In the Sierra Nevada wilderness, a two-story log cabin stared out at the world for 81 years until it was carefully disassembled, labeled, loaded onto a truck, and transported through an entire national park to serve as a museum exhibit. This is no metaphor; it is the actual history of the Hodgdon Homestead Cabin, which still stands in Yosemite today, and it is a more layered story than the "historic building relocated" framing usually suggests. According to the Homestead Cabin panel on the National Park Service's Yosemite History Center page, it all began in 1879 when the rancher Tom Hodgdon established his grazing business in Aspen Valley and employed a Chinese-American cowboy by the name of Ah Hoy, as well as his neighbor Franklin Babcock, to build a cabin and a road there. On paper, this might seem like a straightforward pioneer story. In reality, this was a much more complicated, much more American tale.
The government moved in, and the Hodgdons got evicted from their own meadow
