Ta-bu-ce (Maggie Howard), Yosemite's First Cultural Demonstrator

Ta-bu-ce pours water from a Pima basket while making manzanita cider, about the 1930s. Yosemite National Park photo.

In the 1930s, the National Park Service hired a few Native Americans to show visitors their crafts, cooking and other traditional skills. At Yosemite National Park, the first was Ta-bu-ce, a Paiute woman also known as Maggie Howard. Conflicting stories and dates cloud parts of her life, but many people witnessed her determination, talent and character.

A childhood hard to date

• Birth: a 1910 Hayward (CA) Daily Review article said she was born at Mono Lake in 1867; others put her age at death at 90 or more, implying about 1857; the 1920 and 1930 censuses give 1870, near Bridgeport, California.
• Family: she reportedly lived near Bridgeport until her mother died, while she was young, then with her father Kosana (Joaquin Sam) near Mono Lake.
• Orphaned: her father reportedly died in 1875, trapped by a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada on the way home from gathering acorns and trading in Yosemite Valley. If she was born in 1870, she was five.
• Working young: she went to the Indian Village at the mouth of Indian Canyon. Historian Shirley Sargent says she began cooking and cleaning for the Sentinel Hotel in 1877 — at perhaps seven. Later she cooked and kept house for local families.

Husbands and hardship

John Bingaman's The Ahwahneechees (1966) lists her husbands as Jack Lundy, Billy Williams and Daniel Howard, but her sons' birth years show a different order:

1. Billy Williams — son William ("Willie Mike"), born about 1892.
2. Jack Lundy — son Simon, born about 1898.
3. Daniel Howard — by 1920; he was 20 years younger. All three were Native American.

Bingaman tells of a night in upper Indian Canyon after the park's Indian Festival: a windstorm toppled a pine onto the camp, killing her 14-year-old niece May Tom and leaving Ta-bu-ce with a broken collarbone, crushed feet and ankles and a fractured leg. By his account she lay under the tree all night; she spent the summer in a cast and walked with a limp for the rest of her life. Chris Enss's High Country Women dates the storm to May 1899 and says she was taken straight to the doctor — the accounts differ.

The 1920 census lists Daniel, Willie Mike and Simon as laborers at Yosemite; Daniel again in 1930. Neither census gives Ta-bu-ce an occupation, and both say she could not read or write.

Ta-bu-ce cooking behind the Yosemite Museum, about 1932. Yosemite National Park photo by Georgia Pearson.

The "live Indian exhibit"

As Maggie Howard, working with the Yosemite Museum, she won a following. At first the Yosemite Natural History Association paid her. In July 1930, the Oakland Tribune reported she was hired to "grind acorns, prepare acorn mush, and other such delicacies." From November 1 to 29, 1930, she was also on the NPS payroll as a laborer at $2 a day.

The 1930 superintendent's report called the program an "innovation" — a "live Indian exhibit" where she demonstrated basket weaving, cooking, songs, games, art and lore behind the museum. Some writers say she started in 1929, but neither her employee record nor the 1929 report supports that.

• The next two years: about three months each summer, still at $2 a day. The 1932 report credited "live exhibits" for the museum's popularity; demonstrations in the Nature Garden drew large audiences.
• 1933–1935: no NPS appointment in 1933 or 1934, and only about two weeks of pay in 1935. Like some other early women, she may have worked as an unrecorded day laborer.
• To 1942: most sources say she kept demonstrating until 1942, taking time off in March 1939 for cataract surgery in San Francisco.

She made her living from demonstrations in the park's Indian Village, selling baskets, and tips from visitors who photographed her. Sargent wrote that she learned "to handle a microphone, lecture with composure, answer questions with dignity and pose for pictures patiently, though reluctantly," and that though her English was good, she spoke a broken dialect "to keep up an authentic atmosphere for tourists" — savvy enough to give visitors the "Indian" they expected.

In August 1941, Yosemite Nature Notes described her under an incense cedar, weaving a baby carrier, in bright calico and a gay bandana, recalling that as a Mono Lake Indian in the '80s and '90s she came to Yosemite Valley only in summer, staying for the acorn harvest.

Visitors watch Ta-bu-ce pound acorns into flour, about the 1930s. Yosemite National Park photo.

Last years

World War II halted the demonstrations, and many participants, Ta-bu-ce among them, left. In 1942 she retired near her sons at Mono Lake. Visiting her in July 1946, Carl W. Charsmith found she had aged considerably, and wrote of the "respect and affection" she earned and her "rare sense of humor": she could turn an unwelcome question so as "to put the questioner 'on the spot.'"

Ta-bu-ce died in Bishop, California, on January 25, 1947, aged 77 — though obituaries noted her true age was unknown.

Sources

Based on "Ta-bu-ce," National Park Service, research supported in part by the National Park Foundation; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Yosemite superintendent's annual reports (1929–1942); Yosemite Nature Notes (Godfrey, 1941 and 1942; Charsmith, 1946; Anderson, 1947); John W. Bingaman, The Ahwahneechees (1966); Shirley Sargent, Pioneers in Petticoats (1966); Chris Enss, High Country Women (2019); the 1920 and 1930 censuses; and 1939 reports in The Fresno Bee and The San Francisco Examiner. See also the NPS portfolio Dressing the Part and the Yosemite basketry exhibit's weavers.