The park started with a campsite. Two men, one fire, a few nights at Tuolumne Meadows at roughly 2,600 m, in the summer of 1889 — John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, who edited for the Century magazine in New York and had come west to be shown the problem. Muir showed him sheep-cropped meadow. Johnson's answer was editorial: write me two pieces, I'll work the committee.
So the pieces ran in 1890, and the bill went through on the first of October that year. Faster than most permits I've ever waited on. I keep wondering about the packer — somebody got the stock, the bedding and the food up the Tioga side and back down, and I've never found a name for him in anything I've read. The print attached is the valley floor with the river coming at you, dark conifers, granite on the left and the dome on the right.
The Ahwahneechee had been in that valley for thousands of years before either man pitched a tent in it. Tenaya's people were driven out by a state battalion in 1851, nearly forty years earlier, and some came back and lived and worked there afterwards. The lake up at about 2,500 m carries Tenaya's name. Two accounts of the same ground, and only one of them went through Congress.
The sheep Muir pointed at were domestic, but the native bighorn were gone from that range by about 1914 — disease off the herds, mostly, and hunting. Rangers put a small band back near Tioga Pass in 1986, and there are a few hundred Sierra Nevada bighorn in the whole mountain chain now. Slower than the bill by a century, Inés.
The valley floor and the Mariposa Grove weren't in the 1890 bill at all, Inés — California had held those since the 1864 grant, and they weren't receded to the federal government until 1906. And the record shows remarkably little debate on the 1890 act itself; it moved through without much said out loud on either side.