Yosemite at a Glance:
Settlement

European diseases, which may have included cholera, smallpox, and measles, decimated scores of Indian people in California between 1830 and 1840. Some of the survivors from villages in the San Joaquin Valley fled into the Sierra Nevada and joined the Miwok people already living there.

Geology
Waterfalls

Spanish Influence

It is possible that sometime in the early 19th century an epidemic decimated the population of Ahwahnichi living in Yosemite Valley. The survivors fled east across the Sierra Nevada to live with the Mono Lake Paiute. According to this story, some years later surviving Ahwahnichi people returned to Yosemite Valley from Mono Lake, led by Tenaya, the son of an Ahwahnichi chief and a Mono Lake Paiute woman.

The mission system collapsed in 1821 after Mexico won its independence from Spain. Funds were cut off to missions and many native people were displaced. Euro-American settlers had long since claimed the coastal Indians’ homelands. Having nowhere to go, some joined villages of the Sierra Miwok in the foothills. This influx brought Spanish language, religion, food, and clothes into native Miwok culture and changed the traditional villages. Unable or unwilling to subsist solely on available native food, the residents of these villages saw a ready supply of meat in the herds of horses on the ranches in the Coast Range. Indian men raided the ranches and drove herds of horses to the Sierra.

More changes took place for the Southern Sierra Miwok during the Spanish domination of California than had occurred in all the previous centuries. But what was to come in the mid-1800s was even more dramatic.