author
Lafayette Houghton Bunnell
1824–1903
A frontier doctor, explorer, and memoirist, remembered above all for his role in the 1851 Mariposa Battalion expedition into Yosemite Valley. His later book helped shape how generations of readers imagined Yosemite and the violent conflict surrounding its early non-Native intrusion.
1 Audiobook
Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, Which Led to That Event
by Lafayette Houghton Bunnell
About the author
Born in 1824, he became a physician and later built his reputation as a writer of western history and personal recollection. He is best known for joining the Mariposa Battalion in 1851, the expedition often described in older accounts as the first by non-Native people into Yosemite Valley.
That legacy is closely tied to his book Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, first published in 1880. In it, he recorded the expedition, the naming of Yosemite Valley, and his own memories of the campaign, making the book one of the best-known firsthand narratives connected to Yosemite's early written history.
His story also sits within a harder history. The Mariposa Battalion was part of a military campaign against Native people in California, so his work is valuable both as a classic Yosemite account and as a document of that conflict. He died in 1903.