Yosemite Valley Was Named by a Campfire Vote, and Few Knew the Word

Yosemite Valley was named by a campfire vote in 1851, and most of the men who voted didn’t know what the word meant. The few who thought they did said “grizzly bear.” People who later studied the Miwok language came up with something else: “the killers.”

Doc Bunnell’s campfire vote

The men around that fire belonged to the Mariposa Battalion, a volunteer militia. The National Park Service says it was formed “to drive the native Ahwahneechee people onto reservations,” and that once inside the valley the men “systematically burned villages and food supplies.”

Lafayette H. Bunnell, a doctor with the battalion, left a detailed account of the naming in his book Discovery of the Yosemite. He dated the battalion’s first trip into the valley to March 1851. Others put it in May, and Bunnell pushed back in print.

On that first night, Bunnell suggested the valley ought to have a name. The men offered “romantic and foreign names” and plenty of Bible names. Bunnell didn’t like any of them. He said “an American name would be the most appropriate,” and then proposed “that we give the valley the name of Yo-sem-i-ty,” after the people they’d just seen “leaving their homes in this valley, perhaps never to return.”

Not everybody went along. A man named Tunnehill objected to honoring the people they’d come to fight, and somebody else pitched “Paradise Valley.” Then John O’Neal, a Texan in Captain Boling’s company, called a vote. It was “a viva voce vote,” meaning by voice, and Bunnell says the name was “almost unanimously adopted.”

The odd part is that Bunnell admits “the signification of it (a grizzly bear) was not generally known to our battalion.”

How Yo-sem-i-ty picked up an e

The battalion wrote it “Yosemity,” with a y at the end. Bunnell says Lieutenant Moore of the U.S. Army, reporting on an 1852 expedition, “substituted e as the terminal letter,” maybe “supposing Yosemite to be of Spanish derivation.” The e stuck. Bunnell grumbled that, as a result, the right pronunciation “is not always attainable to the general reader.” If you’ve only ever seen the word written down, you can see his point.

In 1855 the publisher J. M. Hutchings tried “Yo-Hamite” and held on to it “for some time,” but by then, Bunnell wrote, “Yosemite had already crystalized.” The federal place-names database lists Yo-Ham-i-te and Yo Semite Valley among the old variants and records Yosemite Valley as the official name by a decision of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in 1932. Its history note says the valley was “named for the Yosemite tribe of Indians by Dr. Lafayette H Bunnell.”

Grizzly bear or killers

Who named the valley isn’t in doubt. What the word means is.

“A full-grown grizzly bear”

Major Savage, who could speak most of the local mountain dialects, told the men at the fire that the name “signified a full-grown grizzly bear.” The trouble is that, in the same passage, Bunnell says Savage “could not readily understand” Tenaya, the band’s leader.

Henry Gannett of the U.S. Geological Survey wrote in 1905: “From uzumaiti, meaning ‘grizzly bear,’ the name applied by other tribes to the Awani tribe of Indians.” In 1916 the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber also called it Southern Sierra Miwok for “grizzly bear,” but he said Americans put it on the valley “either through a misunderstanding or from a desire to attach to the spot a name which would be at once Indian and appropriate.” As for the story that the valley’s people were known as “the Grizzly Bears,” Kroeber wrote that it “cannot be authenticated and is probably incorrect.”

“The Killers”

In 1919 the anthropologist S. A. Barrett published a glossary of Southern Sierra Miwok words. The word for grizzly bear is uhu’mati. Yosemite is a different word: “yō’hemiūte, from yō’he, to kill, and miūtī’ya, people.”

The linguist Madison S. Beeler laid out the case in 1955, in the journal Names. The bear word and the “killers” word sound a lot alike, so mixing them up was “easily understandable on the part of those unfamiliar with the language.” But “That the second, and not the first, is the true etymon is most likely,” he wrote. He quoted an earlier linguist, Lucy Freeland, who said it was the name “applied by the neighboring Miwok to the dwellers in Yosemite Valley.” In other words, it was what the neighbors called them.

So which one wins? Beeler gave his reasons. The bear word doesn’t start with a y, and “killers” fits the way Miwok builds words: a root meaning “to kill,” plus a piece meaning “one who,” plus a plural ending. Barrett’s glossary also traces it to the verb “to kill.” The oldest source we found for the bear, on the other hand, is Major Savage, who admitted he had trouble understanding Tenaya. That’s why we give “the killers” the edge, though Kroeber, writing in 1916 before Barrett’s glossary came out, went with the bear.

The name that was already there

The valley had a name before the battalion showed up. Asked about his people’s past, Tenaya said, “The valley was then called Ah-wah-nee.” Kroeber gives it as Awani, the name of the biggest village in the valley “and therefore of the valley itself,” and Barrett’s glossary lists Yosemite Valley as awo’ni.

Bunnell tried to learn what Ahwahnee meant. Tenaya motioned to show depth and plucked some grass, and Bunnell guessed “the deep grassy valley.” He added, honestly, “Still, it may not mean that.” And Tenaya himself, Bunnell heard later, “repudiated the name for the Valley” while accepting it as the name of his band. When Captain Boling heard that Ahwahnee was the older name, he said it was “all right enough for history or poetry,” but they couldn’t change the name Yosemite now.

California picked up its own name from a make-believe island in a Spanish novel, so the state is used to names that don’t quite match the place. Ahwahnee didn’t disappear, though. Walk behind the Yosemite Museum and you’ll find the Indian Village of Ahwahnee, rebuilt, the Park Service says, “on the former site of the largest Indian village in Yosemite Valley.”

Historical Sources & References

• Lafayette H. Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851 (3rd ed., 1892). The campfire naming, the proposal of “Yo-sem-i-ty,” Tunnehill’s objection, “Paradise Valley” and the voice vote (pp. 60–62); Savage’s “full-grown grizzly bear” and his trouble understanding Tenaya (p. 62); Moore’s e (p. 63); Tenaya on Ah-wah-nee, the “deep grassy valley” guess and Boling’s reply (pp. 63–65); Hutchings’s “Yo-Hamite” (p. 67); the March 1851 date (p. 56).
• A. L. Kroeber, California Place Names of Indian Origin (1916). Yosemite as “grizzly bear,” applied “through a misunderstanding,” and the doubt about “the Grizzly Bears” (p. 68); Awani as the name of the largest village and of the valley (p. 34).
• S. A. Barrett, Myths of the Southern Sierra Miwok (1919). Glossary entries for grizzly bear, uhu’mati (p. 26), and for Yosemite, “from yō’he, to kill,” and Yosemite Valley, awo’ni (p. 28).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1905). The “uzumaiti, meaning ‘grizzly bear’” entry (p. 333).
• Madison S. Beeler, “Yosemite and Tamalpais,” Names 3, no. 3 (1955). The linguistic case for “the Killers” over “bear,” with Freeland’s note that neighboring Miwok applied the name to the valley’s people (pp. 185–186).
• National Park Service, Yosemite National Park, “People”, “Destruction and Disruption” and “Yosemite Indians”. The Mariposa Battalion’s purpose and the burning of villages; the Indian Village of Ahwahnee on the site of the valley’s largest village.
• GNIS feature 269366, Yosemite Valley (U.S. Geological Survey). Official name by Board decision of 1932, the history note crediting Bunnell, and the variants Ahwahnee, Ah-wah-ne, A-wa-ni, Yo-Ham-i-te, Yo Semite Valley and Yo-Semite Valley.