Selling Yosemite

Improbably, while the nation was consumed with fighting the Civil War, Congress took time out to pass a bill establishing Yosemite as the world’s first wilderness park. On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed that bill into law, thereby transferring Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove, a nearby stand of sequoia trees, to the state of California.

The full story is even stranger. At a time when the British government, reliant on cotton from the Confederate states, was wavering on whether to throw its support wholeheartedly behind the Union, an immigrant who had become a U.S. senator sold colleagues on the wild-park bill by framing it as a patriotic gesture. In doing so, he unwittingly garbled American and British history, and nobody was the wiser. It’s not unfair to say that the granddaddy of all national parks sailed into port under a false flag.

When California entered the Union in 1850, San Francisco had a population of 25,000 and the Sierra Nevada foothills were crawling with gold-seekers, but the rest of the state was lightly settled and little-known. Many a Forty-Niner must have paused on his rush toward gold country to stare at the Sierra Nevada’s grandest valley, but the first real invasion of what became Yosemite didn’t come until 1851.

“Invasion” is because the Ahwahneechee Indians had long occupied the valley. The tribe had recently been accused of raiding trading posts along the Merced River, and a band of vigilantes rode in to teach the alleged miscreants a lesson. The incursion failed—the Ahwahneechees caught wind of the threat and melted away—but the vigilantes did take note of the spectacular setting. A year later, Ahwahneechees attacked prospectors who may or