History
The name "Hetch Hetchy" comes from the Native American Sierra Miwok language and refers to a grass with edible seeds that grows in the valley. It was first used by Joseph Screech, who in 1850 became the first non-Native American to enter the valley. Screech noted that Paiutes had formerly inhabited Hetch Hetchy and still gathered seeds, roots and acorns in and around the valley. Acorns are available in the valley, but are rare elsewhere in the high country.
In 1867 Charles F. Hoffmann of the California Geological Survey conducted the first survey of the valley.
Read more about this topic: Hetch Hetchy Valley
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)