Parasites and Place Names: Yosemite’s Genocidal Backstory, Part Two
Conquest turned in part on renaming conquered land to erase the least presence of the tribes. Then there were the lice.
Two months after their first invasion, the Mariposa Battalion, this time under the command of Capt. John Boling, returned to Yosemite. Their goal was to round up Tenaya and his people yet again and ensure that this time around the tribe made it to the reservation and stayed there. Once more the village sites were empty but for a few flitting shadows, until the militiamen moved up the valley, weapons at the ready. Assured that they would be safe, five Yosemites came out of hiding and surrendered, among them two of Tenaya’s three sons and his son-in-law.
The promised safety turned out to be a ruse. Boling dispatched Tenaya’s elder son and son-in-law with his scouts to locate the headman and convince him to give himself up. When one of the three remaining Yosemite hostages bolted for the safety of the woods and escaped, Boling had the remaining two roped back-to-back and tethered to an oak in the middle of camp. Soon they untied each other and sprinted for the trees. The guards, hot to kill, were hoping for just this chance. One hostage made it to safety through the gunfire, but Tenaya’s youngest son was cut down.
The boy’s body was still lying in its cooling, pooled blood when the captured Tenaya came in with several militiamen. At the sight of his dead child the headman’s lips quivered, and he gave Boling a look meant to kill. Tenaya maintained a “moody silence and extreme taciturnity for several days afterward,” according to Bunnell, who appeared surprised at the depth of feeling this “savage” father expressed over his son’s violent death. His amazement increased when Tenaya broke silence to lament the murder of his son, scold Boling, and call down vengeance on him and all Euro-Americans.
Boling found the display amusing. Bunnell, though, reported that he “began to have almost a genuine respect” for the headman. That benevolent feeling evaporated when, just a half-hour later, Bunnell saw Tenaya tuck eagerly into a bowl of pork and beans “with the appetite of a hungry animal.... I now saw only a dirty old Indian.”
Bunnell felt he was beholding not a fellow human being from a different culture but a specimen from a separate species. His evidence for this belief: lice. Euro-Americans had little to fear from the bloodsuckers that infested Native Americans, according to Bunnell, since the pests disliked white blood and soon abandoned their new hosts:
To me this is quite suggestive, when considered as evidence of a diversity of origin of the races…. Each separate race has parasites indigenous to that race, although the genus may be common to each.
Different as they were, Native Americans still had only themselves to blame for their conquest, expulsion, and even extermination. Bunnell declared:
The savage is naturally vain, cruel and arrogant. His treachery is to him but cunning, his revenge a holy obligation, and his religion but a superstitious fear…. Tenaya appeared unconscious of his own wrong-doing, and of the inevitable fate that he was bringing upon himself and his people.
Since, like Bunnell, most Euro-Americans dismissed Native Americans as an inferior species fated to vanish before the advance of a “superior” people, naming objects and landmarks after the displaced consigned the expiring race to nostalgic memory. Much as Bunnell had erased Ahwahnee to create Yosemite, he elicited the names of landmarks from Tenaya and created his own — often mistaken — English versions of what he thought they meant: Mirror Lake, Vernal Falls, El Capitan, Nevada Falls, North Dome, Royal Arches, Half Dome, and Bridalveil Falls, among others. And he made quite the show of bestowing a special honor on Tenaya.
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The headman told Boling that many of his people had escaped over the Sierra crest to seek sanctuary among the Kutzadika’as. Pursuit would be hard and fruitless. Boling didn’t believe him and ordered the battalion to follow the Yosemites’ trail into the high country, forcing Tenaya to act as guide at gunpoint. Sure enough, the militia came upon a village “resting in fancied security, upon the border of a most beautiful little lake.” The battalion surrounded and rushed the encampment, captured the refugee Yosemites without a fight, and led them under guard to the Fresno River reservation.
On the journey, Bunnell proposed to Boling that the lake be named after Tenaya:
Here, probably, his people had built their last wigwams in their mountain home. From his lake we were leading the last remnant of his once dreaded tribe, to a territory from which it was designed they should never return as a people.
Bunnell, pleased with himself and expecting praise and gratitude for his gesture, proudly told Tenaya what he had done. The old chief was unimpressed. “It already has a name,” he said, “we call it Py-we-ack.” Tenaya understood full well Bunnell’s game, and he was having none of it.
Deposited on the Fresno River reservation, the Yosemites found the hot, dry flatland unappealing, the rations scant and unappetizing. A few weeks there were enough for Tenaya. He asked for and received permission to take his people back to their long-time home in Ahwahnee in return for a guarantee of no further trouble.
All went well and peaceably for about a year, when a small group of miners from the foothills decided to take a prospecting tour of Ahwahnee. Perhaps they did not know that an earlier band of prospectors had murdered an unarmed Yosemite boy. To avenge that killing, the Yosemites ambushed the second group of miners, killing two and wounding another.
A U.S. Army contingent responded by slipping into Ahwahnee at night and capturing five Yosemite men. Convinced that they had the killers — no matter whom they caught, such patrols always asserted they had the bad guys — the lieutenant in charge ordered the men to be shot on the spot. By that time Tenaya and the Yosemites had packed up and were heading over the mountains yet again to take refuge among the Kutzadika’as. The army gave chase, but the Yosemites outran the soldiers, who soon tired in the sloppy spring snow and called off their wet, cold chase.
As accurate as he may have been in recounting the Mariposa Battalion’s maneuvers, marches, and murders, Lafayette Bunnell got almost everything about the Yosemites themselves wrong. His memoir makes the tribe sound like a homogenous band of leftover Stone Agers headed by an autocrat. The reality was vastly more complicated.
Yosemite Valley’s archaeology reveals at least nine ceremonial sites and almost 40 seasonal camps and year-round villages. Social organization was every bit as complicated as the physical layout. Oral histories passed down through the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, the descendants of the Yosemites, identify 18 lineages from 11 cultural groups, each cycling annually through villages and hunting-and-gathering grounds. Leadership comprised 40 to 45 captains, chiefs, appointed chiefs, and dance captains. In other words, Tenaya was hardly a solitary dictator. Behind and around him stood a complicated phalanx of leaders with varying responsibilities and areas of influence among a people embedded in a tightly woven net of social and cultural connections. There was nothing “primitive” about the Yosemites.
Not that Bunnell and the Mariposa Battalion had an interest in grasping the political and cultural reality of the people they were attacking, killing, and dispossessing. Reducing the Yosemites to a “savage” tribe made it that much easier to rain down violence and take their lives and land.
And, as far as Yosemite was concerned, the Mariposa Battalion was hardly the last word on the matter.
Upcoming events
On Saturday, Aug. 10, 7 p.m. PDT, I’ll be reading from Cast out of Eden, talking about the book with poet and writer friend Moira Mattingly, and taking questions from the audience at The Bookery, 326 Main St., Placerville, CA. Free and open to all.
The following Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2 p.m. PDT, I’ll be talking about the book and taking Q&A from the audience under the auspices of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at California State University East Bay, Concord Campus, 4700 Ygnacio Valley Rd., Concord CA. You can register here.
Autographed copies online
If you’d like Cast out of Eden signed by the author — that’s me — you can order it online, thanks to the generous help of Matthew Kerns (Texas Jack) and his Dime Library website. Here’s where and how to order.