The trading post had been raided and several people killed; in the name of conservation. Chief Tenaya and his tribe, renegades among their own people, were feeling the encroachment of the miners and settlers closing in. Through retaliation, they sought to conserve the land they called Ahwanee. The year was 1851.
The miners and early American settlers had their own definition of conservation. So they captured and drove the Chief and his Paiute renegades from the land and, as was customary among 18th century Europeans, renamed the land. The name chosen was Yosemite. Forty one years later, John Muir would establish the Sierra Club in the interest of conserving the natural splendor of Yosemite. After all, the seeds of conservation, watered by the blood of natives and foreigners alike, were already sown here.
Mr. Muir was constrained to fight for the protection of this land due to proposed reductions of park boundaries. He was successful in returning the area to Federal Land management and in this way began a lifetime of conservation efforts motivated by the realization, as he later wrote, that “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” (Muir, 1912). The club has celebrated a time line rich in meaningful efforts that have produced vast reserves of natural resources for the exploration and enjoyment of future generations.
A contemporary of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir personified Nature as one who, “with her choicest treasures, … spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert.” Because of the efforts of these two naturalists, Thoreau in the east and Muir in the west, naturalism would flourish and lead to a new awareness of man’s connectedness with nature coupled with his responsibilities for the preservation of its resources.
However, where Thoreau opened the minds of men to new paradigms of thought concerning nature, Muir enlisted men to take action. Working with political structures, he established institutions of protection to safeguard our natural treasures. While the former was enrapt in self realization from deep introspection, the latter was laboring to make malleable, those rigid mechanisms already suffering from narrow-minded rigor mortis.
Is it not ironic that, like the Paiutes of old, the club today must labor for its own preservation with equal intensity focused on building and maintaining its presence, in hopes of garnering more donations and thereby continuing as nature’s guardian? In a sense, the unmitigated size of the club itself is a kind of organizational Yosemite. Chief Tenaya fought to maintain his foothold in the valley where the Sierra Club was born and today this fight for survival against encroaching elements continues.
REFERENCES
Bunnell, Lafayette Houghton. (1859). “How the Yo-Semite Valley was Discovered and
Named.” Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine. (May 1859). http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/hutchings_california_magazine/35.pdf
Muir, John. (1912). The Yosemite. The John Muir Library. (pg. 256). Downloadable PDF
available here: http://books.google.com/books?id=vl4AAAAAYAAJ
