page_title: History of the Yosemite area
section_title: Artists, photographers, and the first tourists
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Yosemite area / Early history / Artists, photographers, and the first tourists
caption_attribution_description: English: An album by Carleton E Watkins (1829-1916), one of the finest American landscape photographers of the nineteenth century.
context_page_description: Human habitation in the Sierra Nevada region of California reaches back 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Historically attested Native American populations, such as the Sierra Miwok, Mono and Paiute, belong to the Uto-Aztecan and Utian phyla. In the mid-19th century, a band of Native Americans called the Ahwahnechee lived in Yosemite Valley. The California Gold Rush greatly increased the number of non-indigenous people in the region. Tensions between Native Americans and white settlers escalated into the Mariposa War. As part of this conflict, settler James Savage led the Mariposa Battalion into Yosemite Valley in 1851, in pursuit of Ahwaneechees led by Chief Tenaya. The California state military forces burned the tribe's villages, destroyed their food stores, killed the chief's sons, and forced the tribe out of Yosemite. Accounts from the Mariposa Battalion, especially from Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, popularized Yosemite Valley as a scenic wonder.
  In 1864, Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees were transferred from federal to state ownership. Yosemite pioneer Galen Clark became the park's first white guardian.
context_section_description: Forty-eight Non-Indian people visited Yosemite Valley in 1855, including San Francisco writer James Mason Hutchings and artist Thomas Ayres. Hutchings wrote an article about his experience that was published in the July 12, 1855, issue of the Mariposa Gazette and Ayres' sketch of Yosemite Falls was published in late 1855; four of his drawings were presented in the lead article of the July 1856 and initial issue of Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine. The article and illustrations created tourist interest in Yosemite and eventually led to its protection.
  Ayres returned in 1856 and visited Tuolumne Meadows in the area's high country. His highly detailed angularly exaggerated artwork and his written accounts were distributed nationally and an art exhibition of his drawings was held in New York City.
  Hutchings took photographer Charles Leander Weed to Yosemite Valley in 1859; Weed took the first photographs of the valley's features, which were presented to the public in a September exhibition held in San Francisco. Hutchings published four installments of "The Great Yo-semite Valley" from October 1859 to March 1860 in his magazine and re-published a collection of these articles in his Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California, which remained in print into the 1870s.
  Carleton Watkins exhibited his 17 by 22 in (43 by 56 cm) Yosemite views at the 1867 Paris International Exposition.
  Photographer Ansel Adams made his first trip to Yosemite in 1916; his photographs of the valley made him famous in the 1920s and 1930s. Adams willed the originals of his Yosemite photos to the Yosemite Park Association, and visitors can still buy direct prints from his original negatives. The studio in which the prints are sold was established in 1902 by artist Harry Cassie Best.
  Milton and Houston Mann opened a toll road to Yosemite Valley in 1856, up the South Fork of the Merced River. They charged the then considerable sum of two dollars per person until the road was bought by Mariposa County, after which it became free.
  In 1856, settler Galen Clark discovered the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia at Wawona, an indigenous encampment in what is now the southwestern part of the park. Clark completed a bridge over the South Fork of the Merced River in 1857 at Wawona for traffic headed toward Yosemite Valley and provided a way station for travelers on the road the Mann brothers built to the valley.
  Simple lodgings, later called the Lower Hotel, were completed soon afterward; the Upper Hotel, later renamed Hutchings House and eventually known as Cedar Cottage, was opened in 1859. In 1876, the more substantial Wawona Hotel was built to serve tourists visiting the nearby grove of big trees and those on their way to Yosemite Valley. Aaron Harris opened the first campground business in Yosemite in 1876.
caption: Bridal veil fall photographed by Carleton E. Watkins
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