In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation approving the construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam to inundate the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park. This decision concluded a decade-long, highly contentious debate over the dam-and-reservoir complex to supply water to post-earthquake San Francisco, a battle that was dramatic, unsettling, and consequential.

Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents captures the tensions animating the long-running controversy and places them in their historical context. Key to understanding the debate is the prior and violent dispossession of California Indians from the valley they had stewarded for thousands of years. Their removal by the mid-19th century enabled white elite tourism to take over, setting the stage for the subsequent debate for and against the dam in the early 20th century. That debate contained a Faustian bargain. To secure an essential water supply for San Francisco meant the destruction of the valley John Muir and others praised so highly. This contentious situation continues reverberate, as interest groups now battle over whether to tear down the dam and restore the valley. Hetch Hetchy remains a dramatic flash point in American environmental culture.