Yosemite National Park

Yosemite National Park. Located on the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada, Yosemite National Park contains over 761,000 acres of protected land, including sequoia groves and expanses of alpine wilderness. The main attraction is Yosemite Valley, where the Merced River winds through meadows in a dramatic rock‐walled canyon. Yosemite's cliffs and waterfalls form a monumental landscape that has long been a sacred national icon, a tourist mecca, and a focal point for conservation efforts.

U.S. troops drove out Yosemite's Ahwahneechee Indians in 1853, and tourism began two years later. The painters Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill and the photographer Carleton Watkins soon immortalized Yosemite as a sacred space. In 1864, Congress granted Yosemite Valley to California as a state park. Although Yellowstone became America's first national park in 1872, the wildland park concept originated in Yosemite. John Muir, Yosemite's greatest advocate, arrived in 1868, and he fought to protect and expand Yosemite until his death. In 1890, Yosemite National Park was formed from lands surrounding California's small park, and in 1906, Muir and the Sierra Club convinced California to return Yosemite Valley to the nation.

Muir's final campaign was a decade‐long struggle to stop San Francisco from damming and flooding the park's Hetch Hetchy Valley. His effort failed in 1913, but the national debate spurred wilderness preservation and the National Park Service was created three years later. At the end of the twentieth century, Yosemite remained a jewel in the national park system, but its pollution and overcrowding kept it at the center of debates on wilderness use.
See also Environmentalism; National Park System; West, The.

Bibliography

Roderick Nash , Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed., 1982.
Alfred Runte , Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness, 1990.

William C. Barnett