UC Merced

This project explores the shared history of the Stanislaus River canyon and the Emigrant Wilderness, two places in the mountains of central California that changed the way Americans manage the country’s preserved wilderness. In both places, the environmental conditions that made them popular destinations for outdoor recreation – and, in turn, made them subjects of wilderness preservation campaigns – existed thanks to human artifice and engineering. And in both cases, that engineered infrastructure was connected to a single hydroelectric project in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains completed shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. With predictable and controlled water flows, the stretch of canyon downstream from the project’s main power plant became in the 1970s the most popular rafting whitewater in the American West and remains today a national symbol for river preservation. Fifty years prior, the Emigrant Wilderness became a backcountry fisherman’s paradise thanks to a collection of small, hand-built dams constructed by a former employee of the company that built and maintained the electric power system. Both the canyon and the wilderness were accessible largely due to roads, reservoirs and other infrastructure built during the system’s initial construction and which remained over decades for its maintenance. In both cases, the human origins of these wild places took center stage in legal, political and regulatory contests over their preservation with one question driving the conflicts – are dams compatible with the wilderness? In telling this story, Building the Wilderness will cover approximately a century of people, places and events in central California, beginning in its industrial landscape during the 1890s and ending in its high-country wildlands in the early 2000s.