The Ghosts of Yosemite Valley

John Muir is in the news, a century after his death. 

The Sierra Club has “come clean” that John Muir, at least later in his life, was a not too-virulent racist. 

No doubt a lot of white folks are going to roll their eyes; is there no end to this recutting of history? 

But this is not ancient history, nor is the Great Sin of John Muir *merely* racism. The issues here are bigger and deeper than that, and strike to the root of wild lands in the American west. 

Let me start, for want of a better place, with the picture, below. 

It’s a photo of the Ahwahnee Hotel, a posh 1920s-era spread smack in the middle of Yosemite National Park. 

The Ahwahnee Hotel is named after the Ahwahneechee Indian tribe that used to live in the Yosemite Valley until they were killed or driven out, beginning in 1850, but continuing in 1906 when the park was created, and afterwards in 1929 and as late as 1969. 

When the Scottish immigrant John Muir arrived in the Yosemite Valley, he described it as “pure wildness” where “no mark of man is visible upon it.” 

 If that appeared to be the case, it was only because Muir did not understand what he was seeing and refused to acknowledge the obvious and rightful caretakers of the land, the Ahwahneechee, who still lived in the valley. 

The manicured lands that Muir loved so much were not a product of wild nature, but of controlled fires set by the native hands of the people he did not value. 

Without native Americans to set brush-clearing fires, the meadows and open forests that John Muir admired began to grow crowded with trees and brush, and wildlife began to decline. 

The over-crowded landscape created by fire suppression is still with us today. As Scientific American notes: 

“After a century of fire suppression in the Yosemite Valley biodiversity had actually declined, trees were now 20 percent smaller, and the forest was more vulnerable to catastrophic fires than it had been before the U.S. Army and armed vigilantes expelled the native population.” 

Slow we learn, and quick we forget. 

But will a balance be restored? 

No doubt, but slowly, slowly. 

As for the Ahwahneechee, their remaining descendants are now part of the Paiute tribe in eastern California -- a people treated as ghosts even when they are among the living. 

Yes, John Muir was a small-r racist, but he was also part of massive immigration to the US that gut-shot the American west with disease-carrying white people who stole land at gunpoint, killed the natives when they resisted, and then wrote them out of the history books entirely. 

That’s the real story. 

You want to see the Awanhee? 

 The hotel is just up the road. Rooms are $520 a night ... and up. 

The people? They are treated as ghosts. Please do not look for them.