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

Acknowledgments

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 ,-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 xiv Preface 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 , 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 s. 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...