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The Yosemite Grant was the first time in all of human history that a large tract of wild land was set aside not for the exclusive use of the rich or royalty of a Nation, but for everyone and for all time. A hinge of History was moving in 1864 when they set Yosemite aside.
When that bill was passed and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, we were in the midst, the depths, the worst year of the American Civil War where casualties numbering two thousand a day, we're coming back to Washington DC and the same day that Lincoln signed into law the act setting aside Yosemite. He also signed into law an increase in the income tax to help pay for the war that he would hope would save his country.
First of all, most Americans believe that National Parks have always been here, that they are the product of some sort of automatic process and the truth is they haven't always been here and they are only the result of visionary people engaging in a long hard fight to try to save a place from destruction.
In the 19th century up until the Yosemite Grant, the business of Congress was to dispose of public land through homesteads for minors, for lumbermen, for the railroads, and something about this place made us stop say at least here, let's do something different.
When people compare it to Cathedral that tells you something, that they see it as a sanctuary as a refuge. It has the walls. It has the sacramental water that flows into it. It has all those elements that are both awe inspiring and yet somehow comforting at least in the valley, and then you go to the Mariposa Grove and you're standing there with these living things. That have been there for thousands of years and you have to be a pretty callous and kylo person not to be in awe and in reverence of these living things.
Andd it's all about this great idea, an idea that when it was first proclaimed was as radical and unique as the Declaration of Independence, which was to say that a nation's most majestic and special and some would say sacred places should be a set aside not for the rich and for royalty and the well-connected, but for everyone and for all time, and when that was first applied here to Yosemite that was a historic moment that led not only to National Parks throughout the United States, but led to National Parks across the world copying the model that had its first germination of a seed here in Yosemite.
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