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In 1900, the city of San Francisco reached into Yosemite National Park for the water of the Tuolumne River. By 1913 the city had grasped it, defeating John Muir and other defenders of national park integrity. Congress cleared the way for O'Shaghnessy Dam, which diverted one third of the river's flow and flooded Hetch Hetchy Valley, a national treasure nearly as wondrous as Yosemite Valley to the southeast. Hetch Hetchy: Undoing a Great American Mistake examines the dam both as a stunning engineering feat and as a disastrous project that compromised the national park idea shortly after its birth. The book memorializes a surpassingly beautiful valley, celebrates the men and women who fought for it, and evokes the once and future wilderness that lies under the waters of the dam.