There would be no environmental history without a human context. California's Yosemite Valley has an organic and geological history written in its plants and rock formations and a silent history that took place on the tails of Manifest Destiny , where the landscape was merely a setting for a human plot that is largely excluded from institutional memory today. The subjective telling of Yosemite's past through both text and image maps the American consciousness of a celebrated national park. By drawing from Rebecca Solnit's "Water, or Forgetting the Past: Yosemite National Park," "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West" by John Muir, and several period artistic interpretations of the area one can conclude that the idealized landscape of Yosemite is made not only of natural formations but cultural constructions of the past that carry into present day.
             In "Water, or Forgetting the Past: Yosemite National Park" Rebecca Solnit attempts to measure the cultural impact of a nature reserve whose violent human history was, and remains, dominated by omissive media. The laws that protect Yosemite National Park elevate it to a status above commonplace earth. As Victorians "mixed their taste for scenery with piety and sought hard for traces of a God" (256) Yosemite carved a spiritual niche for itself and became a standard by which other nature could be measured. During this time the language used for describing art, landscapes and spirituality overlapped, nature meant not only the material and observable world but the natural state of man in contrast to a state of grace. The park was signed into existence by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Yosemite was created at a time in American history burdened with discord and on the heels of an artistic and intellectual movement known as romanticism. Yosemite became a vehicle for American pride and patriotism, embodying not only...