In Yosemite, for thousands of years before the discovery of gold, Native Americans traveled through and inhabited the area that the Sierra Nevada’s melting snow spills dramatically over rocky cliffs on the walls into the Valley. Waterfalls that sit over three thousand feet above its floor. The treasures the park holds are unduplicated, each wonder differing from the next, each overwhelmingly spectacular.

From 1850 to 1851 Native Americans and Euro-American miners in the area were at war, the Mariposa War. Some Euro-American men had formed a militia known as the Mariposa Battalion. Their purpose - drive the native Ahwahneechee people onto reservations. The Mariposa Battalion were the first non-natives to enter Yosemite. When this war ended, Yosemite was then open to settlement and speculation.

Today we are going to talk about Jennie Curry, half of the curry couple who founded Camp Curry in Yosemite, and the history of the Yosemite Firefall.

Season 3 features inspiring, gallant, even audacious stories of REAL 19th Century women from the Wild West. Stories that contain adult content, including violence which may be disturbing to some listeners, or secondhand listeners. So, discretion is advised. I am Andrea Anderson and this is Queens of the Mines, Season Three.

Between 1855 and 1864, the Yosemite Valley had 653 visitors.After the completion of stage roads into the valley, the number rose to 2,700 visitors annually within its first decade. Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant on June 30, 1864 and Yosemite Valley was placed under the protection of the state of California. The act preserved the valley for public use and recreation for all time. Some of the earliest visitors were artists, authors, painters, illustrators and photographers who came to publicize the Valley. Hotels were built and stagecoach companies started bringing tourists on the long journey in.

Six years later, James McCauley, an Irish sailor and miner, arrived in Yosemite Valley. McCauley took a job in a sawmill, working alongside John Muir. McCauley soon built a horse trail from the base of Sentinel Rock up to Glacier Point. It was over a four-mile route which climbed 3,200 feet. At Glacier Point, he built a small shack which he named the Mountain House. McCauley charged a toll for the trail and the Mountain House provided concessions and lodging to its travelers.

One night in 1872, McCauley and his school-aged sons kicked a campfire over the ledge at Glacier Point. The act quite literally sparked the idea of a money-making venture. A firefall. They would collect a fee from tourists in the valley during the day to build a modest fire and push it off the cliff that night. He experimented with versions of fireworks that he lowered on wires from Overhanging Rock nearby. The attempts seemed comparatively insignificant from the Valley floor. Finally he returned to the idea of pushing over the embers.

McCauley bought both of his 8 year old boys' mules and the young McCauley twins attended school by riding them down the Four Mile Trail to the Valley. It took ninety minutes.

While in the valley, they would collect $1.50 from tourists who wanted to see a Firefall, and then would ride the trail back up to Glacier Point, with a pack mule, packing wood and carrying the provisions for the hotel. On the Fourth of July, a collection often amounted to ten or twenty dollars. Busy days like that required hauling wood up for at least two days.

McCauley soon leased Mountain House to others to manage, that was when the state of California took possession of all Yosemite claims in 1874. In 1880, he leased Mountain House back from the state. Fifteen years later, the facility was described as “almost uninhabitable”. The couple was evicted by the state in 1897 for failure to maintain. McCauley was killed accidently in an accident with a runaway horse, and the firefalls stopped. For years they were almost forgotten.

In 1899, David and Jennie Etta Curry and their children took the wild ride down the old Coulterville Road with Driver Eddie Webb, to their new home in Yosemite Valley. Both had studied under Dr. David Starr Jordan at Indiana University, where they had both graduated from in 1883. It was unusual at the time for a woman to be a college graduate. Back east, both were Hoosier school teachers.

The Curry’s had a unique love for nature. Their previous work involved taking parties through Yellowstone with a movable camp.

David and Jennie saw an opportunity. They received permission from the Guardian of the Valley, which was the state park at the time, to use the site of its camp. With seven tents, they opened a family campground at the base of Glacier Point, and they called Camp Curry.

It is wild if you think about it, furnishing a business in a location like that, before means of modern transportation. Bare tents, burlap for the floors, mattresses, bed springs on wooden legs, clean bedding, chairs, and tables were brought in by wagon from Merced, which was one hundred miles away. Oilcloth covered cracker boxes’ that were used for wash stands. There was a dining tent that seated twenty people. Camp Curry opened in June of 1899, charging $2 per night. The first affordable accommodation in the Park. Accommodations at the Sentinel Hotel were $4 a night.

She was fondly known throughout the Valley as "Mother Curry". The power behind the throne. Her personality would truly contribute to their success. She was big in mind, soul and body and interested in people and in life. Of course, women's domestic skills were highly valued in the West, but like many pioneering women, Jennie had to find a way to broaden the roles beyond the Cult of True Womanhood, as mentioned in the book and previous episodes.

Jennie helped plan additional guest services, made the beds, and packed the box lunches for adventurers. She would say that she had done every job around camp, from baking dozens of pies or loaves of bread to making lye soap from wood-ashes in a huge open kettle. All but the duties of the porter. The Curry’s in fact, did do all of the work around camp. With the exception of one paid employee, the cook and two or three students from Stanford, who worked for a designated time in exchange for a week's room and board.

During the first season, the camp expanded to twenty-five tents, with almost 300 guests in the season, of the 4,500 people who visited Yosemite Valley that year. Many of the guests came from Curry's educational network. It was a pretty good start. The crowds predicted Camp Curry would fail. It was cold, and isolated.

The Curry’s were determined. They had ideas. The memory of the firefall was eventually brought up, and Mr. Curry decided to revive the tradition on holidays, or when prominent guests were in the Valley.

Men would gather wood on the Ledge Trail, and build a 12 foot wide, four foot tall mound of firewood. At four, they would light the fire, allowing the pile to burn down until it was a hill of glowing embers, for 5 hours until 9 o clock. Nine o’clock in Yosemite meant Fire Fall. It was an unwritten law that everything and everyone in the valley STOPPED at 9pm.

David Curry would cup his hands to his mouth, raise his face toward Glacier Point and bellow: “Hello, Glacier Point!” without the aid of a sound system or even a megaphone. This is how Mr. Curry earned the nickname “The Stentor.” Stentor was that famous Greek of antiquity who could command 10,000 troops without a megaphone." The fire tender at the point would reply: “Hello, Camp Curry!” The rest of the exchange followed: “Is the fire ready?” “The fire is ready!” followed by Curry’s roaring command “Let ‘er go Gallagher!” “Let the fire fall!” “THE FIRE-ER IS-SSS FALLING!” I am guessing that Gallagher was the regular fire tender.

The two men at the top, using extra long-handled wide steel rakes, would alternate strokes to maintain a steady stream of cinders, plunging over the cliffs, to their resting place on a ledge 1,700 feet below. It was a skill. It took practice to be able to push blazing hot coals for an extended period of time, over a cliff in a steady stream down the granite wall. Simulating a continuously flowing waterfall. It was a blazing stream of thousands and thousands of individually discernible red and gold sparks floating down the cliff in complete silence, the sparks flying away like shooting stars. Fifteen minutes later, the fall would grow smaller until it became a mere thread of gold which drew the curtain of night, before darkness descends.

Break

The railroad reaching El Portal in 1907 made travel to the gold rush in California much more accessible. For the park, it skyrocketed the ability of making improvements in equipment and efficiency. Jennie no longer needed to bring in furniture, food, in fact everything by wagon from Merced. The train ended only fifteen miles away, and the road there was easy. She was able to raise the comfort level of the camp for her ever increasing number of guests with better kitchen equipment, dressers, bed frames and rugs.

The firefall continued each night and held 20 minutes of enchantment, where thousands of onlookers felt something in common for that short period of time. Yosemite’s grandeur was on full display, how unspeakably tall were its cliffs and how quiet its forest. The act, performed every night for many years, etched the surface of the granite, leaving a 1000 ft white strip.

From 1913 to 1916 the Yosemite Firefall tradition was halted by the park service over a disagreement between David Curry and the Assistant Secretary of the Interior. David Curry died in 1917, just before the Firefall was reinstated. Jennie, with the help of her children, carried on with running and expanding Camp Curry, on lease from the government.

The tradition carried on for decades, the song “Indian Love Call,” popularized by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in the 1936 film “Rose Marie,” was eventually performed while the fire cascaded down the rock face. So much for the silence I guess. The firefall was halted during World War II, when park facilities were used by the military.

Jennie Curry died in October of 1948. The original purpose of the fire fall was to draw visitors to the park. Five years after Jennie’s death, Yosemite received 1 million visitors for the first time.

In 1960, President John F. Kennedy visited Yosemite and was, according to various sources, either held up by an important phone call or was still eating his dinner at 9 p.m. The firefall was held for half an hour so he could see it — much to the displeasure of the rest of the visitors. By 1965, annual visitation had reached 2 million.

The firefall continued on for nearly two-thirds of the 20th century, the firefall occurred each summer night. Luckily, it never caused any forest fires, but other environmental impacts were mounting: Thousands of visitors were tramping through the meadows, driving their cars off the park roads, trying to get the best view, leaving litter everywhere. There were thefts from the hotels and campgrounds, when visitors would be absent or distracted and lastly, nearly every dead red fir tree accessible by road had been stripped of its bark for use as fuel. Rangers worked late nights untangling traffic jams, while idling vehicles spit out exhaust into the park. There were simply too many people. The park canceled the firefall. About 50 people gathered to mark the end of the tradition, on Jan. 25, 1968. 55 years ago from the recording of this episode.

Although the Glacier Point firefall is a thing of the past, a natural, even more awe-inspiring, phenomenon that goes by the same name at Horsetail Falls remains. The organic illusion appears for a few weeks each February. Light from the setting sun hits the eastside of El Capitan at Horsetail Falls at a precise angle seems to be molten lava rushing 1,570 feet to the valley floor, creating a natural "firefall." Ansel Adams captured it on film for the first time, in 1940.

The natural Yosemite Firefall can be finicky. Several factors must converge to trigger the Firefall to glow. First, there has to be an adequate amount of snowpack for Horsetail Falls to be flowing and the temperatures must be warm enough to melt the snow. The sky also needs to be clear at sunset. If conditions are cloudy the sun’s rays will be blocked, and Horsetail Fall will not light up. If everything comes together and conditions are just right, the Yosemite Firefall will light up for about ten minutes. To see Horsetail Fall glowing blood red is an almost supernatural experience. The sun hits Yosemite Valley at roughly the same angle in October, but the lack of runoff prevents the same phenomenon.

The discovery of Horsetail Falls is not well documented. There is no doubt that the Awahneechee Indians who lived in Yosemite Valley for hundreds of years, most likely knew of its existence, but there is no evidence that they passed the knowledge to the white settlers. Love that. Makes perfect sense.

The local lore of “elmer” is linked to the Fire Falls. In the 1930’s, a child by the name of Elmer would drift off with his friends or something to their own place to watch the Firefall and every night. It was a common thing in Yosemite to hear after the Firefall, his mother calling him back to camp: EL-MER- EL-MER- EL-MER.

It all leads me to wonder, what is the most spectacular thing i nature that you have ever seen?

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