once were. Conditions worsened, regulations tightened, and by 1969, the last residents relocated to government housing and the Indian Village “vanished into flames” for a fire fighting practice session.[50]
The last remaining survivor of Ahwahnee (Yosemite) was Totuya (Foaming Water), who was born in the 1840s. She was only ten when her and two-hundred Ahwahneechees retreated from their home under Major Savage. Totuya married a fellow Yosemite refugee but her husband and their four sons passed away. She married a Mexican miner and bore three daughters. During her last days in 1929, she returned to Yosemite where tourists watched her shell acorns. When one tourist offered her a nickel, she pushed him away and cried, “No! Not five dollars one acorn, no! White man drive my people out—my Yosemite.”[51] The last link to the tribes of Yosemite died April 20, 1931.
[1] Stephen Corry, “The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks,” in Truth-Out.org, , August 25, 2015, accessed March 5, 2017 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32487-the-colonial-origins-of-conservation-the-disturbing-history-behind-us-national-parks
[2] John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1901), 32.
[3] NPS. “Look! Real Indians!” NPS Park History. Last modified September 2004. Accessed January 21, 2017. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/albright3/chap6a.htm
[4] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v. 9, 65.
[5] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (U.S.: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55.
[6] NPS, “Look! Real Indians!”
[7] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 49.
[8] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 22.
[9] Eder, An Administrative History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925, 10.
[10] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v. 9.
[11] Keller, American Indians and National Parks, 24.
[12] Annual Reports of the Superintendents of Yellowstone Report 842.
[13] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 56.
[14] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 59.
[15] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks, 22.
[16] Peter Nabokov, Lawrence L. Loendorf, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 62.
[17] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 39.
[18] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 61.
[19] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v.
[20] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 66.
[21] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 67.
[22] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks, 23.
[23] Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 50.
[24] Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 52.
[25] Norman K. Denzin, Searching for Yellowstone: Race, Gender, Family and Memory in the Postmodern West, (New York: Left Coast Press, 2016), 145.
[26] Julian Brave, “The Forgotten History of ‘Violent Displacement’ that Helped Create the National Parks.” The Huffington Post, August 26, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/national-park-service-anniversary-indigenous-people_us_55dcdd7ce4b0a40aa3ac9998.
[27] Daniel E. Anderson, Origin of the Word Yosemite. Yosemite Library. http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html
[28] Allan Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya (Billings, Montana: Council for Indian Education, 1974,) 16.
[29] PBS.org Assimilation, Relocation, Genocide in Indian County Diaries
[30] Parker, John. History of Merced County, Elliott & Moore, 1881.
[31] Carl P. Russell, One Hundred Years in Yosemite 1947 in Yosemite.ca.us
[32] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 35.
[33] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 37.
[34] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 46.
[35] Find a grave ?? https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=17760824
[36] Carl Parcher Russell, 100 Years in Yosemite: the romantic story of early human affairs in the central Sierra Nevada (California: Stanford University Press, 1931), 44.
[37] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 49.
[38] Bunnell, Discovery of Yosemite: An Indian War of 1851, 31.
[39] Daniel Anderson, “Origin of the Word Yosemite,” Yosemite Online Library, Last updated July 2007, accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html
[40] Ray Jones and Joe Lubow, It Happened in Yosemite National Park: Remarkable Events that Shaped History (Nebraska: Morris Book Publishing, 2010), 14.
[41] Ray Jones, It Happened in Yosemite National Park: Remarkable Events that Shaped History, 14.
[42] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 104.
[43] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 106.
[44]Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, A century of theft from Indians by the National Park Service March 2016 http://www.theecologist.org/essays/2987382/a_century_of_theft_from_indians_by_the_national_park_service.html
[45] Bev Ortiz, It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Berkeley: Heydey Books, 1991), 7.
[46] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 102.
[47] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 122.
[48] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 123.
[49] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 126.
[50] 130.
[51] H.J. Taylor, The Last Survivor (San Francisco: Johnck and Seeger, 1932), 1.
Conservationists and preservationists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century disagreed about how to manage natural resources. John Muir valued nature for its spiritual and transcendental qualities while Gifford Pinchot argued for using the wilderness for long-term sustainable commercial use. Both beliefs, however, did not see Native Americans as part of the romanticism of nature. To Muir, the holy temple of nature was threatened by Indians. Muir did oppose the oppression of the Miwoks in Yosemite, but he also considered them to be a lazy, dirty people. It seemed that Muir felt more empathy for the wild animals than man. In 1901, Muir wrote, “Bears are a peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour. Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”[2]
Every National Park has its own story just as each Native American tribe has its tale. For many years, the NPS reports rarely mentioned Indians, but they were not invisible. Indian displacement in Yellowstone was based on peace treaties while Yosemite violently displaced its inhabitants. In each case the tribes lost nearly all of their aboriginal use. In the great battle to protect the land the National Parks won, but in some instances, not without a fight.
Yellowstone National Park
Before Yellowstone became the first National Park in 1872, the four great tribes of Yellowstone territory hunted, prayed, and traversed the park annually, although few dared to live near the “Evil Spirit” who roamed among the geysers and hot springs.[3] This old yarn remained a belief among tourists and park administrators. The myth that Indians were fearful of the superstitious geysers were fueled in Yellowstone guidebooks. This belief helped justify the exclusion of Indians in national parks. Yellowstone was not only living and hunting ground for the four great tribes, but also a sacred place for vision quests and medicinal purposes. It was an ideal resource for drying food, preparing sweat lodges, and soaking in hot springs for nearly 11,500 years.[4]
The Tukudeka, or Sheep Eaters, a small band of the Shoshones, were permanent dwellers in the northern, eastern, and the southern regions of Yellowstone.[5] The Crows, or Absaroka, resided east of Yellowstone, near the Big Horn Valley and mountains. The Blackfeet, enemies of the whites and Crows, lived in the Glacier Park region in northern Idaho and Montana. The Bannocks lived in what is now Idaho and crossed Yellowstone every summer to reach buffalo country.[6] The Bannock trail was a two-hundred mile trek that began in Idaho’s Camas Meadows, crossed the Madison River Valley, and crossed the Gallatin Range. From there, it crossed the Yellowstone River and climbed into the Absaroka Mountains, ending in the buffalo plains near the Shoshone and Clark Fork rivers. Other, scattered bands relied on Yellowstone land were the Lakota, Nez Percé, Flathead, and Umatilla.
By 1837, smallpox greatly reduced the number of Indians living in Yellowstone. Both the Mountain Crow and the Eastern Shoshone had a population of eight thousand before the epidemics of the eighteenth century, and both tribes declined to nearly two thousand by the 1870s.[7] This, coupled with the higher elevations of the park which deterred many tribes from living there year-round, gave an illusion of vacant wilderness.[8] Hiram Martin Chittenden, leading historian of the American West and engineer in Yellowstone in 1891, stated that “It was singular fact in the history of the Yellowstone National Park that there was no knowledge of that country seems to have been derived from the Indians.” Chittenden propagated the myth that Indians were afraid of the geysers. In his book, The Yellowstone National Park, he wrote, “The explanation ordinarily advanced is that the Indians had a supernatural fear of the geyser regions and always avoided them.”[9] Osborne Russell wrote about his encounter with the Sheep Eaters in his 1914 book, The Journal of a Trapper, 1834-1843: “Here we found a few Snake Indians comprising 6 men 7 women and 8 or 10 children who were the only inhabitants of this lonely place and secluded spot.” Philetus W. Norris, the second Superintendent of Yellowstone, considered the Sheep Eaters a harmless pygmy tribe, but nevertheless, acknowledged that they did reside in Yellowstone.[10] He, too, believed the Indians feared the geysers. Norris claimed that tribes stayed away from the geysers because of a “superstitious awe concerning the rumbling and hissing sulfur fumes of the spouting geysers and other hot springs, which they imagined to be he wails and groans of departed Indian warriors who were suffering punishment for their early sins.”[11]
Norris wrote about the retreat of the Nez Percé in his Annual Reports of the Superintendents of Yellowstone. “The Nez Percé have acquired sufficient civilization and Christianity to at least overpower their pagan superstitious fear of earthly fire-hole basins and brimstone pits.”[12] Hunts to Die, a Mountain Crow born in 1838, refuted these claims. His people called the great geysers Bide-Mahpe, meaning “sacred,” or “powerful” water.[13] The relationship between the Crow and the geo-thermal basins was spiritual. Indians who went there to fast saw “strange beings,” but there was no fear.
Indians had many enemies: diseases, enemy tribes, mining encroachment, broken treaties, and the railroads. Between 1851 and 1868, the Blackfoot, Crow, and Shoshone negotiated treaties with the United States Federal Government which initially allowed the tribes to continue hunting on the federal land. But in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, Crow Country became three/fourths of its original size, located in what was to become Yellowstone National Park.[14] The Treaty defined territory for tribal groups and it permitted travelers and railroad workers on the Platte River Road, a popular emigrant trail. The Crows were left with 115,000 acres in the easternmost region of Yellowstone, while the U.S. government kept 1.7 million acres.[15] The Crow finally accepted the deal, but in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, they gave up all of their Wyoming land and lost all territory north of the Yellowstone river and east of 107th meridian.[16] Sits in the Middle of the Land was sorry to end up with eight million acres out of their original forty-six million. The first Fort Laramie treaty caused the Teton Sioux to intensify military pressure on the Crow.[17] Blackfoot raiders also wreaked havoc on Crow tribes, who were displaced near trading posts, which were common targets.[18] There was so much intertribal fighting that the American Fur Company closed Fort Sarpy which forced the Crows to travel to Fort Union along the upper Missouri.
In 1872, the Crow distanced itself from disease prevalent among the Gros Ventra tribes along the Milk River, and the enemy Sioux tribes. The “Montana Strip,” the small part of land remaining under Crow territory, was all that was left for the Crow to cling to. An 1882 agreement extinguished Crow rights to the remaining segment of the park north of the 45-degree latitude and east of the Yellowstone River.
The last enemy was the final stroke. The Northern Pacific railroad entered into the scene and railroad promoters persuaded the federal government to ban Native Americans from the park, and they were successful.[19] In arrogant fashion, the Northern Pacific railroad invited the Crow to the last spike ceremony, to celebrate Indian loss, with requests to dress in full regalia. Their dance at Gray Cliff was symbolic “of the loss to all Indians of Yellowstone.”[20] Crow leader Iron Bull, second in rank to Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land, was assigned to hand the last spike to Henry Villard, president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. After handing over the spike, he addressed the crowd:
“This is the last of it. This is the last thing for me to do. I am glad to see you here, and hope my people of the Crow nation are glad to see you, too. There is a meeting in my part of the ceremony, and I understand it. The end of our lives is near at hand. The days of my people are almost numbered; already they are dropping off like the rays of sunlight in the western sky. Of our once powerful nation there are now few left—just a little handful, and we, too, will soon be gone.”[21]
In 1891 the Montana and the Wyoming Railroad Company laid rails across the remaining Crow country.
Yellowstone Park Superintendent Norris thought the Indians were an annoyance to the park and blamed them for low tourist turn-outs. He was able to relocate the Sheep Eaters to Fort Hall and the Wind River Reservations. After an 1877 Nez Percé incident, Norris decreed that all Indians must leave Yellowstone. He declared, “Yellowstone is not Indian country and no natives lived in the park, any that did were ‘harmless hermits.’”[22] Yellowstone was signed away by treaties even though many of tribes never participate in the signing. For example, the equestrian Shoshone never negotiated with the United States, but the treaties defined the northern and eastern boundaries of the Park upon their removal.[23] The Eastern Shoshone gave up their land and moved to reservations near Wind River Valley. But two-hundred Sheep Eaters initially refused to leave the park, as they never met to negotiate the treaties, but were inevitably escorted out. Another Reservation was set up for the Northern Shoshone, Bannocks, and Sheep Eaters on the Lemhi River in 1875. After the territory became a National Park in 1872, Indians were allowed to return, for the tourist’s amusement.[24]
Celebrating the spirit of the American West, Yellowstone National Park created Buffalo Bill-style entertainment. Indians were hired to perform in a spectacle that illustrated how the cowboys conquered them. Capitalism and conservation met head to head in Yellowstone. Tourists drove to the National Parks to be with nature, but it was a sanitized nature, according to some scholars. Indians were replaced by bears who tourists could feed out of their car windows, and the painted artworks of the natural wonders told only one version of Yellowstone- the romantic notion that wildlife did not include displacing Indians.[25]
Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation is 2.2 million acres, the third-largest in total size of all reservations in the United States. The Northern Arapaho arrived after the Eastern Shoshone on a temporary basis, en route to a promised reservation in Idaho. But the new reservation was never established, and the two tribes now jointly administer the area.
Yosemite National Park
By the late nineteenth century, most of the tribes near Yosemite National Park had negotiated treaties, but it took a small army to conquer the Ahwahneechees. Sparked by the California Gold Rush, the sudden influx of ‘forty-niners’ ended in Indian genocides. Between 1848 to 1855, over half a million people travelled to the Sierra Foothills in search of their fortune. Indians who occupied what is now Yosemite National Park did not go down without a fight. Their story is one of tragedy and oppression, but also of pride. Major James Savage and the Mariposa Battalion were called to Southern California to settle disputes between miners and Indians. They marched into the Valley and “discovered” Yosemite in 1851. The Indians had been calling the Valley Ahwahnee, or gaping mouth-like place, for nearly six thousand years.[26] The Ahwahneechees, part of the Southern Sierra Miwok family, were given the name “Yosemites” by the soldiers, who not only found it easier to pronounce, but also because of the murderous reputation of the tribe. Yosemite means literally “those who kill.” (Yos, “to kill,” the modifier e, “one who,” and the plural suffix -meti).[27]
On an early winter morning in 1850, two of Major Savage’s men ambushed a group of Ahwahneechee hunters. Chief Tenaya anxiously preformed the Cry Ceremony, a five-night tradition honoring the dead, while deciding his next move. White men were not a new concept for the chief and his people. Tenaya had seen them in Mono country and they had all been friendly. He heard of missionaries who brought gifts, different methods to grow food, and strange stories of other worlds.[28] He also heard of deceptive white men, who brought disease and violence. Tenaya knew little about Major Savage: That he bought multiple Indian wives from the Nootchoo, Pohonochees, Eekino, and Homut and treated them like servants, and that he frightened away the game. Tenaya had to make a decision: fight the white men or retreat to reservations. He remembered the fate of his neighbors: Located on the Western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, the Chumash Indians planned revenge on Spanish and Mexicans who invaded their ancestral land. When invaders heard of their plan to kill them, they rode to the Chumash villages, killing their children and burning their dwellings. When the fighting was nearly over, forty women and children, starved and weary, took shelter on a mountaintop. Surrounded by invaders who told them to jump or be shot, the Chumash held hands, sang their last Cry song, and jumped. Tenaya was likely remembering the Chumash massacre in 1769 by Spanish soldiers who executed hundreds of thousands of Indians.[29] This memory caused immediate distrust among neighboring tribes.
Tenaya realized his people could not ride horses and their arrows were inferior to the invader’s guns. Fearing a massacre would occur to his own people, the Yosemites fled to the Ahwahnee caves where they waited for their chief to decide their fate.
Major Savage was legendry among miners and Indians. With blonde hair and blue eyes, he was called the White Chief, the Blonde King, and the White Father. He traveled south, settled among various Indians tribes, and earned the trust of José and Jesus, two of the most powerful chiefs in the valley of the San Joaquin.[30] He was elected chief of several of the tribes and often tried to resolve feuds between miners and Indians. Savage, who mined for gold himself, began paying Indians to do his “diggins” and paid them with knives, blankets, and provisions. When Savage realized he may be threatened by an Indian attack, he invited Indians from various tribes to meet with him. He warned them:
“I know that some of the Indians do not wish to be friends with the white men and that they are trying to unite the different tribes for the purpose of a war. It is better for the Indians and white men to be friends. If the Indians make war on the white men, every tribe will be exterminated; not one will be left. I have just been where the white men are more numerous than the wasps and ants; and if war is made and the Americans are aroused to anger, every Indian engaged in the war will be killed before the whites will be satisfied.”[31] Savage was worried about the Indian wars, especially if it affected his business.
He warned the Yosemites, who refused to work for him, “Tell them they must come down to the government reservations that are ready for them. They will no longer know hunger … the land is no longer theirs.”[32] Tenaya allowed his people to accept defeat and move to the San Joaquin Valley reservations, but as for himself, he would stay and fight. That evening, Tenaya looked into his daughter’s eyes and cried, “A new blackness, a new destruction threatens the Ahwahneechees.” As the people left their ancestral lands he called out, “We will not go down. May the peace of our mountains go with you.”[33] Tenaya and those who chose to fight, retreated into the mountains.
Major Savage captured Tenaya’s sons, Till, Seethkil, and Latta, but Latta escaped and found his way to his father in the mountains. While climbing to capture Tenaya, a boulder fell onto a guard’s head, killing him. This accident proved to be fatal for Tenaya as well. Meanwhile, a guard named Chic Walker grew angry watching Seethkil and Till try to untie themselves. He ordered the boys to run away, with the understanding that he would try to shoot them as they ran. Sprinting toward their freedom, Walker shot Tenaya’s youngest son in the back. Then he proudly sneered, “If the bag of shot hadn’t a bin on the muzzle I’d a gotten the other one, too. I gave ‘em a fair chance to run away.”[34] Dr. Lafayette of the Mariposa Battalion tried to offer help but it was too late.
Late in the afternoon of March 27, 1851, Savage chased Tenaya into the mountains to Old Inspiration Point, and from this spot across from Majestic El Capitan, Savage “discovered” the Yosemite Valley. On July 1, 1851, the Mariposa Battalion was mustered out and the fight was over. Savage returned to cattle ranching and trading operations on the Fresno River near Coarse Gold, only to be shot and killed one month later by Major Harvey, who took offence to some of Savage’s strong words. [35] His enemies believed he was a liar who exploited the Indians but his friends were inconsolable at the news of his death. In a September 4th, 1852 Daily Herald, it said, “He could do more to keep the Indians in subjection than all the forces Uncle Sam could send here. Some of them reached the scene of the tragedy soon after it occurred … They clung to his body, and swore they would die with their father.”[36]
Chief Tenaya outlived Major Savage, but he grieved for his son. He grieved for the land. He was a broken man, led around on a rope. In his last plea to the captain before his murder, he begged:
“Captain, kill me, as you have killed my Seethkil, letting him run, and then shooting him in the back, with no way to defend himself. Then the Captain will have the dear land of Ahwahnee free of its rightful possessors: The people who know and love it. Destroy all of the people, for that seems to be your wish. With your guns, your horses, and your many men, you can take whatever you want and the people cannot stop you. All the people will die. When I die, my spirit will make trouble for the Captain, his Great Father government and all of their people. You may destroy me, but you cannot destroy the spirit of the old chief and his Ahwhaneechees. They will return to Ahwahnee. Their spirits will be in the rocks, the waterfalls, the trees, animals, and in the very pohonos, the cool, puffy winds that blow across and drive in cold blasts of ice crystals. You may kill us, but our spirits will never leave our home. Our spirits will follow in your footsteps.”[37]
Dr. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion, who had tried to help Seethkil, wrote about his march through the scenic Sierra Nevada Mountains in his book, Discovery of Yosemite: An Indian War of 1851. Although Dr. Bunnell bragged about his murder sprees, he also acknowledged the unlucky fate of the Indians. “As for myself, I freely confess that my feelings of hostility against the Indians was overcome by a sense of exaltation; and although I had suffered losses of property and friends, the natural right of the Indians to their inheritance forced itself upon my mind.”[38]
Major Savage incorrectly believed that Yosemite meant grizzly bear, named for the “lawless and predatory character of Chief Tenaya’s band,” wrote Dr. Bunnell. Dr. Bunnell suggested naming the Valley “Yosemite” as a tribute to Tenaya’s people. He wrote, “the name of the tribe of Indians which we met leaving their homes, perhaps never to return, would be perpetuated.”[39] He did not know that Tenaya never wanted the Valley named after him. After this time, two conflicting stories emerged. According to Dr. Bunnell, the Ahwahneechees were allowed to return to their Valley in 1853, but peace was short lived. A few young Ahwahneechees stole horses from the nearby Mono Indians and in an act of revenge, were mostly killed, including Chief Tenaya. Dr. Bunnell wrote from second and third-hand accounts. Tenaya’s granddaughter, Totuya, challenged his story. Totuya remembered returning to the Valley after her grandfather died playing a round of hand game, popular among Native Americans. After an argument broke out while playing the game, Tenaya and five other Ahwahneechees were stoned to death. Their bodies were cremated and scattered at Hite’s Cove in Yosemite.[40] Most of the remaining Indians joined neighboring bands like the Monos or the Miwok tribes along the Tuolumne River. The few Indians that stayed relied on white management and lost most of their traditional ways of life.[41]
A new era of tourism arose in Yosemite. If the tourists were looking for Ahwahneechees, they could look no further than the park, as many of the Indians worked as tour guides or sold crafts. More Indians were employed as the tourism economy grew, working as wood choppers, sight-seeing wagon drivers, and especially as fishermen for unlucky sportsmen.[42] Other Miwok families eked out a living by gathering strawberries or working as domestics. Many early tourists had a great interest in Indians and, due to railroad advertisements, attached the idea of wilderness with Indians. James Hutchings, an early park promoter, advertised the park as well as the natives. He pitched the camp as a place to see “real Indians in their natural environment.”[43]
In 1916, the National Park Service created a new tourist attraction: Indian Field Days. The NPS staff held this annual event in order to "revive and maintain interest of Indians in their own games and industries, particularly basketry and bead work."[44] Accuracy of the event was not considered, and Yosemite Indians were instructed to wear regalia from the Great Plains Indians. Their culture slowly eroded while their umuchas, or traditional conical cedar bark houses, were replaced with tipis and braided rabbit skins were replaced with wools and quilts.[45] Indians participated in parades, rodeos, and bareback horse races. In Spence's words, "the Field Days often degenerated into little more than an excuse for tourists and park officials to pose in buckskin and feathered headdress." Indian Field Days continued into the 1920's.
Only 406 tourists traveled to Yosemite the first decade, beginning in 1855, but by the time President Lincoln signed the Yosemite Park Act in 1864, as well as the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the figure rose to 1,100 tourists per year.[46] After tourists complained about the “unsightly poverty of the native houses” park superintendent Charles Thompson explained to the Indians that it was a privilege, not a right, to remain at Yosemite. He ruled that if anyone was unable to find work in the winter months, they would be evicted.[47] Thompson’s plan to clean up native “eye sores” was not confined to their dwellings. Thompson believed their removal would “break them up as a racial unit and, in time, to diffuse their blood with the great American mass.”[48] According to Thomas, as well as the Yosemite Board of Expert Advisers, “Indian residence in the Valley depended less on ancestry and more on usefulness to the community.”[49] And while fewer Yosemites found park employment, greater numbers moved out of the valley to Mariposa county. By 1940, the remaining Yosemite natives were only half the population they once were. Conditions worsened, regulations tightened, and by 1969, the last residents relocated to government housing and the Indian Village “vanished into flames” for a fire fighting practice session.[50]
The last remaining survivor of Ahwahnee (Yosemite) was Totuya (Foaming Water), who was born in the 1840s. She was only ten when her and two-hundred Ahwahneechees retreated from their home under Major Savage. Totuya married a fellow Yosemite refugee but her husband and their four sons passed away. She married a Mexican miner and bore three daughters. During her last days in 1929, she returned to Yosemite where tourists watched her shell acorns. When one tourist offered her a nickel, she pushed him away and cried, “No! Not five dollars one acorn, no! White man drive my people out—my Yosemite.”[51] The last link to the tribes of Yosemite died April 20, 1931.
[1] Stephen Corry, “The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks,” in Truth-Out.org, , August 25, 2015, accessed March 5, 2017 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32487-the-colonial-origins-of-conservation-the-disturbing-history-behind-us-national-parks
[2] John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1901), 32.
[3] NPS. “Look! Real Indians!” NPS Park History. Last modified September 2004. Accessed January 21, 2017. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/albright3/chap6a.htm
[4] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v. 9, 65.
[5] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (U.S.: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55.
[6] NPS, “Look! Real Indians!”
[7] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 49.
[8] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 22.
[9] Eder, An Administrative History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925, 10.
[10] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v. 9.
[11] Keller, American Indians and National Parks, 24.
[12] Annual Reports of the Superintendents of Yellowstone Report 842.
[13] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 56.
[14] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 59.
[15] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks, 22.
[16] Peter Nabokov, Lawrence L. Loendorf, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 62.
[17] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 39.
[18] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 61.
[19] Jeanne Marie Oyawin Eder, “An Administration of treaty History of Indians of Yellowstone National Park, 1851-1925” (PhD thesis, Washington State University, 2000), v.
[20] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 66.
[21] Nabokov, Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park, 67.
[22] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turk, American Indians and National Parks, 23.
[23] Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 50.
[24] Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 52.
[25] Norman K. Denzin, Searching for Yellowstone: Race, Gender, Family and Memory in the Postmodern West, (New York: Left Coast Press, 2016), 145.
[26] Julian Brave, “The Forgotten History of ‘Violent Displacement’ that Helped Create the National Parks.” The Huffington Post, August 26, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/national-park-service-anniversary-indigenous-people_us_55dcdd7ce4b0a40aa3ac9998.
[27] Daniel E. Anderson, Origin of the Word Yosemite. Yosemite Library. http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html
[28] Allan Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya (Billings, Montana: Council for Indian Education, 1974,) 16.
[29] PBS.org Assimilation, Relocation, Genocide in Indian County Diaries
[30] Parker, John. History of Merced County, Elliott & Moore, 1881.
[31] Carl P. Russell, One Hundred Years in Yosemite 1947 in Yosemite.ca.us
[32] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 35.
[33] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 37.
[34] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 46.
[35] Find a grave ?? https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=17760824
[36] Carl Parcher Russell, 100 Years in Yosemite: the romantic story of early human affairs in the central Sierra Nevada (California: Stanford University Press, 1931), 44.
[37] Shields, The Tragedy of Tenaya, 49.
[38] Bunnell, Discovery of Yosemite: An Indian War of 1851, 31.
[39] Daniel Anderson, “Origin of the Word Yosemite,” Yosemite Online Library, Last updated July 2007, accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html
[40] Ray Jones and Joe Lubow, It Happened in Yosemite National Park: Remarkable Events that Shaped History (Nebraska: Morris Book Publishing, 2010), 14.
[41] Ray Jones, It Happened in Yosemite National Park: Remarkable Events that Shaped History, 14.
[42] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 104.
[43] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 106.
[44]Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, A century of theft from Indians by the National Park Service March 2016 http://www.theecologist.org/essays/2987382/a_century_of_theft_from_indians_by_the_national_park_service.html
[45] Bev Ortiz, It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Berkeley: Heydey Books, 1991), 7.
[46] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 102.
[47] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 122.
[48] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 123.
[49] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 126.
[50] 130.
[51] H.J. Taylor, The Last Survivor (San Francisco: Johnck and Seeger, 1932), 1.