06/11/2026
The YOSEMITE!
in 1906, a little over three years after he sat by a campfire with John Muir under the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Yosemite Recession Bill.
The law did something Muir had spent much of his life arguing for. Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove had been under California state control since 1864 — a strange administrative doughnut, with the federally-protected national park surrounding a state-controlled core. State management had been uneven; overgrazing, fire, and unchecked development had taken their toll. Muir had pushed for federal control for decades.
In May 1903, on a three-day camping trip with the President, he had finally found his audience.
The legislation Roosevelt signed on June 11, 1906, accepted California's "recession" of the valley and the grove back to the federal government, unifying them with the surrounding Yosemite National Park. It was the policy completion of a campfire conversation — and, in conservation terms, one of the most consequential signatures TR ever made, bringing the most iconic mile of American landscape under permanent federal protection.
Today, every visitor who stands at Tunnel View and looks across the valley — the granite walls, the falls, the meadows, all in their preserved state — owes that view, in part, to a camping trip and a bill signed on this day in 1906.
