A collection of baskets by American Indian women is housed in the Yosemite Museum. Lucy Telles, pictured, demonstrated basket-making to visitors from 1930 until her death in 1955.

Yosemite’s resources are captured within a flourishing museum collection that protects more than 4 million items, including John Muir’s tin cup, Thomas Hill’s oil paintings, and 100,000 historic park photographs. The 1922 donation of an Indian basket collection helped inspire the park to build a museum in Yosemite Valley that opened in 1926.

The Yosemite Museum has the honor of being the first museum built as a museum in the National Park Service. The collection is home to more than one million historic records and another million archeological artifacts. The museum also maintains a research library with some 10,000 books relevant to Yosemite, as well as photographs and articles. The library is open to the public; contact the park's librarian for more information.

In addition, the park’s recent oral history project is collecting some 50 interviews a year from people with park stories, events, and experiences that captures eye-witness evidence of the past.