![]() ![]() The buffalo soldiers who initially patrolled Yosemite pioneered the distinctive hat worn by National Park Service rangers.īefore the 1916 establishment of the National Park Service, management of Yosemite fell to the military. Roosevelt spent a night beneath the giant sequoias of Mariposa Grove and compared it to “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.” Muir implored upon Roosevelt the need to expand the national park to include those lands still in California’s possession, and in 1906 the president signed a law that brought the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove under federal jurisdiction. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt traveled to California and requested that Muir take him camping for several days in Yosemite. Theodore Roosevelt stands with naturalist John Muir on Glacier Point, above Yosemite Valley, California in 1903. A presidential camping trip led to Yosemite National Park’s expansion. California, however, failed to prevent incursions by miners, loggers, cattlemen and sheepherders into the Yosemite Valley, which led Muir in 1895 to lament that it was “downtrodden, frowsy, and like an abandoned backwoods pasture.” 5. When the federal government first established Yosemite National Park, it did not include those lands already bestowed upon the state of California in 1864, including the Yosemite Valley and its natural icons-El Capitan, Half Dome and Yosemite Falls. At first, the national park did not include the Yosemite Valley and its iconic landmarks. “To let sheep trample so divinely fine a place seems barbarous,” wrote Muir of the “hoofed locusts” that were devastating the region’s subalpine meadows and spreading diseases that depleted the native bighorn sheep. In 1870, as many as 15,000 sheep pastured in the Tuolumne Meadows alone. Sheep were once among the primary threats to Yosemite’s natural landscape.Ī particular threat to Yosemite’s natural beauty came from sheepherders who frequently set meadows ablaze to promote the growth of edible grasses for their grazing sheep. His popular articles in newspapers and magazines raised the awareness of the region’s beauty and contributed to the eventual establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1890. Muir lamented the destruction of the forests and vast meadows that surrounded the state-controlled Yosemite Valley. “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” the amateur naturalist wrote. John Muir, a native of Scotland who grew up in Wisconsin, first set eyes on the Yosemite Valley in 1868. John Muir, Scottish-born American naturalist, engineer, writer and pioneer of conservation. ![]()
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