Yosemite does not mean grizzly bear; it meant 'they are killers'
Yosemite's name is often said to mean grizzly bear, a mistake popularised by the man who named the valley. In Miwok the word meant roughly 'they are killers', a label for the Ahwahneechee who lived there. The park itself helped invent the very idea of national parks.
The park spans about 3,070 square kilometres of California's Sierra Nevada across four counties, and nearly 95% of it is legally wilderness. Its granite walls, waterfalls and giant sequoia groves won World Heritage listing in 1984. The scenery is the product of two forces: roughly 10 million years ago the Sierra was lifted and tilted, steepening rivers into narrow canyons, and about a million years ago glaciers crept down from the heights and ground out the U-shaped Yosemite Valley.
People may have arrived 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, and Native Americans lived in the area for close to 4,000 years. The residents called their home Ahwahnee, big mouth, and themselves Ahwahneechee; they ate acorns, salmon and deer and traded with Central Sierra Miwok and Yokuts neighbours. The Gold Rush brought more than 90,000 newcomers in 1849, and California's Indigenous population collapsed from an estimated 300,000 to about 50,000. In 1851 the state-backed Mariposa Battalion under James Savage entered the valley to drive out Chief Tenaya's people, part of what is now called the California genocide.
Lafayette Bunnell, a doctor with that battalion, is credited with naming the valley after talking with Tenaya, and he wrongly believed Yosemite meant full-grown grizzly. The Miwok word yohhe'meti actually meant they are killers, a neighbours' name for the Ahwahneechee, and its resemblance to a bear term keeps the myth alive. Survivors were later moved into a state-built village and made livings through tourism; Totuya, also known as Maria Lebrado, Tenaya's granddaughter, died in 1931 as the last full-blooded Ahwahneechee.
Yosemite shaped conservation itself. Lobbying by Galen Clark and others led Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Grant in 1864, putting the valley under federal protection, and in 1890 John Muir's campaign persuaded Congress to create a national park, a model for the later national system. Around four million people visit each year, most staying within the valley's 18 square kilometres, and in 2016 attendance topped five million for the first time.
Source: Yosemite National Park
