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This chapter discusses the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, which fulfilled preservationists' long-held dreams for a strong federal commitment to the preservation and enhancement of all national parks. However, the creation of the National Park Service only perpetuated the same struggle between preservationists and development interests that plagued the management of Yosemite in the 1880s. Like those earlier debates before the California State Assembly, this struggle would also carry over to the new agency's relationship with the Yosemite Indians. In the same year that the park service was established, Yosemite officials and concessionaires inaugurated the Indian Field Days, a festivity designed to “revive and maintain the interest of Indians in their own games and industries, particularly basketry and bead work.”

Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had a varied impact on American sensibilities. John Muir, for example, studied science and accepted the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory--but retained a biblically colored piety that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. During this extended period, writings by Mary Austin and Black Elk reflect their encounters with versions of naturalistic piety lying outside Euro-American ethnic traditions. Still, the written form in which Black Elk expressed his ecological vision of holiness, as imaged in the great hoop of the Lakota nation, was decidedly influenced by his contact with non-Indian culture. Although Rachel Carson was a committed scientist whose work presupposed belief in organic evolution, her writing also reflects a robust spirituality founded upon reverence for life and for the mystery of things unseen.

Miwok Indians from the Central Valley and Piute Indians from east of the Sierra Nevada were the first peoples to inhabit the Hetch Hetchy Valley. They were transient inhabitants, spending the summer and fall hunting and fishing, and harvesting acorns and grasses. The first Euro-Americans to see the valley were associated with the California Gold Rush. They found no gold, but a rather lush, long meadow useful for sheep grazing. But the beauty of the valley attracted naturalists such as John Muir, painters, and explorers. However, compared to its sister valley, Yosemite, in 1900 Hetch Hetchy was virtually unknown.

During the second half of the 19th century, San Francisco grew from a village to a major city. Located on a peninsula, the city faced a perpetual water problem. Mayor James Phelan realized that if the city was ever to reach its full potential, it needed an abundant and pure water supply from the Sierra Nevada. After studying a number of different sites, the Tuolumne River and the Hetch Hetchy Valley emerged as the preferred location. But the valley lay within the newly-established (1890) Yosemite National Park. Yet San Francisco continued its quest, purchasing land within the valley and seeking legislation to allow reservoir development.

This chapter continues the discussion of the life of Clarence King. King's search for natural truths bore the imprint of John Ruskin, but his obsession with masculine science and adventure as a means of social integration and improvement originated with John Tyndall. He embraced nature as a microcosm of American society. As one of the many geologists who moved through the physical world, he was supposed to uncover mineral resources. Yet he saw his science as one way to impose a grid of order on contemporary America.

The idealization of uninhabited landscapes and establishment of the first national parks reflect important developments in late-nineteenth-century Indian policy. Although the creation of the first national parks coincided with efforts to restrict Indians to reservations and assimilate them into American society, native use and occupancy of park lands often continued unabated. This book argues that uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks. It also focuses on the policies of Indian removal developed at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks from the 1870s to the 1930s.

This chapter examines the movement that lead to the creation of the first national parks. President Lincoln's 1864 signing of the Yosemite Park Act, which set aside fifteen square miles of the public domain and placed it under the protection and management of the state of California, created an important precedent for the preservation of larger areas in the coming decades. Congress also drew up legislation that provided for the “preservation” of Yellowstone in its “natural condition.” Passed into law on March 1, 1972, the Yellowstone Park Act removed two million acres of public domain from “settlement, occupancy, or sale.”

This chapter demonstrates that Yosemite Valley remained home to a permanent, relatively autonomous Indian village. While native residence in the valley stands in the marked contrast to other early parks, it also presents an important comparison with the experiences of Indian peoples at Yellowstone and Glacier. Such differences shed important light on Yosemite's unique history and reveal the processes by which this park was eventually made to fit the standards of the national park ideal.

The shift in scale, from local to national, which accompagnied the building of modern nation-state and the triumph of governmentality conditioned the adoption of new conceptions of the mountain and new modes of intervention. Within a few decades, Western nation-states readily made the mountain a major natural resource, a remarkable scenic landscape, a wild component of their territory, an ecological asset, even a preserve for unusual species. A special focus is made on the aggressive policies conducted by the modern state in forest management from France to the other countries of Western and Southern Europe and to the US. A symmetric movement is followed for nature protection, from the US to other former British colonies and Western Europe. Through these policies, mountain communities experienced a dramatic disqualification of their knowledge and modes of environmental management.

This chapter discusses the efforts to protect Yosemite and the sequoias in the Sierras in the nineteenth century and then turns to the more heated conflicts over the fate of the coastal redwoods. The roots of California's tradition of civic mobilization lie in nature protection. This tradition began with the efforts of a few prominent individuals—including John Muir, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Olmsted—and then became institutionalized in the upper-middle-class Sierra and Sempervirens clubs and the predominantly upper-class Save-the-Redwoods League. Broader grassroots citizen mobilization played a critical role in campaigns to return control of Yosemite to the federal government, expand the size of and increase the funding for state parks, and protect endangered sequoias in the Sierras. The state's administrative capacity to protect California's scenic environment was initially limited, paralleling its inability to regulate hydraulic mining during the mid-nineteenth century. However, this capacity subsequently expanded through the establishment of institutions such as the State Board of Agriculture, the State Forestry Commission, and the State Parks Commission.

Chapter 4 keys on John Muir’s ecstatic wilderness religion as a paradigm of the dialectic between Christianity and animism at the center of this book, namely, Christianimism. Muir’s nature evangelism came at the price of rhetorically abetting the forced removal of Native Americans from their homes within the fledgling national parks movement. Notwithstanding this stain on Muir’s legacy, his thought is notable for rethinking the full arc of Jesus’ life—John the Baptist, departure into wilderness, temple money-changers, and crucifixion—in deeply personal terms that are environmental and biblically sonorous. Muir advocates a two bookstheology in which the Bible and the Earth are equally compelling revelatory “texts.” His Yosemite spirituality reaches its apogee in his 1870 “woody gospel letter,” a paean to a homophilic, orgasmic religion of sensual delight: “Come suck Sequoia and be saved.” In Muir’s spirit, the chapter concludes that Christianity is still not Christianity because of its erstwhile hostility to embodied existence.

This chapter discusses the Southern Pacific's interest in conservation, particularly the preservation of the wilderness. It examines the effect of the construction and operation of these rail lines on the natural ecological systems present in California and the western regions. The chapter shows the participation of Southern Pacific leaders in resource conservation programs and the environmental policies of the Southern Pacific. It then moves on to examine the partnership of the Southern Pacific with John Muir, in order to build the Yosemite National Park. The discussion considers the various obstacles they faced, as well as the other national parks that they built, such as the Sequoia National Park.

For decades, Carl Leopold had watched rafts of pine logs swaddled together like organ pipes, from a block to a half-mile in length, float down the Mississippi from the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By the turn of the century, these rafts had dwindled in frequency and length. Most of the two-to five-hundred-year-old white pine forests that had surrounded the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard had been sliced to stubble, and logging companies were abandoning these leavings for the untouched forests of the West. Carl couldn’t help but notice. His business was built on wood, and if wood supplies ran out, so would his source of income. Greed and waste were the razors of the lumber trade, and Carl knew well that the forests of the West would fall to their blades if the public did not protest. Just as he monitored the number of ducks and geese he hunted, Carl believed in guarding the number of trees cut. So, despite his longing for Aldo to follow him in the family business, he unintentionally primed his eldest for a very different profession. Carl scanned newspapers and outdoors magazines seeking forest news, expounding on his findings to his eldest. Edwin Hunger tagged along on some of Carl’s outings with his sons and described them as “lectures on the move” in which the boys learned “much about the woods in general and how they should be managed and preserved.” While Aldo was in elementary school, Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland set aside millions of acres out West in forest reserves. Members of the lumber, mining, and ranching industries responded with outrage; they wanted no limits on their use of public lands. But increasingly, concerned citizens were pushing for national laws to protect the remaining forests. One prophet in the fray was John Muir. He preached a gospel of preservation: Stop the wasteful destruction and let the forests manage themselves. Cut only populous common trees, and then only sparingly and carefully, “for every right use.”

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's life and career in the late 1940s. In April 1945, Henry completed the periodic follow-up form for Lewis M. Terman's gifted program. That spring his wife Sidney went to California to care for her stepmother. After spending the rest of the semester teaching and composing, Henry went west, where he and Sidney planned to spend most of their time. Life in the ranch was hardly idyllic, but Henry had no complaints, telling Lou Harrison that he was being creative while raising a million figs a year. Meanwhile, he remained in touch with the world of music. In November, he wrote Richard Franko Goldman that he was testing figs and writing band pieces. The Cowells stayed at the ranch until the middle of January 1946, when Henry was committed to teach at The New School for Social Research. They returned to Fresno in April, remaining through the fall. In October 1947, Henry and Sidney spent their sixth wedding anniversary in Yosemite.

This chapter investigates the creation of Yosemite State Park in 1864 and Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The story of these parks has often been told in the realm of environmental history, with scholars presenting their early history as a parable about the virtues of preservation overcoming human tendencies toward use and exploitation. Yet, both parks had their origins as pieces of legislation crafted by the Republican Party and debated within that party. Park backers believed that experiencing natural beauty would “civilize” the average person and improve his or her intellectual abilities. Supporters also argued that America should follow its republican principles by making scenes of natural beauty accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy. Finally, they claimed that the government’s ability to establish parks in the midst of a bloody civil war showed the strength of the Union.

This chapter examines the visitors, volunteers, and rangers in Yosemite National Park. It discusses how the environment is managed to create the impression of harmony between nature and culture. It explores the historical roots of this trend, as well as its persistence in park management in the present. Through interviews with park visitors, the chapter demonstrates that their attitudes towards nature shape their understanding of the spiritual and/or religious significance of their experience. Contrary to the hikers who were interviewed in Chapter 2, visitors to Yosemite demonstrate a different religious aspect of recreation, one in which “nature” is both more civilized and more consistently ascribed with religious value. This chapter demonstrates how park rangers appreciate this diversity within the visitor population, and how the trope of spirituality allows them to cater to a wide range of visitors.

In 1911 Charles Ives wrote “The New River,” a song unique among his works for its outspoken environmentalist stance. Composed in direct response to the diversion of waters from Ives's beloved Housatonic River to feed New York City reservoirs and plans for constructing a dam, the song also captured widespread national outrage over the Hetch Hetchy Dam being built at the same time through Yosemite National Park. Combining transcendentalist understandings of nature with more contemporary arguments to save Hetch Hetchy published by Robert Underwood Johnson and John Muir, Ives's song sounds his belief “the fabric of life weaves itself whole.”