Troops Hit the High Country
In the early days of the Sierra Nevada’s national parks, the cavalry chased shepherds, sheep, and Native hunters out.
As winter snows were melting just a few months after Yosemite became a national park, the United States Army got to work. In April 1891 Troops I and K of the Fourth Cavalry stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio under Captains A. E. Wood and John Dorst received orders to protect the Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant reserves. Wood drew Yosemite and established headquarters at Wawona, inside the boundaries of the months-old Yosemite National Park. Dorst headed south with his troopers, to Sequoia and General Grant.
A military man to the core who became Yosemite’s acting superintendent by virtue of his command, Wood envisioned the park as a fortress under siege. Toping the enemies list were the herders.
“The sheep have been the curse of these mountains,” Wood reported, blaming the animals for eroding soils and upending game populations, particularly bear, deer, quail, and grouse. He had a low opinion of the men who made a scant living driving sheep into the summer mountains; after all, they were only “foreigners — Chilians [sic] … Portuguese, French, and Mexicans.” He came up with an ingenious method for dealing with them. Any cavalry patrol that caught a trespassing flock separated sheep from shepherd, then escorted the herder to one side of the park and drove the flock to the other. It took days for the herder to make his way back across the mountains and round up what remained of the flock, which had typically dwindled in number owing to bears, pumas, wolves, and coyotes with a taste for lamb and mutton. Rather than risk such financial loss, more and more herders steered clear of park and cavalry.
“I have effectively stopped such vandalism,” Wood reported with clear pride. He predicted that the park “would be alive with game” in but a few years.
Muir applauded the cavalry’s fast and focused work in turning Yosemite into a defended fortress. Understanding in hindsight the significance of his long talk with Robert Underwood Johnson at their Soda Springs campsite, Muir exulted that “in a little over a year from the time of our first talk beside that Tuolomne camp-fire the bill organizing the park passed, and a troop of cavalry was guarding it.” No longer did the region look “broken and wasted, like a beautiful countenance destroyed by some dreadful disease. Now it is blooming again as one general garden, in which beauty for ashes has been granted in fine wild measure. The flowers and grasses are back again in their places as if they had never been away, and every tree in the park is waving its arms for joy.”
The cause of all this restored glory was “protection from the sheep scourge,” a struggle that figured into cosmic combat:
The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. The smallest forest reserve, and the first I ever heard of, was in the Garden of Eden; and though its boundaries were drawn by the Lord, and embraced only one tree, yet even so modest a reserve as this was attacked.
Muir was making park protection the holy act of restoring Eden itself and defending it against outside assault.
The cavalry cut no slack for tribal nations on the hunting ban within national parks. During the 1890s, the troopers put an end to Indigenous deer-hunting expeditions in the Tuolomne and Merced watersheds, which had been fully legal until those areas fell within the new park. Muir stood firmly behind this effort:
It is when the deer are coming down that the Indians set out on their grand fall hunt. Too lazy to go into the recesses of the mountains away from trails, they wait for the deer to come out, and then waylay them.
Muir never hunted, yet he was voicing the esthetic judgment of Teddy Roosevelt and other elite hunters. Pursuing trophies in the high country was the noble pursuit of manly WASP outdoorsmen, while hunting for food from ambush, the way Native Americans did, was a slothful crime against nature.
“Central camps are made on the well-known highways of the deer, which are soon red with blood,” Muir explained. “Each hunter comes in laden, old crones as well as maidens smiling on the luckiest. All grow fat and merry.” These hunts, with a little forceful urging from the cavalry, were vanishing as surely as the tribal nations, “and their red camps on the mountains are fewer every year.”
Since the cavalry worked the Yosemite backcountry and the valley proper remained under the control of the state of California, the troopers rode their patrols well away from the areas most tourists frequented. Muir approved:
The soldiers do their duty so quietly that the traveler is scarce aware of their presence.
During Muir’s early days in Yosemite, he saw tourists as comical. “All sorts of human stuff is being poured into our valley this year, and the blank, fleshly apathy with which most of it comes in contact with the rock and water spirits of the place is most amazing,” he had written to a friend back in 1870. Sitting in their saddles “like overgrown frogs,” the tourists only feel “comfortable when they have ‘done it all,’ and long for the safety and flatness of their proper homes.” Fortunately “the tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as a harmless scum, collecting in hotel and saloon eddies,” never learning that “the top of the valley is more than half way to real heaven.”
By the 1890s, Muir was singing from a more welcoming hymnal. His growing warmth toward tourists came at the urging of The Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who realized that American wilderness could be saved only if it appealed to urban professionals like himself. Hard-core mountaineers on the order of Muir were few and far between, so for the parks to succeed, they had to appeal as well to tourists seeking a less strenuous experience. The increasingly domesticated Muir came to describe Yosemite and Sequoia in urban terms:
… the wildest health and pleasure grounds accessible and available to tourists seeking escape from care and dust and early death.
Muir wanted to convert his readers into national park tourists, in part by assuring them that nothing untoward would come their way. Native Americans, Muir reassured his readers, posed no risk at all:
As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.
The fearsome and once-dangerous Yosemites had been cleared out of the park that carried their name. Frontier justice had been done, conquest completed, and the park rendered safe. The cavalry kept it secure against inroads and threats, quietly and out of tourists’ sight, preventing vanishing tribal remnants from hunting deer and foreign-born shepherds from grazing their flocks inside the park. The line had been drawn, the wall surrounding the sanctuary built, the defense mounted.
This well-defended temple sanctified a vision of wilderness centered on Euro-American perceptions, values, and desires. It was, in a word, white. Yosemite could be contemplated, not lived in; the benefits of this wild space accrued to the soul, not the body, so it only made sense to ban all hunting and gathering, even by Indigenous peoples who had taken their sustenance from the landscape for millennia. Forcing them out of the park and banning all hunting rededicated their former homeland to the purpose God intended: contemplation of the Divine amid sublime manifestations of granite and glacier.
Better Euro-American visitors than Native American residents. Settler colonialism demanded it, wilderness required it.
Next up: adding the valley to the Yosemite National Park.
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