Audio
The Yosemite
Transcript
How are you doing? This is Sergeant Bowman. You know, I've talked quite a bit but sometimes you can talk a lot and not say the thing you need to say. I've been talking to you about being here in Yosemite. You know, when I found out that, you know, Yosemite is something--is something new and it's something different. It's a National Park. I didn't really know what that was until we got here. And in my mind, a National Park is something so pretty you want to--you want to put it in your pocket, you want to take it home with you, but taking any bit of Yosemite home with you is illegal. And that's--well, the job was for the 9th Cavalry in Yosemite began in '03, but also this year right now, 1904, the key people had taken pieces of Yosemite away. Now, you think you can't take granite away. You think you can take a piece of Half Dome and put it in your cell and just ride off with it. But folks got that in their mind and sometimes little things add up to something much bigger, the little pieces of things add up to something much greater. So you got to make certain that the whole idea on National Parks because it was an idea before it ever became something real in this world. You want to make certain idea on National Parks, don't get carried off like dust gets carried off by the wind or leaves in the Fall, get blown away and never come around again. So that is the job, so we had our headquarters down the Camp A.E. Wood, near the South Fork of the Merced. It sounds something special but it wasn't really, just a bunch of tents and a few buildings here and there, that's about all there was to it. It's in that area, that's pretty quite called Wawona. And that was the headquarters, so that's where Captain Nas was. He's right there but we had the job of going away from that Camp A.E. Wood out into the wild, out into the mountains, out to where there weren't very many people. And when there aren't very many people around you, you feel you have the freedom to do whatever you want and a lot of folks felt that they could still do that even after Yosemite become a National Park, because they had all these people in Mariposa County, who are used to, who are accustomed to, who felt right to come into the mountains and shoot the deer, they call them mule deer around here. They shoot the deer for food. And before it was a park, they'd come up into the mountains and they actually cut trees down for firewood, and that's all right because man taking care of his family is all right. Providing food for his family is all right. Cutting trees down for firewood is all right. All of those things were all right until the park was set aside. October 1st, 1890, then all of a sudden with a stroke of a pen from President Harrison, all those things that had been right were all wrong, and it was just our luck, troop case luck, 9th Cavalry luck to show up in Yosemite and have to tell all those people that what they've been brought up to believe was right was now wrong. Now, that ain't easy duty to tell someone who feels vague in their rights, to tell them they're all wrong. But that's the job. And what that job meant was patrolling Yosemite. Now, Yosemite is about 1500 square miles all the way down to the South Fork of the Merced on the west side. All the way over to the east…
Description
Sgt. Boman describes the role of soldiers in the protection of Yosemite.
Duration
12 minutes, 48 seconds
Credit
Shelton Johnson
Date Created
06/26/2013
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