instructions: History 1493 –Spring 2024 Paper 2 (1).pdf
Most residents were sleeping when an earthquake shook San Francisco on April 18, 1906. Ruptured gas mains sparked thirty subsequent fires that destroyed 490 city blocks. Estimates suggest perhaps 2000 people died. For weeks after, the city struggled with an inadequate water supply, prompting municipal officials to search for a more reliable source of water and electricity. As early as 1901, San Francisco officials had proposed damming the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, but the proposal gained new urgency after the earthquake. The proposal generated a national opposition seeking to protect the national parks.
As the debate moved to the U.S. Congress, San Francisco’s advocates emphasized the city’s needs and its large population. Their opponents offered a vision of development grounded in nature, tourism, and recreation. In 1913, Congress passed the Raker Act, granting the city the right to flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Nonetheless, burgeoning environmental groups gained new constituencies and stirred greater interest in the national parks.
The primary sources below include letters, reports, articles, and congressional testimony on both sides of the debate. The documents also tell much through their silences. Neither side acknowledged that the park encompassed the traditional lands of the Ahwahnechee people. Some Native Americans remained through much of the twentieth century as park managers found them useful for labor or as tourist attractions, but eventually all faced expulsion.
secondary sources options:
Politics and the Park.pdf
The Engineer as Lobbyist.pdf
Righter, Robert. “The Hetch Hetchy Controversy.”.pdf,
Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness_ Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks.
Milton in Yosemite.pdf
America’s National Parks.pdf
All other pdfs: primary source options
