Yosemite Indians
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Ethnologically, the natives of Yosemite Valley belonged to the Mariposa dialect group of the southern Sierra Miwok Indians. The Yosemite area was occupied by Indians between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. Ancestors of the historic Sierra Miwoks probably began entering the foothills and higher elevations of the Sierra from the Central Valley about 2,000 years ago. Within late prehistoric and early historic times, the Central and Southern Sierra Miwoks constituted the primary inhabitants of the Yosemite National Park area (Greene, Linda Wedel. Yosemite: The Park and Its Resources. Vol. 1. Historic Resource Study. Washington, DC: U. S. Department of the Interior, 1987). However, other tribes also occupied and regularly visited the Central Sierra, including the Yosemite region, primarily the Washo and the Mono Paiutes (who lived immediately east of Yosemite in the western Great Basin in an area that includes Mono Lake). The Paiutes claim they occasionally hunted in Little Yosemite Valley and spent the winter in Yosemite Valley, and also inhabited Hetch Hetchy Valley. At the time of the discovery of Yosemite Valley by whites, the estimated population of the Indians in Yosemite was between 200-500. There were three kinds of villages in the Yosemite Valley - permanent villages (occupied the year round); summer villages (May-October); and seasonal camps (for hunting and fishing). Some 37 camps have been counted in the Valley proper and at least six camps were occupied as late as 1898. The people living there belonged to the Ahwahneechee, or Ahwahnee Mew'wah, or Sierra Mewuk, (or, Miwok Indians). However, Chief Teneiya (or, Tenaya), the Chief of these Indians when the white men arrived in the 1850s, was recognized by the Mono tribe (found on the eastern side of the Sierras), as one of their numbers as he was born and lived among them until he founded the Paiute colony in Ahwahnee, or Yosemite Valley. The original Indian name of Yosemite Valley was Ah-wah'-nee (deep grassy valley, or perhaps, place of a gaping mouth), and the Indians living there were called Ah-wah-neé-chees according to statements by Chief Teneiya to Dr. Lafayette H. Bunnell who published Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, Which Led to That Event (Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1880). Chief Teneiya said the Ah-wah-neé-chees had been a large and powerful tribe, but by reason of wars and a fatal black sickness, nearly all had been destroyed, and the survivors of the band fled from the Valley and joined other tribes. This left Yosemite Valley empty for many years until Chief Teneiya returned from living with the Monos, where he had fled back home. Many years before this time, Teneiya's father had left Yosemite Valley and gone to live among the Monos, marrying a maiden of that tribe. Their son, Teneiya then brought some of his father's old tribe of Mono Paiutes and other Indians with him to Yosemite Valley, claiming it as the birthright of his people, and taking the name for his band as Yosemite Indians (from the word for large grizzly bear). Other bands of Indians were in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park at this time (Po-ho-neé-chees, Po-to-en'-cies, Wil-tuc-um'-nees, Noot'-choos, Chow-chil'-las, Ho-na'-ches, Me'-woos, Chook-chan'-ces) and these Indians, including the Yosemites, were all somewhat affiliated by common ancestry or by intermarriage according to Galen Clark in Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity (Yosemite Valley, CA: Galen Clark, 1907). When the Mariposa Battalion was organized under the command of Maj. James D. Savage to pursue these California tribes in the Mariposa Indian War of the early 1850s, the Yosemite Indians and one or two other bands of Indians retreated into the mountains of the Sierras. It was during this war campaign of the whites against the Indians that Maj. Savage and his 200 men discovered the Yosemite Valley on March 25, 1851 (two miners glimpsed Yosemite Valley in October 1849 while hunting a bear). Teneiya and his people were taken to the Fresno Reservation in June 1851. Chief Teneiya, his family and some of his followers were allowed to return to Yosemite Valley after being on the reservation for only a few months. In May 1852, the Yosemite Indians killed a party of prospectors coming into Yosemite Valley, setting off another expedition of troops into Yosemite in pursuit of the Indians. After many of the Yosemite Indians were killed, Chief Teneiya and the surviving Yosemites escaped over the mountains into Mono country. Teneiya and his little band stayed with the Monos until the autumn of 1853, when they returned to Yosemite Valley. But, after some of Teneiya's men raided the Monos for horses, the Monos set upon Teneiya and his people and the old chief and many of his warriors were killed. Yosemite became a national park in 1890, and incorporated Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove in 1906, comprising almost 1,200 square miles of mountains and meadows on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada in central California.