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

Introduction: Major Forces That Have Shaped the Sierra Nevada

xvi Preface 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 Preface xvii 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...