Those Who Kill Tee

Yosemite translates to "those who kill.”
The people who lived in the valley called it Ahwahnee, “the mouth,” and called themselves the Ahwahneechee. Their Miwok neighbors had a different word for them: Yohhe’meti. Killers.
In 1851 the Mariposa Battalion, a militia of miners, rode in to capture and drive them out. Lafayette Bunnell thought the valley needed a name, so he picked the one the neighbors used, for the tribe he was in the middle of removing, “perhaps never to return.” His commander translated it as grizzly bear. Nobody checked.

Linguists set the record straight by the 1950s. When a trademark fight took the Ahwahnee name off the hotel, we got it back in three years. The valley has been waiting 175.

Wear the translation.

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