Teaching With Documents, Volume 2

Contents:

Sierra Club Petition to Congress Protesting the Proposed Diminution of Yosemite National Park

Citizens today increasingly strive to protect or revive the environment, often by forming advocacy groups to institute rehabilitative measures. One such group, the Sierra Club, has promoted public awareness of environmental issues for more than a century. The featured document is the first official conservation pronouncement of the then-nascent Sierra Club, a petition to Congress protesting the Caminetti bill (H.R. 5764), proposed in 1892to protect mining, livestock, and timber interests by reducing the size of the newly established Yosemite National Park. The document demonstrates that from the beginning of the park’s history, the Federal Government had to grapple with complex issues to balance the needs of divergent groups interested in using the park’s resources. Today, Yosemite’s ecological health is again in the national spotlight because of traffic and pollution problems caused by a surfeit of park visitors.

In 1864 Congress granted Federal land to form a small state park in California that included the Yosemite Valley. In 1868 naturalist John Muir began to visit the region regularly, and in the 1880s it became clear to him that the land surrounding the state park also needed protection. Muir and Century magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson urged the Federal Government to create a national park such as Yellowstone, which had been established in 1872.

That first Yosemite campaign contained elements common to environmental conservation efforts since that time—striking a balance between conserving a portion of the natural world and allowing access to resources that sustain ranchers, miners, and timber workers. At odds were conservationists and members of the local community whose livelihood depended on consuming the natural resources of the region. Muir and Johnson argued that Yosemite Valley had suffered under the jurisdiction of a state government that placed local interests above the larger social interest in preserving the natural beauty of the valley.

In order to neutralize local political opposition, they appealed directly to national public opinion through Century magazine. They also lobbied influential local entrepreneurs and political leaders. By October 1, 1890, their efforts resulted in the passage of legislation that preserved 1,500 square miles of the Sierra Nevada surrounding the Yosemite Valley as a scenic wonderland to be enjoyed by Californians, other U.S. citizens, and visitors from around the world. Although the conservationists had carried the day, contention over Yosemite’s resources would continue.

In the spring of 1892, John Muir and other local activists in the Yosemite Park drive established a park defense organization dedicated to safeguarding the scenic Sierras and to public education regarding conservation needs. The organization, with JohnMuir as its first president, named itself the Sierra Club, and its strength was soon tested. That same spring, U.S. Representative Anthony Caminetti, a former member of the California Assembly, introduced a bill that would remove from the park large tracts of land north, west, and east of Yosemite.


Click the image to view a larger version


Click the image to view a larger version


Click the image to view a larger version

Caminetti’s bill addressed the interests of citizens from the counties surrounding Yosemite who had lost an important source of tax revenue and were denied access to the commercial resources of the upper Sierras. The Sierra Club’s petition was intended to dissuade Congress from passing the measure. Although the Caminetti bill ultimately died in committee, between 1898 and 1904 nine other bills were introduced in Congress in an attempt to restore timberland from the park to the public domain. Little noticed was the 1901 Right of Way Act, which would eventually lead to the hooding of the picturesque Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water and power for San Francisco.

In 1905 the park boundary was redrawn by Congress when the recommendations of the Chittenden Commission, an Interior Department park study group, were adopted. The Sierra Club and Muir acknowledged to the commission that the needs of a large number of landowners necessitated the removal of Townships 2, 3, and 4 South, Range 19 East on the southwest corner of the park, although the club had petitioned against removal of a portion of that region eight years earlier in paragraph 2 of the featured document (denoted as T-2 -S, R- 19E).

The Sierra Club petition and accompanying map dated January 2, 1893, addressed to the Committee on Agriculture, U.S. House of Representatives, is found at the National Archives in the Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, Committee on Agriculture, Petitions and Memorials. The "blue lines" in the map are black in this reproduction.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

Document Analysis

1. Distribute copies of the document to your students, and ask them the following questions:

a. What type of document is this?
b. What is the date of the document?
c. Who created the document?
d. Who received the document?

Class Discussion

2. Lead the class through an analysis of each paragraph of the petition based on the following sample questions.

a. Paragraph 1: What is the Sierra Club? How does the mission statement compare with its mission today?

b. Paragraph 2: What is the club protesting? Predict the consequences of the diminution of Yosemite.

c. Paragraph 3: How much land was proposed for removal? Prepare transparencies of the document map and of a present-day map of Yosemite. Layer the second map over the first, and ask the class to describe the difference in boundaries.

d. Paragraphs 4-7: Divide the class into four groups, and ask each group to identify the designated land areas on the map. Give each group a current Yosemite map for comparison. How is Yosemite different today? What happened to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, mentioned in paragraph 6?

e. Paragraph 8: Compare and contrast the dangers outlined with present dangers facing the park.

f. Paragraph 9: What solution was proposed by the club? What solutions to the present dangers have been suggested?

Activities

3. Ask your students to draw a cartoon to illustrate the Sierra Club’s Yosemite campaign. The cartoon should represent the point of view of loggers, cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, miners, or conservationists.

4. Ask your students to draw a cartoon to illustrate common issues within the environmental movement today. The cartoons should represent the point of view of business or corporate leaders, regulators, politicians, neighbors of endangered areas, or conservationists.


Click the image to view a larger version

5. Ask a student to research and report to the class the history of the Sierra Club and its current role in the global environmental movement. Ask the class to compare and contrast the Sierra Club to other environmental groups.

6. Ask a student to research and report to the class the current ecological health of Yosemite and efforts to preserve the region. Ask the class to identify environmentally sensitive areas in your community and to describe the current conditions, assess the protection strategies, and devise and propose a conservation plan to local or state authorities, if one does not exist.

7. Ask a student to research and report to the class the Hetch Hetchy Valley reservoir controversy and its effect on the nation. After considering the merits of building the reservoir and maintaining the scenic beauty of the valley, ask students to choose a course of action as if they were a Member of Congress voting on the issue.

8. Ask a group of students to research Muir’s writings on Yosemite and present a narrated slide or video presentation about Yosemite or another environmentally threatened national or state park. Give your students the opportunity to relate their own experiences in national or state parks so that they can evaluate the conditions of park areas they have seen and judge how effective the balance has been between environmental concerns and other uses for the park resources.

9. Select a student to play the role of John Muir in the present day. Ask the student to portray through a skit or interview how Muir would respond to the current dangers facing Yosemite. Ask the class and the John Muir role-player to judge how successful Yosemite conservation efforts have been to date.

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Chicago: "Sierra Club Petition to Congress Protesting the Proposed Diminution of Yosemite National Park," Teaching With Documents, Volume 2 in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. Wynell B. Schamel (Washington, D.C.: National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998), 105–108. Original Sources, accessed March 28, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=FITRXF2J1MJ9P18.

MLA: . "Sierra Club Petition to Congress Protesting the Proposed Diminution of Yosemite National Park." Teaching With Documents, Volume 2, in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, edited by Wynell B. Schamel, Vol. 2, Washington, D.C., National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998, pp. 105–108. Original Sources. 28 Mar. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=FITRXF2J1MJ9P18.

Harvard: , 'Sierra Club Petition to Congress Protesting the Proposed Diminution of Yosemite National Park' in Teaching With Documents, Volume 2. cited in 1998, Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. , National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, Washington, D.C., pp.105–108. Original Sources, retrieved 28 March 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=FITRXF2J1MJ9P18.