EIGHT

Up until this point the Mariposa and park authorities had been operating on either of two assumptions: one, that Carole, Juli, and Silvina had, for some unknown reason voluntarily deviated from their planned intinerary, and would eventually turn up; or, more ominously, that some potentially fatal mishap had occurred, such as a car wreck.

After all, the country leading into and out of Yosemite was quite rugged, with hairpin turns and sharp drop-offs; the weather had been alternately raining and snowing. It was entirely possible that Carole had missed a turn and crashed on her way out of El Portal Tuesday morning; in that case the missing red Pontiac might even then be lying hidden in some easy-to-overlook canyon somewhere off the side of Highway 140, concealed in brush and woods, awaiting a belated discovery.

But the recovery of Carole’s wallet—minus cash but loaded with credit cards, well over 100 miles away from Yosemite—suggested at least three other alternatives, each of them even more sinister: either Carole and the girls had made it out of El Portal, had driven to Modesto, where Carole and the girls had met with some sort of foul play, such as a carjacking; or second, that the trio had crashed on the way out, and that someone had come along, looted the wallet, and failed to report the location of the wreck; or third, that the three had been carjacked either in El Portal or the park proper, or even—given the Sund family’s wealth—had somehow been kidnapped.

Because the discovery of the wallet seemed to indicate the strong possibility of foul play, either in Mariposa County or Modesto, Modesto authorities decided to call in the Federal Bureau of Investigation for assistance, while in Mariposa County an effort was redoubled to develop credible sightings of the trio after Monday night.

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Since his return to California from Arizona the previous Wednesday evening, Jens Sund had several meetings with the Mariposa authorities; then, assisted by other family members and friends, Jens began searching both the park and the Highway 140 corridor, looking for some sign of the red car.

But the Friday discovery of Carole’s wallet in Modesto changed everything: now Jens and the rest of his family, including the Carringtons, had to prepare themselves for the possibility that Carole, Juli, and Silvina might have been kidnapped, or worse. The Sunds and Carringtons relocated their own base of operations to Modesto, and on Sunday, February 23, held a press conference in Modesto: perhaps anticipating or hoping to instigate a ransom demand, the family offered $250,000 for information leading to the safe return of Carole, Juli, and Silvina, no questions asked. Meanwhile, family members, assisted by Modesto police, the park authorities, and Mariposa deputies, began circulating flyers in the park, in El Portal, and in Modesto near where Carole’s wallet was found, in the hope that some witness might come forward who could shed light on what had become of the trio.

One thing seemed increasingly clear: the rented red Pontiac almost certainly was no longer in the Yosemite/Mariposa area. Searchers from the Park Service, the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Department, and the California Highway Patrol had combed the highways leading into and out of the park both on foot and from the air, and had discovered nothing. If the car were still in the area, said Mariposa Sheriff’s Sergeant Doug Binniweis, “we would have located it by now.”

Asked if his agency was investigating the disappearances as a simple missing persons case or a kidnapping, Binniweis could only shrug. “Right now,” he said, “I don’t know.”

Making its own appearance at the press conference, a spokesman for the FBI, Nick Rossi, said his agency was treating the matter as a potential kidnapping until information showed otherwise.

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As a general rule, law enforcement authorities are of two minds about the posting of rewards: broadly speaking, on one hand a substantial reward is likely to stimulate public attention, and potentially lead to valuable clues; on the other hand, however, the larger the reward, the larger the number of false leads that may be turned in, however well-intentioned—and sometimes not.

In an environment with a sizeable number of subsistance-level residents, a quarter-million dollar jackpot can whet the imagination. In this case, with precious little to go on—three women in a missing red car—almost any sighting that conformed to the basics had a chance. The problem for investigators was to winnow the grains of reality from the dry stalks of inspired imagination.

And too, the posting of a large reward has additional advantages and drawbacks—not least of which is attention from the news media. By the week following the disappearance, the northern California news media had recognized the Sund-Pelosso mystery as a surefire subject of viewer/reader interest, especially with $250,000 now in the pot. Within hours, representatives of most of northern California’s major media organizations were in Modesto to attend Jens Sund’s press conference; most soon divided their forces between the motel in Modesto the Sunds/Carringtons adopted as their headquarters, a nearby hotel adopted by the FBI, and the Cedar Lodge at El Portal, waiting for some sort of denouement. Eventually, as the search went on for more than a month, even the national media dropped in to see what was going on.

In truth, the disappearance of Carole, Juli, and Silvina had all of what the news media likes to call “the elements” of a good story, and in abundance. Apart from the mystery itself and the reward, there was the very setting: one of America’s most famous national parks, with breathtaking scenery for backdrop visuals, the sort of place millions of Americans had been to and could relate to; a wealthy family, essentially saying money was no object as long as the missing could be found safe and sound; the likelihood of foul play, particularly against three unarmed, innocent and defenseless women tourists; a strong Sund family presence in Modesto, making themselves available for anguished interviews in a desperate effort to focus public attention on their plight; and even the possibility of international intrigue: after all, Silvina was from a wealthy Argentinian family, which at least suggested the possibility, however remote, that the disappearance might be connected to political upheavals in that country that were more than 20 years old.

But of all of these, the biggest element was the park itself.

As one of the first two national parks (the other was Yellowstone), Yosemite had a long, colorful and even violent history even before it was designated as a federal park in 1890.

The history of Yosemite as we know it began in the last ice age, when a series of glaciers lay over the crown of uplifted granite that formed the rim of the present-day Sierra Nevada mountains, themselves thrust up over millions of years’ pressure from below. As global temperatures slowly warmed, the glacier that would become the Merced River ate through the softer portions of granite atop the Sierra, leaving the harder sections behind in a sort of circular bowl; these would become the towering gray cliff faces so beloved by climbers and photographers today.

After the Merced glacier finally melted, a dam of rock and gravel plugged the western end of the U-shaped valley, leaving a prehistoric lake. Eventually, rock and silt runoff from the towering heights above filled the lake, forming today’s valley floor.

Probably the first English-speaking person to visit Yosemite Valley was the mountain man Joe Walker, sometime in 1833, when that curmudgeonly trapper first crossed the Sierras in search of California horses to steal for sale east of the Rocky Mountains. It appears that the Spanish colonists of California at the time had no inkling of Yosemite’s existence.

That certainly wasn’t true of the native Americans who had lived in California for thousands of years before the Spanish or mountain men like Walker arrived. Indeed, until the discovery of gold in California in 1848, most of the population of California was Native American, and it was their tragic misfortune that a yellow metal worthless to them was instrumental in the destruction of their culture, to say nothing of their very lives. By some estimates, the native population of California declined by as much as two-thirds during the California Gold Rush.

The story of Yosemite’s “discovery” and naming is best told by writer Rebecca Solnit in the November/December 1992 issue of Sierra, the Sierra Club’s publication.

To summarize Solnit’s reconstruction, Yosemite itself first came to the outside world’s attention in 1851, and it took a bit of ethnic cleansing on the part of the gold-crazed whites to do it. As it happened, another mountain man, one Jim Savage, born in Illinois around 1823, was the responsible party; Savage’s own family lore holds that he was kidnapped by Indians as an adolescent, or perhaps ran away to join them; in any event, by the mid-1840s, Savage was a veteran mountain man, and one drawn to the then-burgeoning idea of Manifest Destiny that would culminate in the Mexican War, the occupation of California, and eventually the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848.

Struck by the gold mania, Savage struck out for the southern Sierra, where he apparently hit paydirt on the Tuolumne River and points south. One account portrays Savage as a rather unusual Forty-Niner; where the more typical prospector was up to his knees and elbows in achingly cold streams of snow-melt with gold pan awash, Savage found a better way; apparently a gifted native linguist, with supposedly five wives from different central California tribes, Savage simply hired the natives to bring the gold to him.

“One pioneer,” Solnit writes, “ran into him at this time ‘under a brushwood tent … pouring gold dust into candle boxes by his side. Five hundred naked Indians … brought the dust to Savage, and in return for it received a bright piece of cloth or some beads.’ Another explorer remembered that ‘Jim Savage was the absolute and despotic ruler over thousands of Indians, extending all the way from Cosumnes [in the central Sierra foothills] to the Tejon Pass [across the Mojave Desert to the south] and was by them designated in their vernacular ‘El Rey Guero’—the blond king. He called himself the Tulare King.”

Solnit contends that Savage held his sway over the thousands of native Americans through parlor tricks and other sleights-of-hand suggesting supernatural powers, as well as his gift for languages. Nor did Savage neglect the proprieties of local politicking.

“‘It is related of him,’” Solnit quotes the famous California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, “‘that he made it a point to marry a chief’s daughter in every tribe; exchanged hardware and whiskey by weight, ounce for ounce, with the Indians for gold dust, and bet his weight in gold on the turn of a card in a San Francisco gambling house.’”

By 1850, Savage had relocated his trinkets-for-gold exchange post farther south on the Merced River, where he had relations with a band of Indians calling themselves the Miwok then living in the Merced River Canyon as it led up to Yosemite Valley.

But the aptly named Savage’s depredations on the native population of central California couldn’t last; early in 1850 a band of foothill Indians began stealing livestock to replenish the food supply that had been disrupted by their gold-digging new neighbors; one raid took place at Savage’s Merced River trading post, and in December of the same year, another post was wrecked; this time three employees were killed. Thus began the Yosemite Indian War of 1851.

Having been the party attacked (although hardly the more aggrieved), Savage immediately set out to round up a militia to punish the offenders. Reports from his many Indian sources told him that trouble was brewing in the mountains among a band of Indians called the Yosemite, which Savage thought meant “grizzly bear,” implying that the tribe was named for its “lawless and predatory character.” But here Savage appeared to be in error: not only were the Indians being hunted by the hastily assembled militia—soon to be known as the Mariposa Battalion—the wrong culprits, even Savage’s translation of their tribal name was wrong—very wrong, as it turned out.

In any event, as the Mariposa Battalion under Savage and Lieutenant Treadwell Moore, 200 strong, clambered up the Merced River canyon in pursuit of the hostiles in early March of 1851, they were accompanied by a man named Lafayette Bunnell, who recorded the valorous history of the battalion in a volume titled Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 which Led to That Event; it was Bunnell himself who provided many of the Yosemite place names we know today, such as Bridalveil Falls, and others.

The band of Miwok Indians “Major” Savage, Moore, and Bunnell pursued was under the leadership of its elder, Chief Ten-ie-ya, and were hardly grizzly bears, to say nothing of being of “lawless and predatory character.” Ordinarily, the Miwok weren’t about to enter the valley of the Yosemite, which was the domain of still another band, the Ahwahneechee, named after the valley itself, the Ahwanhnee, meaning “big mouth.” The Ahwahneechee were blood enemies of the Miwok: descendants of Paiutes who had spilled over the top of the Sierras into the big valley, the Ahwahneechees were known for their periodic raids on the more peaceful Miwok living in the canyons below.

But trapped between the vengeful Mariposa Battalion below and the Ahwahneechee above, Ten-ie-ya’s Miwoks decided to head for the hills. Into the valley they went, across its wide floor, and then into the canyon that would come to be called Bloody Canyon, which we know today as Tenaya Canyon (the Park Services advises against climbing in Tenaya Canyon today as “dangerous and … strongly discouraged”).

Near the summit, at a pristine alpine lake that would come to bear his name, Chief Ten-ie-ya halted. Bunnell recorded what happened next.

“When Ten-ie-ya reached the summit,” Bunnell wrote, “he left his people and approached … the captain and a few of us. I called him up to us, and told him that we had given his name to the lake and river.” Doubtless Bunnell thought he was honoring the chief, but Ten-ie-ya said it was hardly necessary; his people already knew what the lake and river were called, and it wasn’t necessary for any white man to tell him what they were.

In return for such a place in posterity, Ten-ie-ya was informed that he and his people were to be brought back down to the central valley, there to live on a reservation for the rest of their lives.

Down the Miwok went, to settle on their meager reservation and eventually be wiped out by the gold diggers’ diseases such as measles, syphilis, and diphtheria; this was how the West was won.

But Savage, while he might have won his war, missed the larger truth, according to Solnit, who draws upon the research of Craig Bates, a Yosemite Park ethnologist; for while it was true that the Miwok word for grizzly bear was “uzumati,” the phonetically spelled Miwok word “yosemite” more naturally translates as “yohemiti”—the Miwok’s characterization of their Ahwahneechee enemies in the upper valley, and which meant: “some among them are killers.”