Yosemite

Yosemite was protected before Yellowstone, and it happened because of a photographer with a camera the size of a suitcase.

Carleton Watkins went into the valley in 1861 with a mammoth-plate camera that took glass negatives eighteen inches across, plus thirty mules to carry the gear and the darkroom. Plates that size had to be coated and developed on the spot. What he brought back could be printed large enough to hold a wall, and that was the point — the scale of the prints was the argument. They went on show in New York, they reached Washington, and in 1864 Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, handing the valley and the Mariposa Grove to California on the condition they be held for public use forever. It is the first time the federal government set aside land purely because it was worth looking at.

The national park came later, in 1890, largely on John Muir’s campaigning, and the state-held valley was folded back in during 1906.

Getting there was the hard part and much of the photography is about the journey. Before the roads, visitors rode in on horseback down a trail from the rim. Stagecoach roads opened in the 1870s and the pictures from then on are full of coaches on ledges, dust, and passengers in linen dusters and veils looking exhausted. The Wawona covered bridge and the early camps at the foot of the falls belong to that period.

Two things in the old photographs no longer exist. A tunnel was cut through a giant sequoia in the Mariposa Grove in 1881 so that coaches could drive through it, purely as an attraction, and the Wawona Tunnel Tree became one of the most photographed objects in America until it fell under heavy snow in 1969. And the Firefall — a bonfire pushed off the cliff at Glacier Point each summer evening so the embers fell in a glowing stream — ran from 1872 until the Park Service ended it in 1968.

The valley floor itself looks different in these pictures, and it is not the camera. The meadows are open where they are now wooded, because for thousands of years the Ahwahneechee burned them to keep them clear. When that stopped, the trees came in.

Watkins, for what it is worth, lost everything. His studio and his negatives burned in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and he died in a state hospital. The prints that survive are the ones that had already been sold.

The Railroad Brought the Canyon to People