CHAPTER XXXIV. 
YOSEMITE. 
There is no doubt the Indians would be much amused if they could 
know what a piece of work we have made of some of their names. As 
stated in the Introduction, all California Indian names that have any signifi- 
cance at all must be interpreted on the plainest and most prosaic principles; 
whereas the great, grim walls of Yosemite have been made by the white 
man to blossom with aboriginal poetry like a page of “Lalla Rookh”. 
From the “Great Chief of the Valley” and the “Goddess of the Valley” 
down to the ‘Virgin Tears” and the ‘Cataract of Diamonds”, the sump- 
tuous imaginations of various discoverers have trailed through that wonder- 
ful gorge blazons of mythological and barbarian heraldry of an Oriental 
gorgeousness. It would be a pity, truly, if the Indians had not succeeded 
in interpreting more poetically the meanings of the place than our country- 
men have done in such bald appellations as ‘Vernal Fall”, ‘Pigeon Creek”, 
and the like; but whether they did or not, they did not perpetrate the 
melodramatic and dime-novel shams that have been fathered upon them. 
In the first place the aborigines never knew of any such locality as 
Yosemite Valley. Second, there is not now and there has not been any- 
thing in the valley which they call Yosemite. Third, they never called 
“Old Ephraim” himself Yosemite, nor is there any such a word in the 
Miwok language. 
The valley has always been known to them, and is to this day, when 
speaking among themselves, as A-wé-ni. This, it is true, is only the name 
of one of the ancient villages which it contained; but by prominence it 
gave its name to the valley, and, in accordance with Indian usage almost 
everywhere, to the inhabitants of the same. The word ‘‘ Yosemite” is sim- 
ply a very beautiful and sonorous corruption of the word for “grizzly bear”. 
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