Crow's Range: An Environmental History Of The Sierra Nevada

Crow’s Range

An Environmental History of the Sierra Nevada

David Beesley

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

RENO & LAS VEGAS

University of Nevada Press, Reno, NV 89557 USA

Copyright © 2004 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Carrie House

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beesley, David, 1938–

Crow’s range : an environmental history of the Sierra Nevada / David Beesley. — 1st ed.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10 0-874147-562-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Human ecology—Sierra Nevada Region (Calif. and Nev.)  2. Conservation of natural resources—Sierra Nevada Region (Calif. and Nev.)  3. Sierra Nevada Region (Calif. and Nev.)—Environmental conditions.

I. Title.

GF504.S54B44   2001

333.72'09794'4—dc22        2004006610

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-702-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-634-6 (ebook)

Falcon and Crow . . . took some of the earth brought up by Duck from the mud beneath the primeval floodwaters. . . . The Water was so deep that the trip down to the bottom and back to the surface had taken Duck a day and a half. Carrying some of the earth, Falcon flew west and Crow flew east, and as they flew they scattered grains of soil and told them to become mountains. Falcon and Crow met in the south at Tehachapi Pass. Crow, who had built the Sierras, asked Falcon, Why didn’t you put up bigger hills? Falcon answered, Because you had more dirt than I!

—Yokuts story of the making of the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Major Forces That Have Shaped the Sierra Nevada

1: A Sierra Shaped by Native People

2: The Sierra Gold Made

3: Conservation Shapes the Sierra Nevada, 1864–1900

4: Establishing Resource Management, 1905–1945

5: The Philosophy of More, 1940–1970

6: The Environmental Challenge, 1960–1999

7: The Sierra in Peril and Ecosystem Politics

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

(following page 116)

California Native American family in Yosemite Valley

California Native American and cedar-slab structure

Young Paiute men visiting Yosemite Valley

Native grinding rocks, Amador County

James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill, Coloma, ca. 1848

Euro-American and Chinese placer miners

English Dam on the Yuba River

River mining in the Sierra Nevada

Hydraulic flume in Nevada County

Monitors at work, hydraulic mine, Nevada County

Hydraulic mine and flume, Nevada County

Trees regenerating heavily hydraulic-mined hillside, Nevada County

Log dam at Blue Lakes, Alpine County, California

Dutch Flat Toll Road at Donner Summit

Brockliss Bridge over the North Fork of the American River

Ox team engaged in logging at Lake Tahoe, 1860s or 1870s

Loading a log truck, Lake Tahoe, 1880s

Small Sierra lumber mill

Pray’s Mill and Wharf, Glenbrook, Nevada, ca. 1870

Glenbrook, Nevada, on Lake Tahoe, 1884

Steam donkey used to pull cut logs to milling sites

Hobart Mills, Nevada County, California

Cutting segments of the General Noble Tree

Loggers and felled sequoia, 1880s

Skeleton of the Mother of the Forest Tree, Calaveras County

Cutting down the Mark Twain Tree, Tulare County

Sequoia being cut by park officials near the Grant Forest

Ponderosa pine forest, Kern Canyon

Sheep grazing in Tuolumne Meadows

Mountain lions shot as part of predator-control efforts, Sequoia National Park

Tree carving by Basque sheepherder, Perazzo Meadows

Map of National Parks and Forests of the Sierra Nevada

Bear pit on Bear Hill, Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, 1940s

(following page 191)

Stoneman House, Yosemite Valley

Dairy herd grazing in Yosemite Valley

U.S. Cavalry troops guarding Yosemite, 1909

John Muir

Webber Lake Resort, 1930s

Steamer at Lake Tahoe

Dam at the outlet of Lake Tahoe into the Truckee River, 1899

Narrow-gauge railroad along the Truckee River below Lake Tahoe

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir discuss Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Trees, 1903

Four women hikers from a Sierra Club group, ca. 1895–1910

John Muir’s last Sierra Club outing, 1912

Railroad logging in the northeastern Sierra Nevada

Conflicting logging styles in the Sierra

The Yosemite Lumber Company logging on a 50-percent grade

Abandoned construction project of the Mount Whitney Power Company

Stand of mature Sierra pines

Forest fire in the Truckee River area, 1899

Turkey Hill Power House, El Dorado Canyon, 1900

Senator Charles McNary, 1923

Hetch Hetchy Valley before construction of the dam

Bulletin of the National Committee for the Preservation of the Yosemite National Park

Construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam, Hetch Hetchy Valley

Hetch Hetchy Dam and tower, looking upstream

Unregulated automobile camping in Yosemite Valley

Pack team supporting Sierra Club outing, Hutchinson Meadow, 1938

Tioga Road before improvements, 1920s

Tenaya Lake as wilderness

Owens Lake, the Alabama Hills, and Mount Whitney, by Mary Austin

Postcard view of the Los Angeles Aqueduct shortly after its completion

Map of River and Lake Systems of the Sierra Nevada

Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery

Mineral King

Crowding and automobiles at the Giant Forest/Grant Grove

Yosemite Firefall

Prescribed burning in Yosemite Valley

The Sierra in Peril, June 9, 1991

Yosemite flood of 1997

City street in Truckee

New dam at the outlet to the Truckee River at Tahoe

View from Martis Valley Rock Shelter

Dog-friendly beach at Tahoe

Continuing development in Squaw Valley

PREFACE

The Sierra Nevada—John Muir called it the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have ever seen. For those of us who come after him to write about it, that creates a problem. We are forever seeking to find a name that can trump the Scottish-born mountaineer and writer. We strive to come up with a descriptive word or phrase of our own that carries the same power and economy as his. Try the Mighty Sierra. John of the mountains has staked that out as well. The same goes if you try to move from the shining granite of the range’s core to its other components. Whether it is the torrid foothills, the grandest and most beautiful mixed-conifer forests, the range’s meadows that he compared to landscape gardens, its glacial-sculptured granite valleys, or even the lower but still inspiring volcanic summits of its northern end covered with floods of lava, Muir has powerfully described them all.¹

I had to put the powerful presence of Mr. Muir aside if I was going to succeed in my endeavor to write an environmental history of the Sierra Nevada. He was immensely important in shaping our image of the Sierra and in beginning the struggle to preserve some of its wonders from overdevelopment or destruction. But his contributions to its environmental history form only a piece of its nearly 10,000–year human story. We have, for better or worse, been making our marks on the range for a very long time. The interaction of humans with the Sierra over some ten millennia is the subject of this book. In it I offer a comprehensive summary of the ways in which people have contributed to changing the Sierra over the whole period of its human occupation. To symbolize this long relationship, I have based the book’s title on a Yokuts creation story.² They were the people whose homeland was the area below Yosemite before the gold rush. Their account of the birth of the Sierra Nevada is both charming and evocative. In it, Crow triumphs over Falcon in a contest to see who could build the highest mountains in California. Crow won because he had more dirt than Falcon. We are dealing with Crow’s range here.

The Sierra Nevada is one of the most unique geomorphic features in the world. It is the largest unbroken mountain range in the contiguous United States, stretching north to south for more than four hundred miles. It is not a series of mountain systems such as the Rockies or the Cascades and is best understood as a single ecosystem. It is the Sierra Nevada, singular, not the Sierras.

It is my basic assumption that all human cultures that have lived in the range have changed it through their actions. There are clear cultural, economic, technological, and ideological differences in how successive generations of humans have gone about this changing. My narrative reflects how different times and people left their distinct impressions on the Sierra.

For most of its human history, native people used Sierran resources, occupied well-defined homelands, and began the shaping of its environment to suit their daily needs. The lower-elevation chaparral and oak woodlands and the higher-elevation forests evolved in part through their intelligent interaction with natural process at work in the range.

Since 1848, when commercial development of Sierran rivers and forests began, the Sierra has provided water, timber, minerals, grazing land, and recreational opportunities for a developing nation and region. Eight national forests are either wholly or partly located in the Sierra—Plumas, Tahoe, Eldorado, Stanislaus, Sierra, Sequoia, Toiyabe, and Inyo. Because of special environmental issues, the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit was carved out of two adjoining national forests as well following the Second World War. The privately owned lower-elevation Sierra Nevada commercial forestlands were completely cut over by the 1930s. Now that they have become productive of timber again, debate over their future is of key interest to foothill communities no longer dependent on extractive industries as they were in the past. The role of fire in these forests is the focus of intense national and state public interest as well. The Sierra’s forested watersheds provide the lifeblood for California’s and northern Nevada’s urban and farming communities. The fate of the Sierra’s public and private forestlands and its water is at the center of a national debate today.

Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon are also the subject of national and international interest and wonder. Early on they were recognized as worthy of protection from private exploitation, even as the rest of the range was being ravaged by uncontrolled development in the aftermath of the gold rush. Although Tahoe was not saved for public use, the movement to preserve the other scenic marvels for that purpose marks the beginning of conservation in America. Concern about these national wonders is part of a national and international debate over the use of natural spaces that continues to make headlines.

Throughout the range’s human history, it also has been changing in response to nonhuman actions. The range is constantly evolving through the forces of uplifting and downthrusting, rockfall, erosion, climate change, and fire. Humans entered the range as another shaping force—glaciation—was declining in immediate importance. The onset of a massive human invasion since 1850 with the gold rush came when the Sierra was entering a warmer and wetter phase of its existence. All of our assumptions about how to live in the Sierra are based at best on a weather pattern that is only 150 years old. Drought cycles of many decades’ length were common in earlier California weather history.³ Modern California—including such cities as San Francisco and Los Angeles—has staked its future on being able to get water from the Sierra. Earthquake and climate shift could call all that into question.

The Sierra Nevada is home to countless forms of native plants and animals. Some of these are found naturally only in the Sierra. Some of its threatened nonhuman inhabitants, such as the California spotted owl and similar rare and endangered species, carry the same weight in development of forest policy as the California owl’s cousin did in the Northwest. The Sierra’s giant sequoia trees are so unique that a national park was created to protect them. One of the nation’s newest national monuments provides even more protection for some of those giants left out in 1890 when the park was created.

Because of its significance, I believe the Sierra Nevada deserves a comprehensive environmental history. This work is a synthesis of primary and secondary sources. The Sierra is huge. Its human record is long and complex, and materials relating to it are widely dispersed. While it is generally recognized to be a single ecoregion, the great variety of geographic subregions it encompasses requires hard labor to bring the subject together into some coherent whole. To make it even more daunting, the rate of development of many of its heavily used regions today and the intense struggle over recent policy issues affecting the range are accelerating. For many years I devoted time to researching and writing about aspects of the range’s environmental history. But it was only after retiring from a heavy teaching load that I finally decided that now was the time to act. The worst that could happen was that I would fail. And no one else I tried to talk into sharing the burden was willing to take it on with me.

My approach to the writing of this book is that of a teacher. But this is not a textbook. For over twenty-five years I taught California history to college undergraduates. My special area of interest and research during that time was the Sierra Nevada. It was easy to make the Sierra my life’s work. I came to California predisposed to seek out the range as a rock climber and mountaineer even before I began to take study of its environmental history seriously.

Over the years I had begun to integrate physical knowledge of the range with the historical study of the human actions that contributed to changes in its natural spaces. This firsthand and direct experience with large portions of the Sierra helped me to better understand the range, especially when it came to appreciating the long struggles of individuals to protect some of its natural marvels, such as Mono Lake, Hetch Hetchy, and Mineral King. And that is true whether the preservation struggle was successful or not. Standing on a stump of a sequoia in Converse Basin or overlooking Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is a humbling experience. Once you see these places, it is easy to understand why people would give much of their life and time in a fight to preserve them.

Also, I found that taking students to places where human actions changed the landscape, and explaining how the changes occurred, led me to a deeper understanding of what environmental history in the Sierra is all about. It is one thing to write about an event or place, and quite another to integrate the physical setting with the human action that took place there. Consider, for example, the massive impact hydraulic mining had on the once-forested hillsides of a tributary of the Yuba River. All I have to do, literally, is look out my studio window to see Sailor Flat and the North Columbia Diggings. To the east of them is Malakoff Diggings, now a California state park. While standing there underneath a wall of compacted sand and gravel exposed to view by the actions of the hydraulic monitors or water cannons, I have explained to students that behind the immediate altered terrain lay a whole supportive series of industries. Capturing Sierran water was the key. I had to explain the logging of the area’s forests to build dams and flumes from the cut timber, and the transportation and coordination of water delivery necessary to make the whole process work. Mercury was mined elsewhere in California, and tons of it was used to capture the fine gold that was washed into giant wooden sluices. It is not just the scarred hillsides of the immediate hydraulic mine or even the still-existing mercury deposited into the streams. The process involved the use of whole drainages and many industrial operations. The immense scale of the industry became clearer to me as I explained how it all worked.

The experience of understanding a Sierra-wide industry can also be achieved on a smaller and more intimate scale. You can sit in an aspen grove on Pole Creek in the Truckee River drainage, for example. It was there that I chose to explain how carvings on the white bark of the grove’s trees documented the time that Basque sheepherders spent as part of a Sierran grazing industry over many decades.⁴ I would ask the students to apply the experience of these herders and the thousands of sheep they tended at that one spot to nearly every river drainage or alpine meadow on both sides of the range. Whatever this did for the students, I know that it made the scale of impact clearer for me. I hope that this combination of understanding the terrain and having explained the effects of human actions in the Sierra will enliven and inform my narrative and analysis of Sierran environmental history.

My narrative describes how at different times people left distinct impressions on the Sierra, creating ecological baselines that reflect the dominant cultural perspectives that guided their actions. The key factors in each successive stage include technology, population size, and that elusive factor called world view, which at times in the historic period I equate with formal government policies.

It has taken a quarter of a century for me to create this environmental history of the Sierra. Research for the work was conducted in the traditional ways of examining printed and manuscript sources, but it was also enriched by years of climbing, hiking, and sauntering, as John Muir would say, throughout the Sierra. Francis Farquhar’s History of the Sierra Nevada, Douglas Strong’s Tahoe, Lary Dilsaver and William Tweed’s Challenge of the Big Trees, Alfred Runte’s Yosemite, Tim Palmer’s The Sierra Nevada: A Mountain Journey, and John Walton’s Western Times and Water Wars provided models for what I was trying to do: that is, to think of the range in broader historical and environmental terms.⁵

In 1995 and 1996, I was fortunate to participate in the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP). My role in this monumental study of the Sierra was small when compared to the scope of the project. My job was to provide a summary of Sierra Nevada environmental history from 1820 to 1960. I was asked to put together all the pieces of the range’s history that I had worked at, as well as using material given me by a number of other scholars working on SNEP. This activity forced me for the first time to see the range as a whole, including both of its flanks, and from top to bottom.

The book is primarily intended for the general public—to provide a comprehensive view of the Sierra’s environmental history both for those who already know and love the range, as well as those who will come to know it over time. It can also serve professional historians by providing a comprehensive survey of the significant, but often widely dispersed, primary and secondary historical materials that pertain to the range. I hope that it will contribute to the creation of what historian Dan Flores refers to as bioregional history—specifically, a history that tries, as Flores suggests (using Fernand Braudel’s idea of longue durée), to investigate the ’big view,’ not through wide geographic generalizations in shallow time, but through analyzing deep time in a single place.⁶ I have tried to create a comprehensive look at 10,000 years of how humans have changed the Sierra Nevada by their actions.

The Sierra Nevada is not just the subject of this book. It is also the key player. The range has always been a dynamic and active force to be reckoned with by individuals and societies that lived in it. Many have acted in its name, or fought tenaciously to use its resources for their own benefit. The beauty of its natural features has compelled political action and fierce loyalty far beyond its actual boundaries. I have chosen to organize this narrative in a generally chronological order that reflects what I believe are the major periods in the range’s long environmental history. I modify this approach by applying a technique that I developed while teaching the hundreds of not completely dedicated students I have worked with over the years. I found it useful to draw students into a historic subject by relating a current example that reflected the spirit or substance of a past historical event. Obviously, this technique involved the use of analogy to stimulate students’ interest. But it had another purpose. History as I see it is alive, and it has consequences. Past actions shape the present. Our forests today are the result of choices made in the past. And native people still live in the Sierra, although their influence has been reduced. Hopefully my mixing of past and present will act to illuminate my re-creation of the Sierran past.

As a final word, I want to make clear to readers that this book was not begun solely out of scholarly interest in a unique mountain range. That is part of the reason, of course. But there is something else at work on me. I feel a kinship with mountain environments. I grew up near the Wasatch Range in Utah and have climbed and hiked there and in the Tetons, Cascades, Sierra, Castle Crags, and the Swiss Alps. I am drawn to mountains just as other writers have been attracted to deserts, grasslands, red-rock canyons, seashores, giant forests, or lakes. But it is the Sierra Nevada where I have chosen to live, and I feel a strong commitment to tell its story. I hope that for others who care about the Sierra, this book can give them information and perspective they can use. I hope that it can aid in the ongoing debate concerning the fate of the Sierra Nevada, just as John Muir hoped his writing would. So there it is, caught in the long shadow cast by John Muir, even though I said I was going to try to break free. Oh well, being in Muir’s shadow is not only deserved on my part, but it’s not such a bad place to be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A good many people have played a role in the making of this book over a great number of years. Closest to hand are the supportive people at the University of Nevada Press. Margaret Dalrymple initially expressed interest in my work as editor-in-chief of the press in 1999, when it was a much longer manuscript, and she continued to provide guidance as project editor until its publication. Joanne O’Hare as editor shepherded it in the crucial period of presentation to the Editorial Advisory Board of the press and through the production process. And although Sandy Crooms is no longer with the Press, her cheerful support and advice as assistant director helped in getting the manuscript reviewed and accepted. I owe gratitude as well to William D. Rowley and two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their suggestions for its improvement. I would also like to thank Sara Vélez Mallea and Gerry Anders for their help on the manuscript.

Others have read parts of the manuscript and have given advice. They include Tim Duane, Tim Palmer, and Malcolm Margolin. Of special note here is my colleague of many years Michael P. Claytor, whose advice and extensive knowledge of California Native Americans made chapter 1 easier to write. He and I also walked together over most of the drainage systems of the northeastern and northwestern Sierra. As part of those adventures, he pointed out unerringly where native people had worked or lived and why they did so, giving me a sense of the long and close ties of these first inhabitants to the Sierra. Our main purpose in these jaunts was to search out Basque tree carvings in aspen groves and to study and compare how this interesting ethnic group blended their culture into Sierran use patterns. Gracias, Miguel.

Many others gave advice, help, and information, including Steve Nicola, Susan Lindstrom, Dana Supernowicz, Pamela Conners, Stephenie Tungate, William Tweed, Lary Dilsaver, James Johnson, Norman Wilson, William Laudenslayer, Linda Lux, Kevin McKelvey, Hank Meals, Douglas H. Strong, and Len Berardi. Special assistance came from Richard Markley, Carmel Meisenbach, and William Baker and other support staff at the Tahoe National Forest who gave me their help and information while I was using the archives there. Richard and Carmel also helped with summaries of information about Tahoe National Forest history while I was working on the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project.

Through good fortune I had the honor to be chosen to contribute a chapter to the monumental Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project. I would like to thank Don C. Erman for placing his confidence in me to carry out my charge, and to Michael Barbour for giving sound editorial direction. I wish to thank Sierra College for approving my request for support for time off to work with SNEP, and for an earlier sabbatical leave to begin serious work on the Sierra. In another project, for the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, Bob Dale worked closely with me to see that my chapter on Sierra Nevada forest history was well integrated into that group’s study of Sierran forests.

Research librarians and staff at the California Historical Society Library, the California State Library, the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library, the Searls Historical Library, the Yosemite and Sequoia National Park Libraries, and the Library of Congress were generous with their assistance. I would also like to say thank you to Charlene Sims for her hard work in keeping my research files organized.

I would especially like to thank Phillip Sturges of the University of Utah for first inspiring me to want to become a teacher and professional historian, and for providing guidance as I learned the craft.

Finally I would like to express my gratitude to my wife, Louise, for her support. The book almost killed me, and without her love and confidence that I could do it, I am not sure that I would have persevered.

Introduction: Major Forces That Have Shaped the Sierra Nevada

Here are some environmental basics about the Sierra to get to a common starting point. Another historian might favor a different set, but I chose these because they figure significantly in the range’s human history and at the same time provide a good introduction to what makes the Sierra Nevada unique.

By most accounts, the Sierra Nevada has been forming for at least 600 million years, and it has taken many shapes during its complex geological history. In its current form—the product of a massive uplift on a fault along its eastern flank—many geologists say that the Sierra is likely to be from 1 to 3 million years old. That makes it a relatively young mountain range when compared with such hoary counterparts as the Appalachians on the other side of the North American continent. Even so, the range’s human environmental history, which began only some 10,000 years ago, represents a brief fraction of the Sierra’s life span. During this phase, geology, climate, natural history, and fire have interacted with human activity, technology, and worldview to produce recognizable patterns in its landscape and resource use.¹

An Ever-Changing Mountain Giant

The Sierra Nevada is always changing, making and remaking itself under the influence of powerful natural forces. Poet and Sierra Nevada resident Gary Snyder, referring to such mountain creating forces, put it this way:

Erosion always wearing down;

shearing, thrusting, deep plates crumpling,

still uplifting—ice-carved cirques

dendritic endless fractal streambed riffs on hillsides

. . . Streams and mountains never stay the same.²

When humans first entered the Sierra, a long ice age was temporarily releasing the range from its frozen grip. But the ice would return later in what has been called a mini–ice age, a last gasp that produced some small glaciers that have managed to hold on into the historical present.³

It is troubling to consider that what is referred to as settlement by European Americans began about 1850 to 1870, at the end of that mini–ice age. All the development and planning of the reservoirs that keep California and northern Nevada alive today occurred late in the last brief century and a half when the current warmer and wetter climate pattern emerged. For many of the years of the range’s life before that time, very long cycles of drought or cooling produced very different climate patterns. How many years of drought could California’s or Nevada’s urban centers and commercial agriculturists survive if old patterns reemerge?⁴

The shape-shifting nature of the range has affected its human inhabitants in different ways. Tectonic changes, often of interest only to geologists and geomorphologists, have also impinged upon the human history of the Sierra.

Consider an example from the eastern side of the range. Thousands of earthquakes have rattled the eastern Sierran community of Mammoth Lakes, California, since 1979. In that year a magnitude 5.8 quake occurred. It was followed the next year by four magnitude 6 temblors in a one three-day period. In the fall of 1997, quakes came with such frequency that they attracted national attention. Eight thousand quakes above 1.2 magnitude occurred between October and December. Thirty small quakes occurred in just four days the following April. Such periods of intense earthquake activity are called quake swarms by the United States Geological Survey scientists monitoring them, almost as if the tremors were a cloud of bothersome stinging insects.

But some of the quakes of this swarm were substantial, reaching magnitude 5. Responding to the increased activity, the USGS prepared a notice of possible volcanic hazard to heighten public awareness of potential risk. Merchants in the area promptly complained that the notice could frighten away fainthearted tourists and skiers, the lifeblood of the community.⁵ Clearly, this was a classic case of conflict between Mammon and science in a mountain enclave.

In March of 1990, the subsurface volcanic activity triggering these earthquakes nearly turned deadly. A United States Forest Service supervisor seeking shelter in a March snowstorm entered a snowbound cabin near Mammoth and nearly died from breathing carbon dioxide. The odorless gas had been accumulating inside the structure, released from a volcano directly underneath. Both the cabin and Mammoth are located within the Long Valley Caldera. This valley was created 760,000 years ago in a previous eruption. Below the surface at Long Valley a new mass of molten magma was forming, pushing up a dome. One of the forces that created the Sierra Nevada was still very much at work.⁶

For residents of the Mammoth area, the trembling in Long Valley was a troubling reminder. Natural forces have a way of disrupting everyday life for those who have chosen this mountain environment. The veneer of civilization that modern technologies have built there is no guarantee of security. Can you imagine how you would feel in an earthquake swarm? How many earthquakes would it take to make you concerned? The imposition of urban patterns on a natural landscape such as the Sierra Nevada brings potential risks. The geological forces that molded the Sierra Nevada—faulting, uplifting, earthquakes, erosion, volcanism, and glaciation—shouldn’t be spoken of in the past tense. These influences have varied in intensity over the millions of years it has taken to shape the range, but they remain with us.⁷

Mammoth stands as a useful metaphor for human contact with the Sierra Nevada. For over 10,000 years, people have had to cope with all the complex environmental and climatic variety that the range has imposed. This relationship of humans with the Sierra has been not only long, but dynamic. People have been involved in an intense and conscious shaping of the Sierran landscape and the use of its resources from the beginnings of human settlement. Collectively they have greatly altered the Sierra Nevada’s natural systems. For thousands of years, waves of human occupation have left their imprint: native, Spanish Mexican, European American. But in the end, the Sierra Nevada still remains a force to be reckoned with in the lives of its occupants.⁸

Similar geological forces create different responses and actions in different cultural contexts. Prehistoric Northern Paiute people and suburban Mammoth Lake residents alike have coped with Sierran geology in their own ways. Obsidian was a by-product of volcanism. In prehistoric times the Paiutes used it to fashion projectile points for hunting, and also traded it with other Sierran natives who lacked this valuable mineral resource. But because the Paiutes did not build permanent structures and lived there only seasonally, the effects of quake activity would have had limited physical significance to them. For example, Paoha Island rose in nearby Mono Lake from a huge volcanic eruption sometime in the 1700s. The Mono Paiute oral tradition was undoubtedly enriched with the explanations that the event inspired. But my guess is that volcanic activity is far more troublesome to current Mammoth residents and commercial interests than to their prehistoric predecessors, what with the millions of dollars invested in urban infrastructure in that recreation community today.⁹

The Range That Crow Built

The Sierra is best seen as a whole—a single mountain range.¹⁰ But as with anything as huge and complex as the Sierra Nevada, it is hard to take it all in with a brief, though accurate, descriptive phrase. It would help to consider some of its aspects from several angles, especially its physical characteristics and life zones. Putting the two together will help in understanding how its human history has developed.

The Sierra Nevada that the Yokuts attribute to the master builder Crow is both majestic and unique. Most often recognized for its splendid peaks, it is also distinguished by its forest-covered ridges, river and glacial valleys, lake basins, deep midrange western canyons filled with magnificent mixed-conifer forests, and of course its alpine meadows. It rises from its base on its eastern side some 11,000 feet from the Owens Valley floor to the summit of Mount Whitney at 14,495 feet. This is a far greater rise in elevation than the Rocky Mountains, which lift up only 9,000 feet above the Great Plains. One of the elements that makes the Sierra Nevada so unique is its granitic core, pushed up as a single block. Because this great granite mass sparkled and shone in the sun, John Muir called the Sierra Nevada the Range of Light.¹¹

The Sierra is massive, stretching some 430 miles along its north to south axis. It begins where the earliest rock formations of the range are overlaid by the Cascades’ volcanic flows. From there it stretches far to the south to Tehachapi Pass. From the beginnings of its western foothills to the bottom edge of its steep eastern escarpment the range is around eighty miles wide. It is one of the three most dominant geomorphic features within California, along with the Central Valley and the Coast Range. And though mostly in California, the range flanks roughly a third of Nevada’s long western border.¹²

Its existence shapes climate and life forms on both of its flanks. Pity poor Nevada, because the Sierra cuts off most of the Pacific storms that water the range. The Sierra Nevada can generate massive amounts of snow and rain seasonally. This water, when trapped by dams, is distributed within a complex, modern hydraulic system. It provides the basis of life for the farms of the Central Valley in California and northern Nevada. The largest cities of California and northern Nevada could not exist without it.¹³

If it were possible to cut the Sierra Nevada in half and observe it in profile on some gigantic laboratory table, another characteristic of the range would be revealed—the asymmetrical shape that resulted from the creative forces of upthrust and tilting. The eastern half of the range is marked by a steep escarpment along a prominent fault line. Observed from Owens Valley at its southeastern end, the jagged 14,000-foot peaks of that part of the range appear to rise almost straight out of the level valley floor. This escarpment is one of the most impressive in the world. Extending nearly the whole length of the range, it has acted as a barrier to weather as well as making human entry difficult. The western slope of the range, rising more gradually from California’s Central Valley, appears tame by comparison, although many of the middle and southern peaks viewed from their western crest lines are impressive.¹⁴

If we were still observing the Sierra Nevada on that imaginary laboratory table, but now viewing it in a north-to-south perspective, another aspect of the range would become apparent. The Sierra Nevada rises steadily in elevation from around 6,000 to 7,000 feet at its northern end to 13,000 feet in its center around Yosemite, then reaches heights of over 14,000 feet in the south before finally descending to around 6,500 feet at its southern terminus.¹⁵

There is a rough continuity in the single crest line of the northern two-thirds of the Sierra Nevada. It lies well to the east of the center of the range because of the long and gently rising western slope. The area immediately around Lake Tahoe is an exception to this general pattern. There a graben or subsidence occurred, causing a deep depression to form along a prominent fault line. This created not only the lake that is nearly 1,600 feet deep,¹⁶ but also a dual crest that soon rejoins to the south. The area surrounding the lake remains geologically active.¹⁷

Continuing down into the southern one-third of the range, another transformation in the crest line becomes apparent. In the area south of the Kings River, the Sierra Nevada forms a prominent double crest. The highest peaks of the main ridge remain to the east, but a second or parallel crest referred to as the Great Western Divide rises to its west. Within this complex geological area lies Kings Canyon. It is the deepest river canyon in the United States at 8,240 feet—yes, even deeper than the Grand Canyon—and contains the longest river in the Sierra Nevada.¹⁸

This description of attributes of the range should make clear that no single human response to it is possible. Ways of life that might work in the western foothills are not possible on its eastern fringe. Population densities from pre-European settlement times to the present, for example, have always been greater on the western California flank.¹⁹

Life Zones and Forests

The Sierra Nevada is immense. It extends between 36 degrees to 40 degrees north latitude and by its sheer length encompasses several climatic or life zones. Other factors that contribute to shaping these zones and their floral inhabitants are elevation, latitude, rain shadow, soil composition, and slope effect. The distribution of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada generally follows these climate zones in clear patterns. John Muir, in describing these zonal differences on the western flank, went beyond the bare scientific terminology to describe four horizontal, colored bands, blending from one into the next. From an imaginary prospect on the crest of the Coast Range facing east, he saw the torrid foothills as belonging to the rose-purple spectrum, followed by a transition to the dark purple of the lower montane, then the blue of the upper montane, and finally the pearl-white of the subalpine and alpine zones.²⁰

Elevation has a major influence on Sierran vegetation. For every gain in elevation of 1,000 feet, it is as if you had moved 300 miles in a northerly direction. Elevation gains generally bring with them lower temperatures, increasing precipitation, shallower soils, less oxygen, and higher winds, all of which have an effect on the plant communities within them. The areas that mark the transition from one zone to the next, referred to as ecotones, are not distinct, but instead flow into each other as vegetation mixes. These transition zones are generally richer in species number and variety as a result of this mingling.²¹

The vegetation zones of the range include not only forests, but also a great diversity of other forms, among them meadows, chaparral shrubs, woodlands, savannas, canyons, and alpine habitats. The greatest diversity in Sierran plants occurs on the western side at the foothill elevation.²²

Before the onset of European settlement, the Sierra Nevada was richer and more diverse in its vascular plant life. The vegetation of the montane regions was arrayed in a complex mixture shaped by such disturbances as fire (natural and human-caused), storms, insects, disease, avalanches, and flooding. This interplay of forces created a mosaic that has no modern counterpart. In the forested zones, trees developed in a succession, affected by the constant disturbances, until they achieved a stage known as late successional, or more popularly, old growth. Each of the forested stands had its own complex history.²³

John Muir, in The Mountains of California, captured the beauty and diversity of the lower west-side montane forests in 1894:

In many places, especially in the middle region of the western flank of the range, the main cañons widen into spacious valleys or parks, diversified like artificial landscape-gardens, with charming groves and meadows, and thickets of blooming bushes, while lofty, retiring walls, infinitely varied in form and sculpture, are fringed with ferns, flowering-plants of many species, oaks, and evergreens, which find anchorage on a thousand narrow steps and benches. . . .

Here, too, in the middle region of deepest cañons are the grandest forest-trees, the Sequoia, king of conifers, the noble Sugar and Yellow Pines, Douglas Spruce, Libocedrus, and the Silver Firs, each a giant of its kind, assembled together in one and the same forest, surpassing all other coniferous forests in the world, both in the size and beauty of its trees.²⁴

Once the crest is reached, the prospect to the east is very different from what ecologist Elna Bakker called the Great Green Wall, her memorable term for the western coniferous forests.²⁵ From the north-central portion of the summit, a view to the east takes in the Lahontan Basin, named after a Pleistocene-epoch lake that long ago disappeared. The forested areas of the eastern side were never as dense or complex as on the west, even before they were cut over to serve Nevada mining and urban development.²⁶

The forests of the Sierra Nevada have been a center of concern for California and Nevada political officials and conservationists from at least the 1860s. Today these forests, on both public and private lands, continue to generate controversy and are the subject of major initiatives to manage them in an environmentally sustainable manner.²⁷

Sierran Water

To respected geologist François Matthes, Yosemite was the Incomparable Valley. As he made clear, though, its beauty came not just from the massive granite walls and glaciated domes, but also from the splendor and variety of its falling waters.²⁸ Mark Twain expressed a similar view of the beauty of Sierran water when he first saw Lake Tahoe: As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the finest picture the whole world affords.²⁹ Both Matthes and Twain, separated though they are by time, place, and perspective, provide us with an understanding of what makes the Sierra Nevada unique amongst mountain ranges. The synergy created when its waterfalls, rivers, and lakes combine with its rock formations, forests, and meadows may not be found anywhere else in the world.

Sierran rivers and streams are renowned for their beauty. But Sierran waters have also been put to many practical uses since human occupation of the range began. Native use, while longer in duration than that which followed European American settlement, had less impact upon the Sierran water systems. Fishing weirs and some irrigation diversions amounted to ephemeral modifications that were often swept away in times of spring runoff.³⁰ Mining, grazing, and logging in the nineteenth century led to more permanent alteration. The development of dams to generate electricity or impound water for urban and agricultural uses has exponentially expanded human influence. About 60 percent of the water used by Californians today comes from the Sierra Nevada.³¹

The rivers and streams of the Sierra Nevada are included in five of the nine major hydrologic systems of California. Three of these, the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare Lake systems, capture all of the stream flow of the western Sierra Nevada. These systems are heavily influenced by the orographic, or rain shadow, effect of the range, which causes the warm and moist Pacific winds to shed their moisture content in the form of rain and snow as the wind currents sweep up the western side of the range. The combined runoff from snowpack, rain, and the base flow from the Sierra’s vegetated watersheds creates many streams that run year round. The two major hydrologic systems of the eastern Sierra Nevada reflect the arid conditions engendered by the rain shadow. They are the North and South Lahontan (the latter sometimes referred to as the northernmost part of the Death Valley system).³²

Because of the orographic effect, most streams of the range are found on its western slope. There are fourteen major rivers. Most of these have numerous tributaries and forks higher upslope. All of the major rivers and many of their tributaries have been significantly altered in historic times by mining and the construction of dams. The rivers of the northern and west-central Sierra Nevada include tributaries of the Sacramento, the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American, Consumnes, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced. The southern Sierran rivers are the San Joaquin, Kings, Kaweah, and the Kern. The rivers of the north and central-west slope of the Sierra eventually all join the Sacramento and flow into the Delta. The rivers of the south, with the exception of the Kern, which in prehistoric and early historic times flowed into Lake Buena Vista, all join into the San Joaquin. It then merges in the Delta with the Sacramento, which in turn empties into San Francisco Bay.³³

The rivers and drainage systems of the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada are fewer, generally do not have as many large tributaries, and contain less water. Even though there is less water, some of the drainage systems, such as that of Lake Tahoe, are very complex. Tahoe’s system contains sixty-three creeks. All of the eastern Sierran rivers flow into separate Great Basin lakes that have no outlets to the Pacific Ocean. Because of this condition, several of these lakes are extremely saline, Mono Lake being the most extreme example. The rivers of the eastern side include the Truckee, which originates in Lake Tahoe; the Carson, Walker, and the Mono drainage that includes Lee Vining and Rush Creeks; and the Owens.³⁴

The Sierra Nevada contains thousands of lakes. Many originate in cirques created by melting glaciers. Other lakes and ponds result from rain and melting snow. These lakes vary in size from surface areas of 300 square miles to very small glacial tarns. As with its rivers, the western Sierra Nevada has the more numerous natural lakes. In Yosemite National Park alone, for example, there are 429 small lakes. While numerous, these western lakes are generally small. There are fewer lakes on the eastern flank because of the steepness of the escarpment and because precipitation is limited by the rain shadow. The lakes of the arid eastern side, ironically, are generally larger than their western counterparts. Of these eastern lakes, the most magnificent is Tahoe. It is one of the largest and deepest mountain lakes in the world, twenty-two miles long, twelve miles across, and nearly 1,600 feet deep.³⁵

Fire and the Sierra Nevada

Since the time when the modern or so-called Mediterranean climate pattern of dry summers and winter rains became the norm in California, fire has been a constant factor in the shaping of the Sierra Nevada.³⁶ The summer always brings thunderstorms, and these create lightning strikes and fires wherever vegetation and weather conditions allow. While many observers of the range have noted this truth, naturalist Verna Johnston perhaps said it best of all: Lightning fires are thus a natural climatic feature of the Sierran environmental scene, and rate as an important landscape architect of the past—as far back as similar climate prevailed, throughout the eons of time when fire suppression and control measures of today were totally lacking in the summer-dry forests.³⁷

Well before humans entered the Sierra, fires were frequent. Their frequency varied according to such factors as weather conditions and climate, elevation, topography, and vegetation type. Before the arrival of humans, Sierran landscapes experienced fire once or several times during the lifetime of the dominant plant species, and these species’ survival and reproduction were often dependent upon fire. Fire in the Sierra Nevada was not a problem—it was a necessity.³⁸

A few examples can demonstrate fire’s complex function in the Sierra. Fire stimulates seed germination in several plant species, such as deer brush. It promotes rapid growth in other plants, so that their life cycles can be completed before the next fire cycle begins. It prompted the evolution of fire-resistant buds, twigs, and bark in certain conifers. Other species, such as oaks, developed adventitious or ancillary buds to replace those that might become fire-damaged. Fire stimulates seed release in various pines and the giant sequoia, and flowering in plants such as soaproot. It regulates accumulation of forest debris, thus allowing certain seeds to take hold in relatively clear ground. In general, it has helped shape the pattern or mosaic of vegetation, promoting uneven-aged stands, varied vegetation types, and gaps in forest cover, reducing the danger of crown fires.³⁹

With the advent of humans, culture added new dimensions to fire’s role in shaping the range’s environment. Cultural perspective is all-important. As with the other powerful shaping forces in the Sierra Nevada, fire can be viewed as either destructive or creative. For those generations of Americans raised on Smokey Bear’s warning that only you can prevent forest fires, wildfire is seen as the enemy. For over a century, conservationists and forest managers have stressed the need to exclude or suppress it if possible. Consider the novel Fire by California writer George Stewart. Personified as a character, Spitfire, the wildfire that drives the action of the novel is treated as a wily adversary from its infancy to its death as firefighters, consumed fuel, and changing weather conditions prevail to end its rampage of destruction. Stewart treats it as a natural, living force:

Like a man, a fire exists in time. First as a tiny spark, it lives faintly. A breath of wind might blow it out; some drops of water quench it. But if born in happy circumstances, it feeds lustily and grows. It takes shape and develops structure, growing in fresh air along the ground, throwing off smoke and consumed air skywards. Where once it scarcely crept, now suddenly it walks and runs. The vigor and power of youth rises within it. It grows adult, and casts out sparks to kindle new fires.

Yet, even as it sweeps ahead in power and glory, the shadow lies over it. . . . Failing to find food, rained upon, blown by contrary winds, fire loses vigor. Grown weaker, it searches less strongly for food, and so grows weaker still. It lies in the quiet of old age. At last, quickly or slowly, it dies.⁴⁰

For Sierran Native Americans, fire in the forest and woodlands they occupied was seen very differently than by their fire-hating successors. Fire was a natural force to be respected and used effectively, not suppressed. Sierran natives preferred open conditions that fire helped sustain in forests. Fire made travel easier, gave them better protection from ambush, promoted the growth of food-producing plants and trees such as oaks, encouraged the growth of basketry materials, and enhanced the growth of deer browse—the list of things natives used fire to promote is long.⁴¹

In the decades that followed the coming of miners, stockmen, and lumbermen to the Sierra, fire continued to play a role in shaping the range. Large blocs of forestland were cut. Fires were caused through loggers’ carelessness or planned by the sheepherders to open more ground for grazing. The forests remained open, as in the native period. But in the century that came after, the goal of the new managers and conservationists was to exclude wildfire where possible. And they were to prove to be remarkably effective.⁴²

Between the 1880s and the 1960s, the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and California Division of Forestry developed the skills and organization necessary to effectively suppress most wildfires. But if fire could be controlled in many cases, the resulting addition of fuel in the form of denser forest and brush cover created conditions that allowed huge, forest-destroying fires that lay beyond the best abilities of the federal and state agencies to suppress. In the 1950s and 1960s, experiments