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A Way Across the Mountain - Joseph Walker's 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite's Discovery (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,017
Discovery Miles 10 170
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A Way Across the Mountain - Joseph Walker's 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite's Discovery (Paperback)
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From July to November 1833, Joseph R. Walker led a brigade of
fifty-eight fur trappers, with two hundred horses and a year's
provisions, from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the Pacific
coast of central California. Toward the end of their journey the
Walker brigade crossed the Sierra Nevada, becoming the first
non-Native people to traverse the range from east to west. That
crossing, made long and brutal by bewildering terrain and deep
snow, is widely and rightly considered a milestone in the
exploration of intermontane North America. Following Walker's death
in 1876, an alluring tale arose concerning his trans-Sierran route.
In the course of the crossing, goes the story, Walker found himself
on the northern rim of Yosemite Valley at the plungepoint of North
America's tallest waterfall, staring into the most awesome mountain
chasm on the continent. Over the decades since then, this
time-honored tale has hardened to folklore. Dozens of historical
works have construed it as a towering moment in the opening of the
West. But in fact this tale of Yosemite's discovery has no basis or
support in firsthand accounts of the 1833 Sierran crossing.
Moreover, there is much in those accounts that contradicts Yosemite
lore, and much that points to a trans-Sierran route well north of
Yosemite Valley. In A Way Across the Mountain, Scott Stine
reconstructs Walker's 1833 route over the Sierra. Stine draws on
his own intimate knowledge of the geomorphology, hydrography,
biogeography, and climate of the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin, and
employs the detailed travel narrative of the Walker brigade's field
clerk, Zenas Leonard. Stine documents the inception, growth, and
persistence of the Yosemite Myth and explores the extent to which
that lore has overshadowed Walker's greatest discovery - that the
huge swath of continent between the Wasatch Front and the Sierran
crest is hydrographically closed, draining not to an ocean, but to
salty lakes and desert sands.
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