Savage himself—tall, blond, always wearing a red shirt (the better to impress the Indians, he said)—conducted some of the negotiations, having a considerable aptitude for the native language. A federal commission also tried to stage talks with the Indians, but neither the commission nor Savage himself made much headway. And so in March 1851, exasperated by the indecision, Savage’s attacks got under way. The levies rode out, each of the battalion’s three companies assigned to wreak havoc in one of three main valleys. Scores of Indian villages were burned, hundreds of tribesmen and women were forced away from their ancestral farms, hunting grounds, and homes, and the Miwoks were directed toward the hot and dry Central Valley, to reservations that had been readied for them, far away from the contentious goldfields in the foothills.

  It was during one of the first of these punitive expeditions, in late March, that one of the battalion’s raiding parties ventured up along the valley of the Merced River in search of miscreants. Attached as surgeon was Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, a twenty-seven-year-old doctor’s son from Rochester, New York, who had taken the opportunity to explore the valley because, two years beforehand, he had been nearby and declared the scenery to be memorable. As he later wrote, he had seen “the stupendous peaks of the Sierra Nevada . . . in the distance an immense cliff, I looked upon this awe-inspiring column with wonder and admiration . . . whenever an opportunity afforded, I made inquiries concerning the scenery of that locality. But few of the miners had noticed any of its special peculiarities.”

  What Bunnell had spotted, gleaming like a beacon in the evening sunshine, and what he now rode toward along the valley that early spring day in 1851, was the star attraction of today’s Yosemite National Park. He had seen the sheer shining face of El Capitan, brilliant and almost reflectively glasslike against the backdrop of snow-covered peaks to the east. As the party rode into the valley, deeper and deeper between the towering walls—shooing away Indians as they met them, directing them to break down their cabins and the sweat lodges and head back downriver into the flatlands to the west—the sights Bunnell had previously glimpsed from afar, came steadily into full view. El Capitan, for sure. Then the Half Dome. The Bridal Veil Falls. Cathedral Peak. At every bend in the river there was something memorable, fantastic.

  Everyone in the party, Bunnell most especially, was stunned by what they were seeing. Landscapes like this—with such soaring peaks, vast and sheer rockfaces, grand waterfalls, snow-covered ranges, flower-filled meadows, forest groves, rocks of a satin smoothness warming in the sunshine, giant sequoias, glaciers, deep blue lakes, the scent of pine needles everywhere—had never been seen before, anywhere. The Mariposa Battalion had stumbled into a sublime and heavenly place, and the world needed to know about it.

  Such miners as had passed through the valley had evinced no interest beyond the amount of gold to be panned from the Merced—precious little beyond a few flecks, as it turned out. So “it would be better to give it an Indian name,” wrote Bunnell later, “than to import a strange and inexpressive one; that the name of the tribe who had occupied it would be more appropriate than any I had heard suggested. I then proposed that we give the valley the name of Yo-sem-i-ty, as it was suggestive, euphonious, and certainly American; that by so doing, the name of the tribe of Indians which we had met leaving their homes in this valley, perhaps never to return, would be perpetuated.”

  Melancholia was to be found in the grout of this otherwise anodyne explanation: “the tribe who had occupied it,” “leaving their homes,” “perhaps never to return.” For that was what Savage and his company ensured: that the sedate village life of these harmless and congenial Miwok was now essentially over, reservation life beckoned, and the Yosemite Valley was forever destined to be pristine, preserved inviolate, and all but free of sinful humanity. Like Adam and Eve, mankind had been evicted from Paradise. Yosemite was ready to be prepared for the altar of conservation for the good of the people of America—in those days, largely white people—to behold.

  The Miwok Indians, who had long lived in and around Yosemite, were by and large turfed out of their traditional lands to make way for the onrush of tourists, though some were retained as attractions and entertainment for the visitors.

  Thirteen years later, on June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln took time off from his Civil War responsibilities to sign the two-paragraph Yosemite Land Grant Act, handing the lands officially over to the custody and care of the state of California for “preservation and public enjoyment.” Within months, photographs of the quite extraordinary landscape were appearing all across the country. The public swiftly got the message. Travelers arrived in large numbers, by horse, in traps. In carriages. In time, cars started to make their way to the outwash of the valley, and promoters started to advertise the marvels within. Roads were built. Then parking lots—first for horse-drawn vehicles, later for automobiles. Tunnels were carved through the giant sequoia trees—one mighty and ancient specimen fell soon thereafter; another was weakened by runoff from all the cement nearby. Concessions were opened. Hotels. Souvenirs. A few Miwok were brought back from their reservations to work as servants and guides and to display, if they still knew, the crafts and manners of those who had once lived there. John Muir became involved, distressed at the now excessive public use—by sinful humanity, as his beliefs suggested; he campaigned that the land be taken out of California’s control and placed it in the hands of the nation, made into a national park. This it was in 1890, eighteen years after Yellowstone in Montana had been made the inaugural member of the National Park Service.

  There were 6000 Miwok living in the Sierra at the beginning of the gold rush, before the raising of the Mariposa Battalion. At the time President Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant, there were just 100 Miwok remaining. Today, matters have improved somewhat: all told, the Miwok of the central Sierra—the so-called Yosemite Miwok—amount to around 150 people, living in a reservation that abuts the northern side of the park. There they run the Black Oak Casino, as state law allows.

  Five million visitors come to Yosemite every year, bringing $379 million in local economic benefit. Some of that bounty is no doubt spent at the casino, though John Muir would presumably disapprove.

  5

  Trust is Everything

  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

  —ALDO LEOPOLD, A Sand County Almanac (1948)

  Should one wish to illustrate the meaning of the word placid, then the lower reaches of the Charles River in Boston, viewed on a crisp and breezeless evening in the fall, would serve just perfectly. The water here is wide, flat, and mirror still, the river’s seaward flow near imperceptible. The skylines—Harvard and MIT in Cambridge on the north side, Boston University and the downtown skyscrapers on the other—provide the familiar backdrop for the college rowing eights gliding past or, as dusk approaches, the single sculls that pass by, serene and swanlike in their solitude, leaving the briefest imprint on the definitively placid surface of the stream.

  Gazing from the riverbank here, it is easy to forget that the Charles has a wilder side to it, that it has a source, is ruffled by rapids, is squeezed between cliffs, that there is a place where the river and anyone beside it can be quite unaware that it will in time become wide and placid. But seventy winding river miles away from Boston—twenty as the crow flies—there is such a place, a gorge, a ravine, a deep chasm that back in colonial times the settlers called the Gates of the Charles, since that was where the river appeared to rise. Nowadays there are golf courses nearby, an old insane asylum, a clutch of suburban tract housing, a women’s liberal arts college, a goodly number of farms, quarries that once provided stone for Boston, and the headquarters of the Bose Corporation, makers of powerful loudspeakers and much sought after earphones. All this activity flourishes to greater or lesser degrees outside, in this much populated quarter of eastern Massachusetts. But inside, within the stone walls of what is now officially called the Rocky Narrows Reserve, there is nothing. Nothing except for nature—nothing but forest, meadows, rocks, and water, just as it always was, preserved intact and inviolate for the community at large.

  Rocky Narrows, with its 274 acres of quite unspoiled Massachusetts landscape, has the distinction of being the oldest surviving possession of the oldest privately run and not-for-profit land conservation trust in the United States. It was given for the public good in 1897 to a body that had been established six years previously as the Trustees of the Public Reservations (the word Public was dropped in 1954). It had been founded by a landscape architect named Charles Eliot, a man with the vision of having the community at large become the trustee-owners of the land around them, for all to enjoy and for none to keep private. He started a movement that, while evolving over the decades into something as fearsomely complex as only the American legal profession can make such things, has lately become a powerful force for returning the land to the ownership of all. Helping, in other words, to make land communally owned, and doing so organically and apolitically, and not enforced artificially, as in the cases of Eigg and Ulva and elsewhere in the more decidedly political atmosphere of modern-day Scotland.

  There are essentially four tiers to this revolutionary new means of owning and stewarding land in the United States today. There are trusts that operate on a statewide level; those that work solely within a county; there are town and village land trusts; and down among the weeds there are the community land trusts, the much smaller-scale groups that are somewhat less involved with landscape and prettiness and leisure, more with affordability and want and social need.

  The Trustees of the Reservations in Massachusetts got off to a flying start with the gift of the Rocky Narrows. An eminent Brahmin—Augustus Hemenway, the heir to an enormous South American silver-mine fortune who is memorialized today by the immense eponymous gymnasium he gave to his alma mater, Harvard College—made the original bequest. The transfer was handled by a friend and early landscape-gardener employer of Eliot, Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the designers of New York’s Central Park. Not only is the tract physically beautiful, with its cliffs and hemlock stands and pinewoods and pastures, but it also serves as a powerful reminder of the first and bloodiest of all the wars between white settlers and Native Americans—in this case, the local Wampanoag Indians and their charismatic leader, Metacomet, also known as King Philip. The gorge was a strategically important defensive line for the Indians, though as it turned out not so effective, since the Wampanoag were fought to the death in a series of brutal battles—King Philip was himself horribly butchered—and then were all but annihilated as a tribe by the end of the seventeenth century.

  The Trustees were the first in the United States—and almost certainly the first in any country—to establish the principle behind the privately funded land conservation movement. It relies on the altruism of citizens who can be encouraged to do one of two things: to give away tracts of their own land that they wish to have preserved in perpetuity: or to give what in Massachusetts are called conservation restrictions (in the forty-nine other states, they are conservation easements), which allow the land to be used only in certain carefully prescribed ways, while the owner retains ownership. He can give, sell, or will his land as he pleases—just so long as the restriction remains in place forever—and with the same restriction or easement passing down through all successive owners as well. This sometimes limits the sale price—not everyone wants to buy land that, say, positively encourages people to roam across it—but the proponents of such schemes think the greater good is served, and thus so be it.

  This last provision is probably what had made this particular conservation movement such a success. Almost four hundred conservation restrictions have thus far been given by landowners across Massachusetts, involving some 21,000 acres. One of the properties involved, in the Berkshire hills at the far western end of the state, is named Questing. The story of its 400 acres, which lie in the prettily sprawling cluster of villages that constitute the town of New Marlborough, is typical of the slow and very positive land revolution that seems now to be spreading across America’s hitherto very vulnerable countryside, where developers of shopping malls and trailer parks once seemed to run wild.

  Questing is a simple enough reserve, far less pretentious than its name suggests. There is room for half a dozen cars to park outside a farm gate. An old forest road then leads uphill through glades of hardwood, ash and oak and cherry, until the woods open up into a meadow, seventeen acres of grassland alive in the summertime with wafts of butterflies and dragonflies. Beyond is forest—hemlock, white pine, yellow birch, red oak, maple—peppered with the ruined cellar-foundations of houses built three centuries or more ago, and with seasonal streams and vernal pools and old stone walls, and looping around it all just one rough path, marked only with blue-paint blazes on trees a hundred yards or so apart, making it less difficult to get lost.

  Birdsong is everywhere; there are mushrooms and salamanders, mosses and ferns, and every so often the sudden red flash of a frightened deer, scurrying out of sight. The term forest bathing may be overworked these days, but to be quite immersed in a wood of such unassuming coziness is positively rejuvenating for the spirit. All the more so when, after an hour or so of seeing no evidence of anything modern, no people, nothing but wild nature and some well-worn reliquaries of New England settlement history, you come back out into the meadow again and behold!, there is a wooden bench at which you may rest and take in the view, and silently thank the Trustees for caring so admirably for a tract of community land, gratefully given and lovingly tended for the benefit of all.

  This piece of land was left to the Trustees by a pharmacologist named Robert Lehman, who died nearby in 1996. He had enjoyed some success in New York City as the inventor of a pharmacopoeia of chemicals that helped manage a variety of sicknesses and had bought the ruin of a farm built in Victorian times by a pair of brothers named Leffingwell, who had both died in farming accidents—one killed by a falling barn beam, the other by the kick of a horse—and whose family then left for the flatter terrain of central Indiana. Lehman and his wife spent decades restoring their old farmhouse, using it as a second home for a while and then moving in full-time once the restoration had made it habitable. They purchased a variety of small parcels of land surrounding it over the years, but always with the intention of granting almost all of the acreage to the community by way of the Trustees, once they had no further use for it. Once, in other words, they had passed on.

  And so the community owns it and uses it today, with gratitude. Since it is managed at long distance—the Trustees’ headquarters is a hundred miles away, near Boston—the acreage is left more or less untended, although the current owner of the Leffingwell house set on the few acres retained privately under the terms of the Lehman grant looks after the trails privately, as best he can. And since Massachusetts is a very small state, less than three hours’ drive from end to end, there is a feeling of intimacy about the arrangement—a once locally owned parcel of property is being cared for by more-or-less-local trustees, who know a thing or two about the vegetation, forestry, and climate that is peculiar to these hills.

  In addition to state-centered land trusts like this, there are trusts that operate in America on a county level, and, in a more recent development, there are those that operate in a more granular fashion still, down at the town and village level. It is these last that seem to be enjoying the greatest current success. By the latest count, there are about thirteen hundred small-town land trusts across America, protecting and preserving through the principle of local private ownership—or by using perpetual conservation restrictions—a total of some ten million acres. Land that can never, ever be developed.

  This, it would seem, is the near ideal situation: local land, offered as gifts by locals, bought with funds raised by locals, sculpted and made accessible by locals, managed and now tended to by locals and now used freely and generally by locals. And yet all of it has been created informally, organically, from the ground up, if the pun may be allowed. And mercifully free from politics, ideology, and argument.

  This is by no means Eigg in America: it is not the result of doctrinal pronouncements, political speeches, and the scoring of partisan points. This is community landownership pure and simple. By all accounts, it is an arrangement that appears to work well, offering to the local public the undisputed benefits of health and exercise and peace and quiet and serenity that all need from time to time, and in the manner that the noted ecologist Aldo Leopold had so famously wished for. This is land at its very best—owned by all, used by all, for the good of all.

  And finally, one level still further down, at a truly grass-roots level, there is the idea of the community land trust. This is an idea bruited very much longer ago, and born not in America but in India; it concerns itself much less with landholdings than with housing, with cities rather than countryside, and with mitigating poverty rather than with mandating serenity and pleasure.

  Vinoba Bhave, who was a friend and disciple of the Mahatma Gandhi, first established the idea of such a voluntary land reform movement in the early 1950s. Like his mentor, he was an ascetic and given to spectacular, nonviolent demonstrations of his political beliefs. For example, in order to publicize what he saw as the need to break up existing feudal systems in India—the situation whereby titled princes, nizams, maharajahs, as well as zamindars, walis, and nawabs owned huge swathes of countryside, and yet millions were left wholly landless—he did a classically Gandhian thing: he picked up a stick and a mendicant’s begging bowl and set out to walk thousands of miles, barefoot or in chappals, across the entirety of his country.