On the Mariposa Brigade

　

1.

European contact with American aboriginal people was efficiently lethal. In a study published in The Journal of Quartenary Science (March 1, 2019), Alexander Koch and others argues that the near-extinction of New World populations was so massive that it altered the climate. In the article, "Earth System Impacts on the European Arrival", Koch and his fellow writers develop the claim that approximately 60 million people lived in the New World at the time of the first Spanish and European entradas. Disease brought by the European invaders killed 56 million members of this population. As a result, massive tracts of land, equivalent in size to France, were abandoned and, ultimately, reforested – most of these effects occurred in the densely peopled kingdoms in Mexico and Peru, as well as the Amazonian basin. Human populations tend to make the world warmer. Reforestation, the extermination of whole kingdoms almost to the last man, and the abandonment of agricultural slash-and-burn practices endemic to the New World resulted in global climate change – the world became a little bit cooler. Koch’s arguments are supported by several confluent strands of evidence: pollen frozen in circumpolar glaciers shows a substantial decrease in substances associated with agricultural (that is, maize and squash pollen). Carbon dioxide decreases demonstrating loss of population – people exhale carbon dixode. Similarly, soot correlated with slash-and-burn agriculture decreases in the century after the Spanish conquest of central and south America. (Climate science is intensely contentious and Koch’s article has inspired vituperative responses from those who deny climate-change – but the article, which I have read, seems soundly argued and rationally supported by objective evidence.)

In this context, it is a pleasure to write about the Mariposa Brigade. Charged with eliminating Indians in California’s central Sierra Nevada, this band of brothers pretty much failed on all accounts. They must be accounted, I think, the most feckless and incompetent band of Indian fighters ever produced on this continent – and, since most Indian campaigns were conducted with an astonishing level of incompetence, the killing often done by amateurs who improvised most of their massacres, this is saying something significant.

The story begins in 1833. A fur trader, crossing the Sierra Nevada with a small group of men, discovered a mighty chasm in the center of the range. The fur trader reported that the gorge had sheer cliffs a mile deep and that no human being would ever descend to the wooded valley floor. Giant trees stood as sentinel over the immense and mysterious canyon. The fur trader, his name was Joseph Reddeford Walker reported the discovery in a tone of confounded horror – the place was entirely desolate, without sign of any human habitation.

But, of course, Walker was wrong about the unpeopled nature of the place. In fact, there were Indians living in the forest between the enormous granite walls, the Ahwahneechee. The Sierra Nevada is a divide between the coastal Miwok people and the native Americans who make their homes in the Great Basin, generally tribes that speak Paiute dialects. Contrary to popular belief, Indian tribes as defined by the European settlers were not culturally pure entities – indeed, to the contrary, most tribes occupying a particular area were comprised of groups of people intermarried between various clans and language groups. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Hopi, were almost entirely assembled from immigrants from other parts of the Southwest. This seems to have been true of the Ahwahneechee – although the Indians spoke a Miwok dialect and followed craft traditions from that cultural group (for instance, very tightly woven reed baskets in which water could be transported), many of the members of the tribe were bilingual and, also, spoke Paiute. In fact, for several hundred years Paiute and Miwoks had mingled to form the Ahwahneechee – that is, the "people living within the great gaping mouth." (Ahwahnee is the native name for the Yosemite valley.)

Lowlanders are often suspicious of mountain people. Mountain people tend to be insular and quarrelsome, like the Hatfields and McCoys, much given to feuding. Old customs persist in the mountains and the people living there may be fiercely resistant to progress. From the perspective of more cosmopolitan Miwok and Paiutes, the Ahwahneechee were backwards and, even, dangerous. In Miwok, the people living in the "great gaping mouth" were said to be yosse mitte or yohhe mitte. The phrase, spelled variously, means something like "they are killers down there." Around 1850, these people were led by a man called Tenaya. True to form, Tenaya was reputed to be quarrelsome and quick to take offense. At that time, the Ahwahneechee were much diminished in numbers – diseases had decimated the Indians in contact with the Mexican and American settlers. A mysterious plague called the "black disease" wiped out vast numbers of mission Indians along the California coast and nothing is more readily exported than a virus – the disease struck Tenaya’s band about 20 years before the gold rush and many of the Ahwahneechee died. (Some accounts say that Tenaya moved the entire band out of the Yosemite Valley for a decade to avoid further contagion; during their exile from the valley, the Ahwahneechee, apparently, lived with their Paiute relatives at Mono Lake. Around 1840, the tribe returned to place of the gaping mouth.) It’s estimated that Tenaya’s clan consisted of no more than 200 members by 1850.

Before the troubles with the Mariposa Brigade, the Ahwahneechee lived in primitive, if serviceable, huts made from bark slabs of incense cedar stacked into a conical teepee-shape. The people were dependant upon acorn mush, a gruel that they made from the acorns of the Black Oak trees standing in tall, noble groves on the valley floor of the "great mouth." Acorn agriculture is labor intensive – the trees must be cultivated and the brush around them suppressed so that the acorns can be readily gathered. The acorns, then, must be shelled and soaked for a long time in water to leach out the tannic acids that would otherwise make them too bitter to eat. This soaking process required repeated cold water immersion of the acorns, something readily accomplished among the rivers and plunging streams in the Yosemite valley. Once the acorns had been suitably prepared, women ground them into a fine flour using metate stones. This flour, seasoned with rabbit or venison, was boiled into porridge, the principal sustenance of the Ahwahneechee. Acorns awaiting processing were stored in Chuckah granaries – these were cedar-wood boxes lined with insect-repellant bay leaves and mounted atop waist-high stilts to keep the contents dry. The first Europeans encountering California Indians remarked on the park-like aspect of the oak forests in which the native people lived – the trees stood isolated from one another in grassy meadows without undergrowth. At first, these landscapes were thought to be natural, but it is now apparent that acorn cultivation throughout California was highly intentional – the vast oak parks were cultural landscapes, the results of hundreds of years of consciously applied agricultural technology.

The coastal Miwok cultivated acorns, lived in the littoral and river valleys, and were, also, great salmon-eaters. The Paiutes to the west of the Sierra were horse-Indians, hunters, and aggressive traders. Some of Chief Tenaya’s kin were Paiutes living at Mono Lake in the basins beyond the Sierra on the present border between Nevada and California. "Mono" means flies and Mono Lake was a big salt-sour body of alkali water that bred black hordes of flies. Salts dissolved in the lake crystallizes into strange towers and pillars, rising up from the pale dead waters like some kind post-apocalyptic monuments. The Paiutes harvested fly larvae from the water, a great delicacy as far as local people were concerned and traded the maggots for venison from the high country, shells and beadwork made by the coastal Indians, and the tightly woven reed baskets that the Ahwahneechee women produced. Winter in the valley of the gaping mouth was harsh and the Ahwahneechee spent the cold months with kin either in the narrow, deep valleys to the west of the Sierra or on the east side of the range with the Mono Lake Paiutes.

The Ahwahneechee knew about the settlers and prospectors swarming into the foothills around Sutters Mill. The Europeans didn’t know about the Ahwahneechee, a state of affairs that was fine with the Indians. Unlike their relatives among the Miwok and Paiute, the Ahwahneechee were content in their mountain fortress, surrounded by cliffs reputed to be a mile high, and Tenaya correctly understood that nothing but harm would occur to his people if they embraced (or quarreled) with the hordes of White men in the San Joaquin valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills.

2.

James Savage was born in 1817 in Illinois when much of that State was still wilderness. Wild Indians ranged the marshes and woodlands and, as a boy, Savage was fascinated with them. Although he was poorly educated and scarcely literate, Savage had a good ear and the gift of tongues – before he was twenty, he had learned several Midwestern Indian dialects.

Savage was ambitious. Illinois was poor in the 1830's and life was difficult. The young man moved to Cayuga, New York where he was married to a woman named Eliza Hall. A business venture failed and Savage returned to Illinois to eke out a living. In 1846, the Middle-Border was infected with Gold Fever. Savage with his wife and brother set out by wagon train for the gold fields around Sutters Mill. The trip was difficult and Savage’s company of travelers, to their misfortune, banded together with the ill-fated Donner party. Caught in the snows of the high Sierra, Eliza gave birth to a baby girl. The trip west was deadly to many women and Eliza died a few hours after the baby was born. There was no food and everyone was perishing from cold and so no one bothered to name the infant – it was clear that she would be dead too in a matter of days if not hours. When this came to pass, mother and daughter were wrapped in blankets and buried together in a shallow pit hacked into the stony ground somewhere on the shores of what is now Lake Tahoe.

Savage survived, descending into the gold fields where he unsuccessfully tried his hand at prospecting. This was hard-work and daunting and Savage didn’t have the patience for mining. Instead, he deployed his linguistic skills, learning the language of the local Indians, the Tularenos. (The Tularenos are Yokuk-speaking Indians who lived in the San Joaquin Valley.) Savage set up trading posts with the Tularenos and, in fact, persuaded them to bring him nuggets of gold that they found in the placer deposits at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. In a few years, Savage had become wealthy – there are stories of him dragging barrels of gold dust through hotel lobbies in Sacramento and San Francisco. In order to cement his relationship with the Tularenos, Savage married the daughters of several chieftains – ultimately, he was said to have no fewer than five native wives. The Tularenos admired Savage and called him El Rey Herero (the "blonde king"). Savage amended that title to El Rey Tulareno ("the king of the Tularenos") and was known by nickname at the time of the Mariposa Brigade.

An empire-builder, Savage established a trading post on the Merced River about 25 miles from Yosemite Valley. At a place called Wood’s Crossing on the Toulumne Creek, Savage recruited 500 Indians from various tribes to work the placer deposits in the stream. Reportedly, he paid the Indians in blankets, beads and whiskey. Savage’s wealth and power increased. He formed partnerships with other White businessmen and set up trading posts near Agua Fria on the Mariposa Creek and at Coarse Gold Gulch on the Fresno River. At these locations, Savage’s business model was the same – the Indians exchanged placer gold for whiskey and trade goods.

Ongoing trade with the Indians was tenuous and, finally, unsustainable – the tribes resented the incursion of the hordes of White miners and sensed that they were being disenfranchised and excluded from their traditional territory by the land claims staked by the prospectors. During the hungry months, when winter provisions were exhausted, the Indians periodically killed the prospector’s horses and mules for food. Tensions increased and their were clashes. In May of 1850, a small band of Ahwahneechee raided Savage’s Merced Valley trading post – there was a long-range exchange of gunfire and the Indians retreated. With a dozen men, Savage tracked the Indians into the higher Sierra but couldn’t catch them. His Tulareno scouts said that the Indians were Uzamati, the clan of the grizzly bear, experienced fighters who lived in a valley that could only be reached through a narrow defile – the scouts weren’t willing to lead Savage’s party into ambush and, so, the posse returned to the trading post. Summer was hot and nothing much more happened.

But, in the Fall of 1850, one of Savage’s native wives admitted to him that the Indians living in the eastern Sierra foothills were planning an all-out assault on the White prospectors and pioneers. Some of the Indians were already charging tolls to pass through their valleys. Further, they were rapidly coming to understand the gold economy – why toil for gold when you can simply kill the prospectors and take the precious stuff from their saddle-bags? Although the tribes often fought one another, this time there was a common enemy and it was best for them to league together against the foe. This alliance of native tribes was led by Chief Juarez of the Tularenos, one of Savage’s clients. Savage decided to intimidate Chief Juarez by demonstrating to him the power of the White Americans in the "big village" of San Francisco. He brought Chief Juarez to the city and showed him the streets and railroads and the foundaries producing guns and cannons. He took him Fort Point beneath the Presidio so that he could see the federal soldiers and the harbor guns aimed out at the Golden Gate. Chief Juarez was impressed more by the abundance of whiskey and gambling in the city by the Bay. Contemporaries say that he was drunk throughout the entire excursion. Returning from the junket, Juarez told the Indians in Sierra foothills that, broadly speaking, White men came in two tribes – there were city dwellers who were powerful and well-armed and, then, the disorderly mob of prospectors without discipline, poorly equipped for war, and, most of them, drunken louts. Chief Juarez had extracted the wrong moral for his trip to San Francisco: he told the alliance of tribes conspiring against the miners that the city dwellers were a different breed and could not be counted-on to come to the aid of the miners. On that basis, Chief Juarez concluded that the Indians could probably kill prospectors with impunity.

In mid-December 1850, Savage was alarmed to observe that the Indians living near the Mariposa trading post had suddenly vanished. This implied that the warriors had embarked on a raid. Savage assembled another posse of about 16 horsemen and tracked the war party. The two groups met in a place where there was a deep canyon between them. Shouting back and forth, Savage pleaded with the Indians to return their encampment on the Mariposa River. The Indians replied that they were tired of working for the White men and that it was much easier to simply kill the prospectors and take their gold. Savage was afraid that he had been diverted away from his Mariposa trading post so that the place could be raided. So he rapidly retreated. Upon reaching Mariposa, Savage learned the Indians had attacked the trading post on the Fresno River, killed the agents there, and burned the place to the ground. The war had begun.

The State governor issued a proclamation forming the so-called Mariposa Brigade. The name for this war party of White militia was not too fearsome – "Mariposa" means "butterfly." James Savage was appointed the leader of the militia and told to "punish" the Indians. So a man named Savage, compromised by having five Indian wives, was dispatched with the "Butterfly Brigade" to fight the savages in the High Sierra. Initially, Savage commanded 75 men. In mid-January, the Butterfly (Mariposa) Brigade attacked an Indian camp near Agua Fria – Savage’s native scouts had located the encampment, about 400 people all told, and the plan was the classic maneuver deployed in the Indian wars: creep up as close to the camp as possible under the cover of darkness, attack at dawn and kill everyone. Unfortunately for the Mariposa Brigade, the warriors in the encampment discovered the encroaching militia and mounted a counter-attack. In the initial exchange of volleys, six militia men were shot down and, things being uncomfortably hot at the firing line, each wounded man was escorted to the rear by several nervous troopers. This depleted the skirmish line facing the Indians and, after another attack, the militia was repelled. (Two of the six wounded militia died.)

Obviously, more militia would be required to punish the hostiles. Accordingly, the governor ordered that miners be deputized to serve in the brigade. Ultimately, about 165 miners were assembled to fight with Savage’s troops. Various other companies, numbering another 100 men, were recruited. The force was divided into several parties, all of them advancing through the foothills to the High Country where the Indians were hiding. In late February and March of 1851, a number of rather desultory skirmishes occurred – the Indians harassed the columns of advancing militia with long-range sniper fire; the militia stormed abandoned Indian camps and burned the winter stores of acorns in their chuckah granaries. This part of the story is complex and not particularly enlightening and so I will pass over much of the maneuvering in the early Spring of 1851 in silence.

In late March, Savage’s posse reached a valley high in the foothills, a place called Wawona. Wawona was within the traditional range of the Ahwahneechee and a winter camp several thousand feet below the Yosemite Valley. Chief Tenaya was at that camp. Savage’s scouts informed him as to Tenaya’s presence and so runners were sent to Wawona to ask the leader of the Ahwahneechee to parley. The weather was foul and all the high passes were clogged with snow. Tenaya with several warriors came down to meet the Mariposa Brigade led by Savage, mostly responsible for scouting, and a military officer, Captain Boling. Tenaya said that the majority of the tribe was willing to negotiate with the militia and were planning to come down from Wawona, protected by the snow in the passes, in a couple of days when the weather improved. Several days passed and there was no sign of Indians coming down from the big hills to surrender. Accordingly, Boling with Savage and a doctor, Lawrence Bunnel marched higher into the Sierra taking Chief Tenaya and his associates with them as guides. Boling’s company mustered about 75 men.

The snow-pack at higher elevations was impassable and so the militia moved slowly, staying beneath the altitude where the snow was most formidable and the trails buried. Some Indians from villages in the area surrendered – about 80 men, women, and children were now part of the advance into the mountains, these people ostensibly prisoners but, in fact, outnumbered the militia men. More Indians came down to join the march from side valleys along the Merced River until there were approximately 250 people from various tribes accompanying the advance through the deepening snow.

After "wallowing in deep snow", the Mariposa Brigade staggered over a hilltop above what is now "Tunnel View", a spectacular vista into the Yosemite Valley. The sight of the valley ringed with sheer three-thousand foot cliffs and the waterfalls billowing off the tops of the granite escarpments was so unexpected and moving that the militia simply stopped its march. Dr. Bunnell reported that he burst into tears at the sublime landscape beneath them – many of the other militia-men, most of them cynical and hardened miners burst into tears. The valley floor was well-cultivated, the precious oak trees standing in isolation with meadows of brilliantly green grass between them and the Merced River, tranquil in this part of its course, glistened amidst the fields fragrant with early Spring wild flowers. Bunnell required that the place looked like a well-kept park.

Bivouacked on the hilltop that night, the officers discussed the name that they should give to the marvelous valley. Several of the men proposed "Paradise" or "Eden." Dr. Bunnell suggested that the place be called "Yosemite." In this way, Dr. Bunnell said, we will commemorate forever the name of the valley’s first inhabitants (inhabitants that the Butterfly Brigade had come to extirpate). There was some fierce rum-fueled debate about the name: many of the prospectors objected to naming the valley after a group of thieving, murderous Indians. A vote ensued. Savage cast the deciding ballot and the valley was named "Yosemite." Of course, there was a problem – the people in the valley had never called themselves "Yosemite". They were the Ahwaneechee. If "Yosemite" comes from the word "uzamati" ("grizzly bear") that term would identify only one clan among the several comprising the tribe. If "yosse mitte" is the etymology, something that seems likely, the valley is named after a slur denigrating its inhabitants – the Miwok expression: "they are a bunch of killers down there." It’s probably best to consider the meaning of "yo se mit ee" in Cantonese as reported by Chinese tourists in then national park: Holy-Blessed-Beautiful-Land.

On the morning after the place was named, Savage and his men descended from the hilltop to explore the valley and its side canyons. The land was deserted, the incense cedar wigwams knocked over, and the chuckahs abandoned. Savage and his men set the oak acorn granaries afire and burned the collapsed shelters as well. When the captured Indians on the hilltop saw the smear of smoke rising from the sites of the villages, they concluded that the militia’s intentions were malign. Although a couple of men had been posted to guard them, the Indians were too numerous – in small groups, they simply melted away into the forest. The canyons branching away from the place of the gaping mouth are steep and filled with the rubble from millennia of rock falls. It was slow-going for the milita finding a trail upward between the angular boulders the size of Boeing jets and plunging blasts of icy water. A few hundred yards above the valley, the militia found an old woman sitting idly on a rock and picking at scabs on her shins. She said that she was too old to climb up the fallen rocks toward the rim of the valley and that she didn’t mind if the soldiers shot her down on the spot. A couple of men picked her up and carried her down to the valley floor. No one else was found.

Returning to the hilltop overlooking the valley, Savage and Boling found that Tenaya and the captives had vanished. The sentries were apologetic but said that there was nothing they could do to prevent the Indians from slipping away from the encampment. Defeated, the Mariposa militia left the valley and began the march back into the San Joaquin valley. Along the way, they encountered a large Chowchilla village, another group of Indians living in the sierra foothills. Once more, the militia stealthily approached the village located on a terrace on the other side of the little San Joaquin River. Captain Boling is reported to have given a rousing pep-talk to his troops, assuring them that the moment of their victory over the savage foe was at hand. While he was speaking, the Indians swarmed out of their huts and lined the bank of the river taunting the militia – once again, the element of surprise had been lost. Several efforts were made to ford the river but it was flowing at full spate, swollen by the spring snow-melt. When a location downstream where the river could be crossed was finally located, the troops circled back to attack the village but found it completely deserted. Thwarted once more, the militia returned to its camp on the Mariposa Creek.

A week later another expedition was mounted. The Butterfly Brigade marched back to Yosemite Valley and, dividing into small skirmish-lines. swept down onto meadows and oak groves, troops advancing along both sides of the Merced River. In the interim, the Ahwahnchee had rebuilt their incense cedar bark lodges and begun processing acorns again. But the small villages scattered at intervals across the green and flowery valley floor were deserted. The troops burned the lodges once more and scattered the acorns stockpiled near the metate stones. Five Indians were sighted crossing a meadow near the river. The militia had some horsemen and they rode after the Indians capturing three of them under a massive formation of domed rocks, three great knuckles of granite rising two-thousand feet above the valley floor and veined with snow in the crevasses near their tops. The capture was propitious – the three Indians were Chief Tenaya’s sons.

The captives pointed the way up a narrow defile and said that the Ahwahneechee had fled in that direction. Leaving a couple men to attend to the prisoners, the rest of the brigade advanced up the narrow rift between the soaring cliffs. The Indians above them began to pitch heavy stones down into the crevasse where the militia were laboring upward and a couple men were slightly injured. More big rocks and boulders showered down and so the militia retreated to the meadow under the three huge granite domes where the captives remained under guard. The youngest boy was sent to his father with the message that the militia’s captain wanted to parley with him. He hustled up the defile and vanished. Then, the two other boys fled. One of them escaped, but the other was shot in the back and died at the edge of flowery meadow.

An hour later, Tenaya came down from the mountain. Several militia men approached him and Tenaya thought better of negotiations at that time. He ran back up the hillside but was cut-off and taken prisoner. When he saw his son lying dead on the ground, he began to weep and loudly demanded that the militia men kill him as well. Captain Boling told that he was sorry about the dead youth but that this was war and war led to killing. Boling had Tenaya tied-up and sent back with several men over the trails leading into the valley.

After a couple days hiatus, the Mariposa Brigade moved from the Yosemite Valley up into the high country following a conspicuous trail made by the fleeing Indians above the tree-line and through the Alpine meadows on the high pass. The troops came upon the Ahwahneechee camped by a glacial lake. The Indians were tired and hadn’t posted sentries and, this time, the militia successfully surprised them. Some shots were fired but no one was hurt or killed. The Indians agreed to accompany the militia down to a stockade near Mariposa Creek. Captain Boling and Savage wanted to continue the expedition – there were other bands in the area and, heartened by their successful attack on the Ahwahneechee encampment, the leaders of the brigade proposed rounding-up the other local Indians. Another captain named Kuykendall reasonably protested that these other natives hadn’t done anything to warrant reprisals and should be left in peace. A dispute ensued and Kuykendall was ultimately court-martialed for "unofficer-like behavior" and disobeying orders. But during these proceedings, the militia, after all mere civilians deputized to fight the Indians, became restive. The men’s clothing was ragged, food stores were depleted, and, worst of all, their reserves of tobacco and rum were exhausted. Members of the Butterfly Brigade began to desert and, finally, the militia was formally dissolved on July 1, 1851.

Tenaya’s band of Ahwahneechee was kept at Mariposa Creek for a few months. Then, funds required to hire guards to watch the tribe were exhausted. Tenaya and his people were released on their own recognizance – he promised to stay away from prospectors and refrain from robbing them of their gold and livestock. In exchange, Savage and Captain Boling agreed to leave the band in peace in the Yosemite Valley.

President Millard Fillmore sent three commissioners from Washington to negotiate treaties with Indians living in the Sierra foothills. Eighteen treaties were negotiated and the Indians agreed to cede their mountain domain to the Federal government in exchange for a grant of 8 ½ million acres in the San Joaquin valley. The government had to buy some of this land from settlers living in that area and the cost of the treaties laboriously negotiated with 502 Indian leaders was expected to be about 500,000 dollars. Not surprisingly, the House of Representatives refused to fund the acquisition of the reservation land. Furthermore, the State of California was unwilling to commit prime agricultural terrain in the San Joaquin valley to the tribes. The Indians never received any land or any money. They were put on desolate desert reservations or simply exterminated. (The entire affair was so blatantly nefarious that the actual treaties negotiated with the tribes, all of which were breached, were kept classified as "military secrets" until 1905.)

The members of the Mariposa Brigade including James Savage petitioned the California legislature for payment of wages earned chasing the Indians between January and July in 1851. The legislature was evenhanded, niggardly with the Indians, it was equally niggardly with Savage and his Mariposa militia. No wages were paid. In 1854, Congress agreed to pay mine-owners and trading post operators a small percentage of the damage incurred as a result of Indian raiding. But, by that time, James Savage was dead.

After his military adventures, Savage established two new trading posts near the new reservations proposed for the foothills. White squatters encroached on the land set-aside for the Indians and conflict ensued. Near the Kings River Reservations, squatters murdered several Indians. Savage was outraged. The squatters, lead by a man named Walter Harvey, were killing the customers of his trading post. Savage demanded that the government impanel a commission to investigate the murders. A council was summoned to a place called Four Creeks – this was in August of 1852. Savage’s denunciation of Walter Harvey had been stinging – he accused Harvey of orchestrating a "massacre" of his Indian clients. On the way to Four Creeks, Harvey intercepted Savage and demanded that he withdraw his allegations of "massacre". Savage refused and punched Harvey in the face. Harvey pulled his gun and shot Savage four times through the body, killing him. Harvey was tried for murder but not convicted – it was Bench trial conducted by a judge that Harvey had recommended for appointment and the Court ruled that the defendant had acted in self-defense.

The Ahwahneechee Indians remained in Yosemite until 1926. Quickly enough, they converted their economy from foraging, hunting, and oak cultivation to the production of curios. The women continued to weave wonderfully dense and water-impermeable baskets that they sold to tourists. The Ahwahneechee lived in huts in a corner of the valley but, like the black bears in the park, spent much of their time begging from tourists. Alcohol was a problem for them and some of their women became "commercial" to use the term that people employed at the time. Ultimately, the bedraggled and tiny group of beggars became an embarrassment to the National Park and they were ousted. Forty years later, during the sixties, a couple of very old women returned to the valley where they demonstrated native crafts and posed with tourists. Their daughters are still employed by the Park Service and sometimes give tours focusing on the Native American history in the park. The three enormous granite domes overlooking the meadow where Chief Tenaya’s son was shot down are now called "The Three Brothers."

Tenaya couldn’t forgive the White men for killing his son. He led a couple of raids against prospectors in the Sierra Nevada and killed two of them. A posse of 25 soldiers chased Tenaya back to the Yosemite Valley. He escaped into the high country. The soldiers summarily tried and executed four or five Indians said to be implicated in the killings, shooting them by firing squad. Efforts to capture Tenaya were unsuccessful.

Tenaya joined his kin at Mono Lake. Things didn’t end well for him. About the time, Savage was killed, Tenaya was stoned to death by the Paiutes. Some accounts say that he stole some horses and was battered to death over that crime. Tenaya’s granddaughter told a historian in the first decade of the 20^th century that Tenaya had been gambling on some kind of "hand game," that a quarrel erupted, and that the other Paiutes involved in the wager beat him to death with heavy stones.

The name "Tenaya" is pleasantly melodious. Several creeks bear the chief’s name. In the National Park, along the famous Tioga Pass Road, high above the tree-line, there is a splendid glacial lake nestled under a massive ark-shaped dome of rock. This is Tenaya Lake. Savage’s name is ugly. So far as I know, nothing is named after him.