Yosemite and James Hutchings, Pt. 1

Once Yosemite had been seen by white men, it became the focus of a great deal of attention, both for its natural wonders and for the potential money to be made there. James Hutchings spent the majority of his life writing and speaking about Yosemite.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly
Frying and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. Hey you guys, it's uh.
This year is one year anniversary of the United States

(00:24):
National Park Service. We would know that even if we
didn't know that, which we did, because lots of listeners
have written to tell us this. So many, so many,
we have had so many requests for an episode about
the Park Service it is not even funny. It's astonishing.
The number to me, like so like the first tis

(00:44):
we got, I was like, oh, that's cool. And then
we got about fifteen more. I was like, whoa people,
what really? And then it got real landslide e, which
is great. I mean, I'm glad that people love the
Park Service and want to support it by hearing more
about it. Uh. And I initially started out with the
foolishly ambitious goal of putting together an episode tracing the
origins of the National Park Service, from its very beginnings

(01:05):
of conservation mentality in the United States to the eventual
establishment of the agency. What some people have asked us
to do basically, Yeah, and I applied for wanting that information,
but that it quickly became a parent that to do that,
we were basically going to have to rattle off a
list of dates and events with no time to talk

(01:27):
about or contextualize any of them. That's because the National
Park Service is the culmination of a lot of different moments.
Like I had literally started writing the episode outline out
and like, for example, to our listeners, our episode outlines
usually run I don't know anywhere between hundred and words

(01:49):
would be a very long one. This one. I had
just the bullet points of the things to hit, and
I was at seventeen hundred words. Like there wasn't even
verbs in those. It was literally like this person Yosemite,
this person Here's there was no way so um this
would be how Like we had a lot more resources
than we actually have. We would have just made an

(02:10):
interactive timeline on our website, although that would be redundant
because those do exist in other places. Um, So I
kind of set aside a chunk of that work that
I had done already because it just became apparent that
to really honor the National Park Service centennial, it might
actually maybe be better to focus on smaller and more

(02:31):
specific elements of that greater whole. So in the event
that you are disappointed and you're just dying to hear
the full lengthy story documentary documentary and Ken Burns has
you covered. In two thousand nine, he worked on a
documentary series about the National Park Service titled The National
Parks America's Best Idea and it is available on Blu

(02:51):
ray and DVD, and the runtime on that set is
listed as seven and twenty minutes. That's twelve hours, which
even if you factor in the fact that some of
that is bonus content and credit sequences, that might give
you an idea of why we're doing just one topic
within the story of America's National Parks. So today we're
gonna have the first of a two parter. We're gonna

(03:13):
talk about Yosemite in particular for both of these and
one of the men who really spent a lot of
his life there. So we're gonna talk just about the
park a little bit for context and what it is
in case I'm sure we have listeners that are not
from the u S. Or even if you're in the
U S. You might not know a lot of details
about Yosemite. And then we're going to talk about a
man named James Hutchings. If you're not familiar with Yosemite

(03:36):
and where it sits geographically, it runs along the central
eastern side of California, adjacent to Nevada. It's two hundred
miles southeast of San Francisco and then the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
In terms of footprint, the park is one thousand, one
hundred and sixty nine square miles. That's seven hundred and
forty eight thousand acres, with more than eight hundred miles

(03:59):
or a little more than two hundred kilometers of hiking trails,
two d fourteen miles or kilometers of paved roads, and
twenty miles which is about thirty two kilometers of paved
walkways and bicycle paths. About four million people visit the
park every year, and more than nine percent of the
park is undeveloped, so it's basically designated wilderness and really

(04:21):
that's the draw. In a two thousand nine Visitors study,
of respondents said that their primary activity on the visit
was viewing the scenery. But while tourists make up most
of the humans in the park today, archaeological evidence suggests
that people were living in the area as far back
as eight thousand years ago. In terms of traceable Native

(04:42):
American tribes, the awan Ichi, which is sort of, if
I'm understanding correctly from my research, kind of a blanket
name given to almost all of the tribes that lived
in the area. I have lived in Yosemite for four
thousand years that we have actual evidence of, and for
a long time, those are the only people that were
seeing the beautiful landscapes that now draw those millions of

(05:03):
tourists today. There are seven tribes that can trace their
lineage back to those earliest groups for whom Yosemite was home,
and the early eighteen hundreds, a few trappers made their
way into the area, but just before the midpoint of
the nineteenth century, the promise of gold brought in a
huge influx of people and conflicts between miners and Native

(05:24):
Americans and the region really began. In March of eighteen
fifty one, the Mariposa Battalions Yosemite Expedition, consisting of a
hundred and five men spread across Companies B and C,
made its way into the Yosemite Valley under the command
of Major James D. Savage. They were there to apprehend
Awenichi as part of the Mariposa Indian War. That war

(05:47):
was a conflict between native tribes and miners who had
moved into the area. Most of the men in the
battalion had been those miners. In early eighteen fifty one,
a trading post on the Fresno River was raided by
a group of a of American clans who had banded together.
These tribes were hoping that in drawing the white military
into the mountains, the battalion would become lost and unable

(06:08):
to pursue them any further. Keep in mind, at this point,
California had not been a state very long. It joined
the Union in September of eighteen fifty, and also in
eighteen fifty a piece of legislation titled quote an Act
for the Government and Protection of Indians was also signed
into law, and that legislation made provisions for indenturing Native

(06:30):
American children and adults to white settlers. There has been
some theorizing among historians that James Savage had been so
eager to assemble of Italian to go after the Natives
because he wanted to use the provisions in that Act
to capture Native Americans for use as a labor force.
The arrival of the battalion in the valley is sited
at at the first time white men saw Yosemite. The

(06:54):
tales that the soldiers later told of the amazing Yosemite landscape,
including a waterfall reported to be a thousand feet high,
sparked interest for other explorers. One of those explorers was
James Mason Hutchings. But before we dig into hutchings life,
we're gonna pause for a moment and have a word
from one of our sponsors, and then we will talk

(07:14):
more about Hutchings and his wife and their establishment at Yosemite.
So to talk a bit about James and Alvira Hutchings.
Hutchings was an Englishman who was a man of many trades,
including carpentry, journalism, and mining. He was born on February

(07:37):
of eighteen twenty. He attended school in the Birmingham, England suburbs,
and eventually found work in carpentry. At the age of
twenty eight, he moved to the United States, spending time
in eighteen forty eight in New York and New Orleans
before moving on to California. If you know about California
history and you did the map there, you may have
correctly surmised that Hutchings was arriving in California at the

(07:58):
very beginning of the gold rush in eighteen forty nine.
There was a flood of thousands of thousands of people
into California, all hoping to strike at rich in gold.
But there was absolutely no infrastructure to support this massive
influx of people. There were no roads, there was no law,
There was just wilderness, and as a consequence, there were

(08:19):
some very large social issues. Riots would often break out
mining camps. There was a lot of violence that went unchecked,
and the only repercussions for wrongdoing came in vigilante form.
All of this conflict really just made Hutchings hands some
very English ideas about social order and how a society
should function. And so, with the money he was able

(08:40):
to make for mining himself, he began publishing letter sheets
for distribution and mining camps in towns. These were illustrated
papers with accompanying text is usually a moral lesson at
some point, which could be mailed off to friends and family,
and the most famous of these letter sheets is the
miners ten commandments, like if you do a certain for
that online you will churn up a bunch of examples

(09:02):
because it published over and over and over throughout the years.
This has laid out similar to the Ten Commandments from
the Bible, but it offers moral guidelines for miners about
not jumping claims and not gambling money you don't have.
Like you, you're pretty sure your claim is gonna pan out,
but so you gamble away the money before you have it,
not working in the rain, and not valuing gold more

(09:23):
than family. The illustrations on this and pretty much all
of his letter sheets were filled with these beautiful images
of California landscapes. Hutchings did well enough over the years
as a miner that he was able to devote most
of eighteen fifty three and eighteen fifty four to travel
through mines throughout the state, collecting stories from the men
he met there with the intention of publishing them. It

(09:45):
was while he was on this tour that he heard
of the beauty of Yosemite, and just as a commentary
on the potential for miners to actually make pretty good money,
Hutchings wrote in his own diary on December thirty one,
eighteen fifty four, quote, I have to enable me to
pay my board at the end of the week, hired
out at mining for three fifty per day. That's three

(10:05):
dollars and fifty cents. Yet one month afterwards I cleared
over a thousand dollars such as change in California. After
hearing those tales of Yosemite's natural natural wonders, Hutchings hired
two Miwak guides to take him an illustrator Thomas Eyers,
to the majestic waterfall that he had heard about, and
once he returned from this exploration, he began writing about

(10:28):
the beautiful landscape. He started publishing a periodical titled Hutchings
California Magazine. You'll sometimes also see it as Hutching's Illustrated
California Magazine, and over the course of the magazine sixty
issue five year run, Hutchings came to be recognized as
an expert on Yosemite, and the valley became famous in
the process. The valley, to Hutchings, was inspiration to a

(10:51):
higher and better way of living, and he was using
his writing to advocate for it. The first volume of
the magazine includes the following and the introductory paragraphs quote,
we wish to picture California and California life to portray
its beautiful scenery and curiosities, to speak of its mineral
and agricultural products, to tell if it's wonderful resources and

(11:11):
commercial advantages, and to give utterance to the inner life
and experience of its people in their aspirations, hopes, disappointments,
and successes, the lights and shadows of daily life. And
the first article in the publication after that introduction begins
immediately to tout the scenic beauty that California offers, writing quote,

(11:32):
there are few lands that possess more of the beautiful
and picturesque than California. It's towering and pine covered mountains,
its widespread valleys carpeted with flowers. It's leaping waterfalls, it's
foaming cataracts, its evergreen forests, It's gently rolling hills with
shrubs and trees and flowers. Make this a garden of

(11:53):
loveliness and a pride to her enterprising sons. To be
very clear, this was not just the little hamphlet publication.
This magazine was substantial. It's really something of a time
capsule of attitudes and social mores of the time. As
Hutchings wrote and collected stories about not just the lovely
landscapes but also as promised in the intro, the daily

(12:15):
life there, and one of those sections in for example,
the February eighteen fifty seven issue, which is called the
World in California, outlines some of the various people one
might find living in the area at the time in
sections titled quote the Indian, the Pioneer, the Minor, the Englishman,
the Irishman, the jew, the Negro, the Hybrid, and the

(12:38):
Sandwich Islander. Whiles some aspect of these categorized writings are
evidence of common views at the time that would be
pretty unenlightened by today's standards. It's interesting to note that
Hutching seems to have had the greatest disdain for the Englishman.
It was characterized as gloomy despite the beautiful sunshine of California,
enamored of his home country to a ridiculist degree, boastful

(13:02):
without conviction, and quote liberal to a fault. Just kind
of funny since Hutchings was from England and his even
when you see write ups of him, some people will
say he was an American born in England. Um I
commented wrote him up as English because he spent the
first twenty eight years of his life in England, so

(13:22):
his later identity definition definitely shifts. I think he would
say he was a Yosemite man above all else. But
it is sort of interesting at how many jabs he
takes at Englishmen. In that particular piece of Native Americans,
he wrote, quote, man of the desert, forest and prairie, Oh,
how short is thy destiny? Wherever thou plantest thy foot,

(13:43):
the sure onward march of the white man treads on
thy heel, crowding me out as a newspaper narrative of
a bygone time. And after further describing how white men
often shot down many of the Native Americans, he then says,
alas what has civilization done for the Pioneer has got
a lot of praise as nature's nobleman. It's kind of

(14:04):
funny that immediately following the passage about the tragedy of
white man shooting Native Americans, in the section on the Pioneer,
it reads quote, he stands trusty rifle in hand, with
his faithful dog beside him, A match for whole tribes
of wild Indians, for whole herds of wild beasts. Yeah,
it's a little contradictory, at least it felt that way
to me. The minor is called quote the great throbbing

(14:27):
heart of California, and he's described as a very godly
and a great reader. The Irishman, according to the magazine,
is quote a cute fellow and quote unencumbered with the
botheration of learning. The Jew is described as friendly, though
dishonest and wheedling, and the Negro is cast in a
generally favorable light because of what a good genial servant

(14:47):
he can be. As we said, definitely unenlightened and when
viewed through the modern lens at the time, probably somewhat progressive.
It's not cool to apply this to you a group
of people, but I kind of just wants to say,
unencumbered with the botheration of learning anytime somebody is ignorant

(15:09):
from now on. It is a lovely turn of phrase,
even though it was used as a horrible insult. In
this regard, the Hutchings magazine defines the hybrid as quote
a bad left handed cross of the Irish and the Yankee.
This character of Hutchings California is a lazy freeloader. The
Sandwich Islander is a frivolous man of luxury, fundamentally unable

(15:33):
to handle true work. And next we're going to talk
about another regular feature in the Hutchings periodical. But first
let's pause once again for a word from one of
our fantastic sponsors, So to get back to the publishing

(15:54):
work of Hutchings for an additional glimpse into the wide
range of topics that his magazine covered. There's also a
regular feature in it called Managing a Woman, and it
deals with the relationships between men and women from the
points of views of various contributors. And I feel like
I should interject here that there is a lot of
discussion among people who study his work as to how

(16:18):
many of those contributors are really him, working under a
pen name versus collected from other people. But one entry
in it, which is credited to a writer named Bessie,
is perhaps surprisingly about the ways in which marriages, and
of course this is talking about hetero marriages here can
change a woman for both bad and good, and it's
told by relaying three examples of marriages known to the

(16:41):
writer Bessie. You know of women who married men who
seemed nice but turned out bad, and also women who
seemed very mean and then became quite lovely by virtue.
Of of being with a man who was very kind
and loving with them. Uh. These are all examples that
are known to the writer, and the message is summed
up at the end of the essay as quote like
begets like and love begets love. The World of California

(17:04):
appeared in more than one issue of hutchings California Magazine,
describing additional groups of people in a similar manner. It
managing a woman and the other writings in the periodical
offer a really unique look at what life was like
at the time, as seen through the editorial lens of Hutchings.
You can read these publications online and we will link

(17:24):
to them in the show notes. Yeah. There archived online
in two big clumps that have collected like the first
half of those publications in the second half UH and
early on, as Hutchings was creating this first media about Yosemite,
both through his his UH Little letter papers and through
these periodicals, he also became the person that wealthy elites

(17:49):
started to turn to you when they wanted to visit
this wilderness area because they were becoming very fascinated by it,
and Hutchings was happy to oblige them by guiding tours
into the Valley. He wanted this of I'm beauty of
Yosemite Valley to be acknowledged and presented to people living
in quickly industrializing places like San Francisco. And while Hutchings
is often characterized as fostering the tourism trade to make

(18:12):
money from it, a fairly recent book on hutchings life
by Jen Huntley suggests that Hutchings really wanted people to
come to Yosemite, hoping they might collectively design an ideal
way of life there that had room for the appreciation
of nature and making a living. And this was a
time when traveling to Yosemite was still an arduous and
expensive journey. So again there was not a road. You know,

(18:34):
it really took quite a bit of effort, and it
cost about four hundred to five hundred dollars for a
person from San Francisco to travel to Yosemite and spend
a week there. That was no small amount in the
eighteen fifties. And the hope was that as these wealthy
people from San Francisco shared their experiences after their visits
to the valley with people back in the city, that
it would spread and that people from other parts of

(18:57):
the U s would eventually also be drawn there. There
were efforts by other people as well as Hutchings, to
try to create an infrastructure to support the tourism of
wealthy visitors to the valley. While one of the main
drivers for this desire for visitors was the money making
desires of the people building this infrastructure, that wasn't the
only reason. There was a growing movement of conservation in

(19:18):
the United States, and the idea of setting aside land
to remain undeveloped was starting to gain gain traction in small,
dedicated circles. In eighteen fifty eight, the first hotel was
built in Yosemite. Prior to this point, there had been
rudimentary structures that were builled as hotels, but they were
often either just tents or little shacks that were meant

(19:39):
to provide only the most basic shelter. But this first
official hotel, the Upper Hotel, was an actual two story building.
There were no real walls to separate the rooms though,
just large sheets of cloth having to create partitions, and
had window frames but no glass in them, so this
was not a luxury resort, but it was still a
huge up from any previous accommodations in the area and

(20:03):
that it was a permanent structure with some actual size
to it. And James Hutchings was one of the first
people to stay at Upper House, and he saw immediately
that there were some problems, uh not about the structure
being you know, rudimentary, but how it was run. The
finances were very poorly handled, and there wasn't a proper
manager for the hotel for the first couple of years. Meanwhile,

(20:27):
in eighteen fifty nine, James Hutchings spent some time staying
at a San Francisco boarding house and while he was
there he made a met a young woman named Elvirus Sprote.
Elvira was seventeen and her mother ran the boarding house.
The pair hit it off and they married the following year.
In eighteen sixty one, they moved away from San Francisco
so James could take a job as a mine superintendent.

(20:50):
And we're about to get to the point where Hutchings
and Elvira really kind of make Yosemite their home. And
we're gonna pause here for the moment. As we said,
this is the first of a two parter, So next
time we're going to speak at length about the books
Hutchings wrote and the true beginnings of like real tourism
in Yosemite, not just these occasional visits from wealthy people

(21:10):
that they were guiding in and a long legal battle
with the State of California. Do you also have some
listener mail? I do. It's short and sweet, uh and adorable.
It is from our listener Lisa, and it is a
beautiful postcard from Rome. And the picture Uh it is
a fragment of the Statue of Constantine, so basically a

(21:32):
giant foot and it has a little kit not it.
So obviously it completely hit all of my sweet spots
in terms of loving a postcard, and Lisa writes, high, gals,
I just wanted to share my joy at finally making
it to the Eternal City, enjoying the history, the art,
the food, and the wine. Too many podcast suggestions to
even list. I hope you like the kitten and I

(21:54):
love it because this is one of those rare occasions
where someone has sent us a postcard from overseas and
none of the writing was obscured by postal marking. So uh,
that's always exciting to me. Graid I could see everything
on it. Who it's a win and it's so adorable.
I will take a picture of it and share it
on our social Uh, thank you so much, Lisa. As
I always say, but I it bears repeating. In my opinion,

(22:17):
I am always so honored and delighted when people take
time out of their vacations to write to us. Uh.
It's really quite touching and it means a lot. So
thank you, thank you, thank you. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at history
Podcast at how s to works dot com. You can
find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash mist
in history, on Twitter at misston history, where at pinchers

(22:38):
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to any social media, missed in History is how to
find us. If you would like to learn about, uh,
a little bit more about what we talked about today,
you can go to our parents site, how stuff Works.
Type in National park Service and you will get a
plethora of articles about various issues related to the park Service,

(23:00):
the parks themselves. We have a wealth of information about moms,
So do that and then come of visit Tracy and
me at missed in history dot com, where we have
an archive of every show ever of the podcast from
way before we were here, and show notes on the
ones Tracy and I have worked on together, as well
as the occasional blog post or other treat so we
encourage you to do that. Come and visit us at

(23:22):
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