“… memorials are remarkably striking and tell the history and character of their makers in durable language, while the decay suggests too well the fate that awaits every tribe on the continent.”

When John Muir first lived in Yosemite in the early 1870s, the few Native Americans he met had just survived decades of systematic removal from their land. In in 1879 Alaska, he met the Tlingit who had maintained some independence despite disease and missionization and he learned about their culture and customs.