A Way Across the Mountain: Joseph Walker's 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite's Discovery
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A Way Across the Mountain: Joseph Walker's 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite's Discovery
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Overview
From July to November 1833, Joseph R. Walker led a brigade of fifty-eight fur trappers, with two hundred horses and a year’s provisions, from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the Pacific coast of central California. Toward the end of their journey the Walker brigade crossed the Sierra Nevada, becoming the first non-Native people to traverse the range from east to west. That crossing, made long and brutal by bewildering terrain and deep snow, is widely and rightly considered a milestone in the exploration of intermontane North America. Following Walker’s death in 1876, an alluring tale arose concerning his trans-Sierran route. In the course of the crossing, goes the story, Walker found himself on the northern rim of Yosemite Valley at the plungepoint of North America’s tallest waterfall, staring into the most awesome mountain chasm on the continent. Over the decades since then, this time-honored tale has hardened to folklore. Dozens of historical works have construed it as a towering moment in the opening of the West. But in fact this tale of Yosemite’s discovery has no basis or support in firsthand accounts of the 1833 Sierran crossing. Moreover, there is much in those accounts that contradicts Yosemite lore, and much that points to a trans-Sierran route well north of Yosemite Valley. In A Way Across the Mountain, Scott Stine reconstructs Walker’s 1833 route over the Sierra. Stine draws on his own intimate knowledge of the geomorphology, hydrography, biogeography, and climate of the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin, and employs the detailed travel narrative of the Walker brigade’s field clerk, Zenas Leonard. Stine documents the inception, growth, and persistence of the Yosemite Myth and explores the extent to which that lore has overshadowed Walker’s greatest discovery—that the huge swath of continent between the Wasatch Front and the Sierran crest is hydrographically closed, draining not to an ocean, but to salty lakes and desert sands.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806157542 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 208,626 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Scott Stine is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies at California State University, East Bay. He resides in Point Reyes Station, California.
Read an Excerpt
A Way Across the Mountain
Joseph Walker's 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite's Discovery
By Scott Stine
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Scott StineAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87062-432-2
CHAPTER 1
A Place among Giants
Joe Walker and His Legacy of Exploration and Discovery
JOSEPH RUTHERFORD WALKER was a giant in the exploration and characterization of the American West. In trails blazed and barriers surmounted, Walker was equal to any of his contemporaries in the fur trade, with the possible exceptions of Jedediah Smith and Peter Skene Ogden. And to an extent greater than his contemporaries, he successfully integrated the knowledge gained from his expeditions into a comprehensive geographic understanding of the Intermontane West: It was Walker, prior to John C. Frémont and prior to Benjamin L. E. de Bonneville, who recognized that the vast tract stretching from the Wasatch Front to the crest of the Sierra Nevada is hydrographically closed — an aggregation of basins whose waters drain not to the ocean but to salt lakes and desert sands. This realization helped put to rest the long-standing legend of a River Buenaventura that flowed westward from the central Rockies to the California coast (see excursion 3).
Yet among Walker's many significant discoveries and endeavors, it is a single feat — his east-to-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada in October 1833 — for which he is most widely remembered. The reason for this renown is not that Walker and his brigade were the first Euro-Americans to cross the range — after all, Smith had done it six years before, west to east. Nor is it that Walker's Sierran passage of 1833 was exceptionally torturous — the American West's annals of exploration and emigration describe many more-perilous predicaments (indeed, this very brigade, on a desperately dry trek through the desert the following year, survived only by quenching their thirst on the blood of dead horses). Nor even is Walker's 1833 Sierran crossing remembered for having opened a mountain route that would aid later westward migration — in fact, while he would establish an important pass over the southernmost Sierra (today's "Walker Pass") in 1834, he would, for years after, steer himself and others away from a central-range crossing like that of 1833.
Rather, Walker's 1833 Sierran crossing is celebrated for what he reputedly saw. According to lore, on or about October 23 Walker found himself on the northern rim of Yosemite Valley, staring into the most awesome mountain chasm on the continent; further, goes the lore, it was not just anywhere on the rim that Walker curled his toes, but at the very point where Yosemite Creek loses its bed and leaps 1,400 feet in free fall. So says the campfire story that, in one version or another, has prevailed for more than 130 years.
That story has its origins in eulogy. Three weeks after Walker's death on October 27, 1876, there appeared the first of several lengthy obituaries that memorialized his life of exploration and discovery (Napa County Reporter, November 18, 1876). That first posthumous tribute, widely circulated and often repeated, contains the following passage: "In [1833, Walker] reached the Sierra Nevadas, which [he] undertook to scale. His first attempt to descend to the west was near the headwaters of the Tuolumne, which he found impassible, but on working a little to the southwest he struck the waters of the Merced and got into the Valley of the San Joaquin. His was the first white man's eyes that ever looked upon the Yosemite." During the ensuing months this alleged sighting of Yosemite Valley was inscribed in stone. The epitaph on the monument at Walker's grave in Martinez, California, lists "Camped at Yosemite, November 13, 1833," as one of his life's highlights.
But this version of history is not without uncertainty and contradiction. While Walker may (or, just as plausibly, may not) have come to believe late in life that his 1833 path down the western slope of the Sierra lay between the Merced and Tuolumne rivers of today's Yosemite National Park, he is said to have told Lafayette Bunnell (1880), a chronicler of early Yosemite history and one of the first Euro-Americans to record a trip into the canyon proper, that the brigade did not see Yosemite Valley in 1833. Adding further to uncertainty, in the 1860s Joseph Meek, who had accompanied Walker to California in 1833, placed the route not through the Merced and Tuolumne Sierra but through the Truckee, Bear, and American river drainages, more than a hundred miles to the north (see fig. 1) (Victor, 1870). Moreover, just how either of these men came to identify the Sierran watersheds through which they had passed — whether by retracing their own steps, or by reconciling their decades-old memories with maps or landscape descriptions provided by others — has never been addressed or even considered.
But that matter, like so many others that bear on the long-assumed Walker/Yosemite association, demands consideration: Short of revisiting their 1833 mountain route, a possibility which has never been suggested, and for which there is no support, how could either of these men, decades after their Sierran crossing, put place names to their path? And how is it that two highly experienced cordilleran trappers — Joe Meek on the one hand and Joe Walker (if in fact he came to believe that his route was through Yosemite) on the other — could differ by more than one hundred miles in their placement of that path? Given the absence of cartographic and toponomenclatural knowledge of the Sierra that existed at the time of their crossing, and given that so much of the range remained remote into the latter decades of their lives, can either Meek or Walker — or, based on hearsay, Walker's eulogizers — be taken as the final authority on the location of the route? Or is there a more reliable basis for route reconstruction?
THE LEONARD NARRATIVE AND ITS DUBIOUS INTERPRETATIONS
Nearly all attempts by late nineteenth-century historians to identify Walker's 1833 route over the Sierra deferred to his early obituary, cautiously concluding that he had traversed the Merced and Tuolumne watersheds (see Bancroft, 1886, 1890). But early in the twentieth century a new source of information came to light — the narrative of brigade clerk Zenas Leonard, first published in its entirety just six years after the journey to California but overlooked by historians for the ensuing six decades (Chittenden, 1902, 1954; Wagner, 1904). The narrative was assembled by Leonard from his and Walker's field notes shortly following the expedition. It provides by far the most detailed record available of their westward passage. A few other accounts of the trip exist, and some of these offer clues as to route, but they were written as highly generalized recollections, in most cases many decades after the journey (Victor, 1870; Beall, 1918; Ellison, 1937; Jonesborough, Tennessee, Sentinel, March 8, 1837; Meek, 1885).
Francis P. Farquhar, renowned historian of the Sierra Nevada, wisely recognized the tenuousness of relying on obituary hearsay — particularly contradicted hearsay — to reconstruct Walker's trans-Sierran route. But in a series of works published between 1925 and 1965, Farquhar argued, and ultimately pronounced, that Leonard's Narrative does indeed support the proposition that in 1833 Walker followed the Merced and Tuolumne drainages, and saw Yosemite Valley (Farquhar, 1925, 1926, 1942, 1965).
A detailed reading of the Leonard narrative, however, indicates that little such support exists, and that the route reconstructions by Farquhar and those who followed his lead (e.g., Wegner, 1930; Watson, 1934; Russell, 1947; Cleland, 1950; Paden and Schlichtmann, 1959; Cline, 1963; Goetzmann, 1966, 1986; Walker, 1968; Gilbert, 1983; Goetzmann and Williams, 1992; Hill, undated) are deficient both factually and methodologically. Among the deficiencies are these: The route reconstructions are highly selective in their use of Leonard's observations, ignoring many of his most detailed landscape descriptions; they often alter Leonard's descriptions, in some cases through partial omission, and in others through embellished paraphrase; they mischaracterize elements of the actual landscape so as to conform with features described by Leonard; they are not based on, nor do they acknowledge, the daily and weekly mileage constraints that accompany the use of horses; and in some cases they deviate from Leonard's October timetable, implicitly or explicitly interjecting many nonexistent days of travel, and reversing the order of some sightings and events. Additionally, the prior reconstructions commonly suffer from failings of logic: They are guided by preconceptions about sites that Walker and his men encountered along their track, they rely on unstated assumptions, and in some cases they resort to circular reasoning.
RULES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION
To avoid these deficiencies, and with the hope of maintaining objectivity, the route reconstruction undertaken here was approached as an exercise tightly constrained by rules. These rules, constituted after reading Leonard and Farquhar but before beginning any detailed analyses with maps or in the field, included the following:
• At every stage, route reconstruction must be approached with a willingness to be falsified.
• Leonard knows best. His directions and descriptions must be interpreted literally whenever possible; any deviation from the literal, or any correction or rejection of his record (e.g., his dates, his distances, his directions, etc.) must be stated and explained; and no such deviation, correction, or rejection may be driven by a preference for one trans-Sierran route over another.
• Leonard's timetable over the interval between his "October 10th" (when the brigade left the Humboldt River and its bottomlands) and his "October 31st" (when they reached "the plain" of California's Central Valley) must be assessed without regard to route, and must be followed strictly.
• There can be no presupposition that the brigade passed certain specific sites (e.g., a specific grove of Big Trees, a specific canyon rim, etc.) in traversing the Sierra. In other words, Walker must be "followed" to and across the range, rather than being "led" from one presumedly "known" spot to the next. With this in mind, the question at hand cannot be (as it so often has been), "by what route did Walker reach Yosemite;" rather, it must be, "by what route did Walker cross the Sierra."
• A sharp conceptual distinction must be maintained between the landscape features described by Leonard and those along the route that is inferred from Leonard; in other words, Leonard's descriptions must not be paraphrased to fit the characteristics of a candidate route, and the landscape must not be mischaracterized to fit a Leonard description.
• Absence of evidence must not be construed as evidence of absence. For example, with no member of the brigade ever having noted a sighting of the lake now called Tahoe, it would be tempting to conclude that they must not have seen Tahoe. But while that lack of mention might suggest (perhaps strongly) that they did not see the lake, it cannot be taken, ipso facto, as proof that they did not see it. Thus, in reading Leonard's, and others', firsthand accounts of the 1833 Sierran crossing, what is not stated must be treated as merely suggestive; only what is stated qualifies as potential evidence.
• The exercise must demonstrate not only the plausibility of each newly proposed route segment but the implausibility (if it so be) of each of the segments proposed in previously published reconstructions.
• Reasonable multiple-day mileage constraints for travel with horses must be derived objectively (that is, derived through objective historical analysis and without regard to Walker's route) and then adhered to.
• Circular reasoning must be avoided.
• "Success" comes not from defining an especially glorious or spectacular route, or from merely casting doubt on the conclusions of prior investigators, but from objectively deriving a course that conforms to Leonard's descriptions and timetable.
LIMITS AND SCALE OF THE RECONSTRUCTION
As a guide to the Walker route, Leonard's Narrative is of varying utility. Many of his landscape descriptions are so detailed and specific that they can be used to place the brigade at particular landmark features. Among these first-order descriptions, for example, is his "most remarkable water course," a river of the west-Sierran foothills that has cut a "very deep" and "narrow" defile through "smooth and level parts of the country," and whose canyon walls are composed of "rocks piled up." Some of Leonard's other characterizations, while not pointing to singular features of the landscape, are of value because they materially constrain the universe of plausible routes. His unambiguous reference to "some trees of the red-wood species, incredibly large — some of which would measure from 16 to 18 fathoms round the trunk at the height of a man's head," for instance, unequivocally places the brigade at one of the few central Sierran Sequoiadendron groves (fig. 2). Still other passages of the narrative, while not affirming a specific route, belie one or more of the candidates. Leonard's description of the eastward panorama from "the top" of the Sierra, for example, is hardly applicable to the views afforded from the upper elevations of Bridgeport Valley or Mono Basin, where most prior investigators have placed the brigade's crestal crossing.
Leonard's remarks concerning the brigade's day-to-day movements likewise vary in specificity. Some are detailed (e.g., "we traveled up this river towards the mountain"). Others are less illuminating, either because they lack detail or because the features that Leonard describes along the day's path are too common and widespread to be diagnostic (thus, the "hills, rocks, and deep snows" that the brigade crossed during their early days at high elevation could be in most any major drainage of the Sierra). In several instances Leonard provides an estimate of the distance traveled (e.g., "after a walk of about 15 miles we arrived at the margin of the woods"), though these must be interpreted with the knowledge (see footnote 53) that he tended to substantially overestimate distances as well as heights. At a few junctures Leonard provides so little information that the brigade's course from one inferable feature to another is necessarily a matter of conjecture. In the present investigation, all of the assumptions that underlie each such conjecture are described in detail, even if they seem self-evident (for example, it is assumed that, in crossing a steeply flanked, high-standing ridge, the brigade sought a saddle in the crestline, rather than aiming for a mountain peak; and it is assumed that, in traversing the deeply dissected Sierra Nevada, the brigade whenever possible traveled parallel, rather than transverse, to the topographic grain).
At the very least, the Leonard account furnishes sufficient chronologic, topographic, hydrographic, and biogeographic detail to permit a watershed-scale reconstruction of the Walker brigade's 1833 traverse of the Sierra. At best it provides compelling evidence that the brigade passed over, through, or within sight of more than a dozen landmark features of the Sierra and its adjoining foothills, piedmonts, and plains. Contrary to the assertions of some recent investigators who would guide Walker through the Yosemite drainages, the Leonard narrative does not permit an encampment-by-encampment delineation of the brigade's movements.
FOLLOWING ALONG WITH LEONARD
When it was rediscovered early in the twentieth century by Horace Kephart, librarian of the Mercantile Library in Saint Louis, Leonard's Narrative was immediately recognized as an invaluable source on both the field life of the fur trade and the exploration of the American West (Chittenden, 1902). In addition to the original (now exceptionally rare) book version of 1839, five editions of the Narrative have been published (Wagner, 1904; Leonard, 1908; Quaife, 1934, reissued in 1978; Ewers, 1959 — see footnote 112). Long considered public domain, it now (2015) can be viewed and downloaded at archive.org/details/narrativeofadve00leon. (This is historian Henry Raup Wagner's copy! See page 288.) The portion of the Narrative that covers the trek from Great Salt Lake to and across the Sierra Nevada is included here, with my own annotations, as appendix A.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Way Across the Mountain by Scott Stine. Copyright © 2015 Scott Stine. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures 11
Acknowledgments 15
Introduction 19
1 A Place among Giants: Joe Walker and His Legacy of Exploration and Discovery 25
2 Presuppositions and Proclamations: Leading Walker across the Sierra 35
3 Background: Joseph Walker and His Places and Times 43
Excursion 1 The Tripwires and Pitfalls of Romanticization 65
4 Following Walker: Setting Pace, Setting Dates 75
Excursion 2 The Matter of Maximum Sustainable Pace 77
5 Following Walker to "The Lakes" and into Bloody Battle 85
6 Following Walker to the Highly Alkaline, Pumice-Lined Lake 91
Excursion 3 Pathfinders and Their Contributions 99
7 Following Walker from the Pumice-Lined Lake to the Sierran Front 103
8 To the Sierran Front: The Implausibility of Routes Previously Proposed 107
9 Following Walker to "The Top" of the Sierra 115
Excursion 4 Joe Walker and Zenas Leonard, Creatures of the Little Ice Age 125
10 Seeking and Descending the Pacific Slope: A Chronologic Summary 135
11 Imagining Yosemite: Arguments against a Path past the Iconic Rock Colossus 139
12 Seeking and Descending the Pacific Slope: Criteria and Constraints 153
13 Following Walker from "The Top" to the Base of the Mountain Brink 157
14 Following Walker from the Base of the Brink to the Mountain-Foothills Border 181
15 Following Walker from the Mountain-Foothills Border to "The Most Remarkable Watercourse" 199
16 On toward Monterey 209
17 Plausibility of a Passage through the Truckee-American Sierra: Eliminating the Dark-Horse Route 213
18 Lore's Origins: A Myth to Match the Mountains 215
19 The Outland and the Outlandish: Barriers to Geographic Understanding 225
Excursion 5 Where Is There from Here? 231
20 An Outland of the Modern Mind 237
21 Summary and Conclusions 239
Appendices
A Leonard's Account of the Journey to and across the Sierra Nevada 243
B The Path Back 265
C Publication History of Leonard's Narrative 285
References 293
Index 307