My Ahwahnee Memories
For me, one association with “Ahwahnee” shoulders all the others aside. It is the memory of a Bracebridge Dinner, the great social event of Yosemite, a rococo Renaissance pageant held at the Ahwahnee every winter. My parents, in their eighties, were appointed Squire and Lady Bracebridge, an honor requiring them to dress up in Renaissance garb. My father was a big man, but some previous Squire Bracebridge had been beefier and had stretched the nobleman’s leotards. When my father pulled them on, they bunched up in folds above the knees. There is no garment more woeful than tights no longer tight. Say “Ahwahnee,” and this recollection jumps at me. I have to laugh: my parents trapped and sheepish in 15th century clothing, acutely aware of how ridiculous they look.
My family history in Yosemite goes back 130 years. My maternal grandmother first traveled to the valley by stagecoach. My maternal great grandfather, Colonel John P. Irish, was a commissioner of Yosemite in the 1880s and an advocate of California state control of the park. This made him a bitter enemy of John Muir, the leading advocate of “retrocession,” or reversion of Yosemite to federal control. The Colonel called Muir a “pseudo-naturalist.” Sixty years later, my father, David Brower, became the first executive director of the Sierra Club, an organization founded by the pseudo-naturalist for the purpose of making Yosemite a national park. Colonel Irish lost both rounds to the environmental radicals. First Muir beat him on Yosemite retrocession, and then my father stole his granddaughter.
My own history in the park goes back nearly to my beginnings. In 1947, when I was two, I slipped away from my parents and was lost or several hours on the Yosemite Valley floor. Everyone, Ansel and Virginia Adams among them, joined the posse searching for me. My walkabout ended when a woman found me down by the Merced River. I was toddling along its bank. Who knows what I was thinking? Maybe I was drawn by the voices, those liquid conversations in its fast, icy current. “El Río de Nuestra Señora de la Merced,” the Spaniards named this stream. A good name. “River of our Lady of Mercy.” She was certainly a river of mercy to me.
Yosemite’s Original Inhabitants
My family’s association with Yosemite is nothing, of course, beside the millennia of tenancy by the original inhabitants, the Ahwahneechee. This band of Sierra Miwok lived here forever, by their own account. Ahwahnee is their name for this valley. “Yosemite” itself may derive from uzamati, the Miwok word for grizzly bear.
In all matters pertaining to California Indians, my main source of insight is Malcolm Margolin, founder of Heyday Books and publisher for forty years of “News from Native California,” the only journal of its kind for the tribes of the state. When I put the name-change question to him, he reflected for some moments.
A Miwok woman holds a basket circa 1924. A band of Miwok were the original inhabitants of the Yosemite Valley.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BUYENLARGE, GETTY IMAGES
“I felt that DNC were really good concessionaires, and I’m sorry they lost the contract,” he said. “And I also thought that their trying to latch onto the names was not worthy of them.”
Then Margolin recalled for me the origin of another Yosemite name.
“Do you know the story of Chief Tenaya?” he asked. “Do you remember how they named his lake?” Chief Tenaya, I knew, was leader of the Ahwahneechee in 1851, when the Mariposa Battalion drove them from Yosemite Valley. Tenaya Lake, chief’s namesake, lies outside and above the valley, near the center of the national park. But I had forgot how the lake came to have Tenaya’s name.
“Let me read it to you,” said Margolin. “It’s from Lafayette Bunnell’s story about the conquest of Yosemite. They’d captured Tenaya. Here’s what Bunnell wrote: “‘I called him up to us, and told him that we had given his name to the lake and the river. At first he seemed unable to comprehend our purpose, and pointing to the group of glistening peaks, near the head of the lake, said: ‘It already has a name; we call it Py-we-ack.’ Upon my telling him that we had named it Ten-ie-ya, because it was upon the shores of the lake that we had found his people, who would never return to it to live, his countenance fell and he at once left our group and joined his own family circle. His countenance as he left us indicated that he thought the naming of the lake no equivalent for the loss of his territory.’”
Margolin has coined a phrase, the “Tenaya Phenomenon,” to describe this sort of episode: the honoring of the image of a people while robbing them of land and power. It is a widespread phenomenon, he said, but particularly flagrant in Yosemite, where a museum, a reconstructed Miwok village, and an active program of Miwok interpretation all thrive side-by-side with an ongoing history of Miwok expulsions, betrayals, and contempt.
“When the Spanish explorers in the Portola’s e