eless, there were no further visitors until 1853,
when Robert B. Stinson of Mariposa led in a hunting-party. Two years
later J.M. Hutchings, who was engaged in writing up the beauties of
California for the _California Magazine_, brought the first tourists;
the second, a party of sixteen, followed later the same year.

Pleasure travel to the Yosemite Valley may be said to have commenced
with 1856, the year the first house was built. This house was enlarged
in 1858 by Hite and Beardsley and used for a hotel. Sullivan and Cushman
secured it for a debt the following year, and it was operated in turn by
Peck, Longhurst, and Hutchings until 1871. Meantime J.C. Lamon settled
in 1860, the first actual resident of the valley, an honor which he did
not share with others for four years.

The fame of the valley spread over the country and in 1864 Congress
granted to the State of California "the Cleft or Gorge of the Granite
Peak of the Sierra Nevada Mountains" known as the Yosemite Valley, with
the understanding that all income derived from it should be spent for
improving the reservation or building a road to it. The Mariposa Big
Tree Grove was also granted at the same time. California carefully
fulfilled her charge. The Yosemite Valley became world-famous, and in
1890 the Yosemite National Park was created.

VII

The Yosemite's geological history is much more thrilling. Everyone who
sees it asks, How did Nature make the Yosemite Valley? Was it split by
earth convulsions or scooped by glacier? Few ask what part was played by
the gentle Merced.

The question of Yosemite's making has busied geologists from Professor
Whitney of the University of California, who first studied the problem,
down to F.E. Matthes, of the United States Geological Survey, whose
recent exhaustive studies have furnished the final solution. Professor
Whitney maintained that glaciers never had entered the valley; he did
not even consider water erosion. At one time he held that the valley
was simply a cleft or rent in the earth's crust. At another time he
imagined it formed by the sudden dropping back of a large block in the
course of the convulsions that resulted in the uplift of the Sierra
Nevada. Galen Clark, following him, carried on his idea of an origin by
force. Instead of the walls being cleft apart, however, he imagined the
explosion of close-set domes of molten rock the riving power, but
conceived that ice and water erosion finished the job. Wit