MADERA HERITAGE QUARTERLY -Part 2- In route to the Valley, the Battalion had met a large band of surrendering Indians, who were herded off toward a reservation. Among them was Maria, a young granddaughter of Chief Tenaya, who was humiliated by surrender and exhausted from walking through deep snow. Three-quarters of a century later, she recalled that the Indians, in 1851, “Got no shirt—got no pontloon. Pretty near nothing on women pretty near (nothing) on men.” She remembered Savage as “no good,” a man who was unfair to Indians who mined for him, and whose “ketchum young girl” marriage to several Indian maids antagonized some of her people. She was bitter over Chief Tenaya’s treatment. “When white men fight him and get him, they tell him they give him money. He no want money. They tell him clothes. He no want clothes. They take him Mono reservation. He die.” His death did not take place on a reservation, however. A Mariposa asked to be taught Indian words, and had difficulty writing down Maria’s speech. Maria laughed, “You can no spell it? You no can spell what a bird sings.” In 1928 75 years after her capture, Maria LEBRADO revisited Yosemite Valley in Company with sympathetic naturalists. She was bent and grizzled, but physically strong and mentally alert. Her nostalgia for early life and Indian friends was eloquent. “Long, long time!: She was cheered at the sight of Yosemite Falls, calling it by its Indian name, “Chorlock, Chorlock no gone!” and Sentinel Rock inspired her reverence “Loya, Loya! Long time’go.” Maria was delighted with most of the tribal exhibits in the(then) brand-new Yosemite Museum, and spent hors in the re-created Indian Village at its back shelling acorns, preparing native dishes, and sharing customs, traditions and lore with white friends who recorded her words and actions. Her death in April 1931, she was about one hundred, was a loss to friends, red and white. -Continued-