The valley was a homeland long before it was a park. For thousands of years the Ahwahneechee, a Southern Sierra Miwok people, lived in the valley they called Ahwahnee, fishing the Merced River, tending oak groves, and burning the meadows to keep them open. That world was shattered in 1851, when the Mariposa Battalion — a state militia raised during the Gold Rush — entered the valley and forced the Ahwahneechee from their land, the first documented entry of non-Native people and the violent beginning of the valley's American chapter. The name Yosemite itself comes down from that era; the place name the people used for their home was Ahwahnee.
Muir's campaign carried it the rest of the way. On October 1, 1890, Congress established Yosemite National Park, wrapping federal protection around the high country surrounding the state-held valley; in 1906 the valley and grove were receded to the federal park, and in 1916 the new National Park Service took over its care. The U.S. Cavalry had patrolled the park in the years between, the first rangers in all but name. Step by step a Gold-Rush militia's valley had become a model that the rest of the country, and much of the world, would copy.
Why People Visit Yosemite
Yosemite offers wilderness on a scale few places can match — a glacier-cut valley of granite cliffs and waterfalls, giant sequoias older than the country, and the high Sierra beyond, all carrying the founding story of the national-park idea. Visitors come for Half Dome, El Capitan, and the falls, and stay for the sequoias, the meadows, and the long Sierra light. From a valley stroll to the high country, it rewards a day or a week. It is timeless, humbling, and unmistakably California.
