In 1928, when I talked with Maria, a member of the original Yosemite tribe, her version of the massacre differed widely from the story told by Bunnell. Through her daughter she stoutly assured me that no Indians died in Yosemite Valley except those killed by whites and those who were ill. I asked her how Tenaya died and where. She explained that while the Yosemites were at Mono Lake they engaged in hand games with the Monos. These games are stirring affairs among the Indians. A. L. Kroeber states, “It is impossible to have seen a California Indian warmed to his work in this game when played for stakes—provided its aim and method are understood—and any longer justly to designate him mentally sluggish and emotionally apathetic, as is the wont. It is a game in which not sticks and luck, but the tensest of wills, the keenest perceptions and the supplest of muscular responses are matched.... Seen in this light, the contortions, gesticulations, noises, and excitement of the native are not the mere uncontrolledness of an overgrown child, but the outward reflexes of a powerfully surcharged intensity.” According to Maria, it was in the heat of such a game that a quarrel developed between Tenaya and his Mono allies. In the fight that followed, Tenaya and five of his Yosemite braves were stoned to death. At least, this stoning feature agrees with former accounts of the killing. Horse stealing and a gluttonous feast in Yosemite Valley do not figure in Maria’s story. She insists that Tom “Hutchings,” the Yosemite Indian befriended by J. M. Hutchings, attended to the burning of the bodies and packed the charred remains upon his own back from Mono Lake to Hites Cove. There a great “cry” was held for two weeks; the remaining Yosemite Indians and all their friends bewailed the loss of Chief Tenaya and the four tribesmen. A number of parties of miners, emboldened by the news of the disbanding of the Yosemites, visited the valley in the fall of 1853. During 1854 no white men are known to have entered Yosemite Valley. By 1855 several accounts written by members of the three punitive expeditions that had entered Yosemite had been published in San Francisco papers. The difficulties of overcoming hostile Indians in the search for gold were far more prominent in the minds of these writers than the scenic wonders of the new-found valley. Nevertheless, the mention of a thousand-foot waterfall in one of these published letters awakened James M. Hutchings, then publishing the _California Magazine_, to the possibilities that Yosemite presented. Hutchings organized the first tourist party in June, 1855, and with two of the original Yosemites as guides proceeded from Mariposa over the old Indian trail via Wawona and Inspiration Point to the valley. Thomas Ayres, an artist, was a member of the party and during this visit he made the first sketches ever made in Yosemite. Ten of these original pencil drawings are now preserved in the Yosemite Museum.