How did Yosemite get its name?

One of America's best-loved landscapes carries a name its own residents did not use for themselves. Yosemite was what their neighbors called them, and it most likely meant "they are killers."

The people who lived in the valley called it Ahwahnee and called themselves the Ahwahneechee, the "dwellers" there. Later linguistic work by Broadbent in 1969 read Ahwahnee as "big mouth" or "place of the big mouth."

The name Yosemite arrived with soldiers. In 1851 the Mariposa Battalion, a militia led by James Savage, entered the valley to attack and remove the Ahwahneechee. Lafayette Bunnell, the battalion's doctor, proposed naming the valley after the people they were pursuing. Savage told him the word meant "full-grown grizzly," and Bunnell repeated that in his 1880 book.

The grizzly story has a real basis, which is why it lasted. Miwok had a word for the grizzly bear, written ïhümat.i or ïsümat.i, and it sounds a lot like Yosemite. Alfred Kroeber and C. Hart Merriam both accepted the bear explanation in print, in 1921 and 1917.

Other scholars took the word apart and found a different meaning. Barrett in 1919, Gudde in 1949 and Broadbent in 1969 traced it to yohe, "to kill," with a plural ending: yohhe'meti, "they are killers." Madison Beeler, writing in the journal Names in 1955, judged the killer reading the more likely of the two. The best explanation is that neighboring Miwok groups used it for the valley's people, whom they feared.

So the name was an outsiders' label, passed to a second set of outsiders who misheard its meaning. Bunnell got the word roughly right and the translation wrong.

He went on naming. In 1851 he proposed "Lake Ten-ie-ya" for a high-country lake, after the Ahwahneechee leader, Tenaya, because the militia had found his people on its shores. Bunnell recorded that the chief answered that it already had a name, Py-we-ack.

Congress protected the valley in the Yosemite Grant, signed by Abraham Lincoln on 30 June 1864. Yosemite National Park followed on 1 October 1890. Both carried the soldiers' name, and the grizzly translation still turns up today.