Then the country did something it had never done before. In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, ceding Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to the State of California on the condition that they be preserved, unspoiled, for public use — the first time the United States set aside scenic land purely for preservation. It predated Yellowstone and the national-park system itself; in a real sense the idea of the national park was born here. Galen Clark, the valley's first appointed Guardian, looked after the grant in those early years.
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.
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.
