Since there really were some Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite, spending a couple of minutes on their role in a two-hour tour would make sense, but there are an awful lot of other topics at Yosemite deserving of attention. They shouldn't overlook Gifford Pinchot, one of the patron saints of the environmentalist movement, and his support for the Hetch Hetchy dam--good for San Francisco, bad for people who can't see what a beautiful place it was before the dam.
Pinchot created the template for the left-wing character-assassination hit job with his attacks on Sec. of the Interior Richard Ballinger. When Ballinger resigned, President Taft said he had been "the object of one of the most unscrupulous conspiracies for the defamation of character that history can show."
Pinchot is also the one who had the bright idea of reintroducing deer into areas of the eastern US where they weren't found--soon to become a major nuisance because of the lack of natural predators to keep the numbers down.
Oh wait! Here is how the NPS REALLY describes it:
“Even though the Buffalo Soldiers wore the uniform of the U.S. Army, their ethnicity combined with the racial prejudice of the time made the performance of their duties quite challenging. In the early 1900s, African-Americans were routinely abused, or even killed, for the slightest perceived offense. They occupied one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder; a fact which served to undercut the authority of any black man who served in any position of power. Yosemite and Sequoia’s Buffalo Soldiers had to be simultaneously strong and diplomatic to fulfill the duties of their job but to avoid giving offense.”
http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/buffalo-soldiers.htm
“In the early 1900s, African-Americans were routinely abused, or even killed, for the slightest perceived offense”
This happens in 2011, in any inner city, a dozen times each day.
Interesting! I lived in the SF area for a number of years, and I remember when they tried to thin the herd of Angel Island (for those who don’t know, this is a little island in SF Bay near Sausalito, where deer were introduced years ago and were chewing through evertying on the island to the point that they had gone through all the vegetation and were starving to death) and hysteria broke out throughout the North Bay...
On the other hand, they were promoting wildcats on Pt Reyes, so I guess that maybe the eco-agenda actually may have worked out in the long run. But Bambi is toast in any case.