The Yosemite

A beloved classic, seen whole: John Muir’s The Yosemite and the history it left out.

John Muir’s The Yosemite (1912) is a love letter to a valley, written to persuade a nation to protect it. The prose still works. Few writers have ever matched Muir on falling water, winter storms, or the light on granite at dawn.

But a love letter is not the whole story. Muir wrote as if the valley had been waiting empty for the right admirer to find it. It had not. The Ahwahneechee had lived there for thousands of years, and the cliffs and lakes carried their names first.
This edition restores Muir’s complete text in a clean, readable format and pairs it with a substantial new illustrated foreword that places his book in context. Muir thought Yosemite was an uninhabited wilderness. We have since learned that it wasn’t. Here are some of the things most of us were never taught:

• The valley’s first names, and the people forced out in 1851.
• The Mariposa Indian War.
• The eighteen treaties made with California tribes in 1851 and 1852, left unratified by the Senate, and hidden for fifty years.
• Hetch Hetchy, a second Yosemite valley drowned behind a dam despite Muir’s fierce objection.
• The removal of the valley’s last Native residents, completed by the Park Service as late as 1969.

The foreword neither tears Muir down nor lets him off the hook. It admires the writing, names the blind spots, and asks how a great champion of wild places could so nearly miss the people already living in them.

Also included are corrected botanical names, light editorial notes, and a “For Further Reading” guide.

For lovers of Yosemite and for anyone interested in how we remember, and misremember, our most famous places, here is the fuller book. Muir asked us to love this place. This edition asks us to know its deep history.