Shirley Sargent (July 12, 1927 – December 3, 2004) was an historian of the Yosemite area in the United States.
Sargent was born in Pasadena, California. Her father was a surveyor who helped rebuild the Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park, starting in 1936. She spent her childhood as a self-described "tomboy" in Yosemite. She had dystonia musculorum deformans, which made her reliant on a wheelchair from age 14. She typed her publications using only one finger, and cycled around on a three-wheeler.
She earned her Associate Degree from Pasadena City College in 1947 and opened a nursery school in Pasadena. Other popular books of hers include Pioneers in Petticoats, John Muir in Yosemite National Park, Yosemite & Its Innkeepers, and Yosemite Chapel 1879-1989.
She also edited James Mason Hutchings' account of his journey across California in 1849.
Later life
In 1961, she bought and built on Theodore Solomons' homesite in Foresta, California, which had only a fireplace surviving from a 1936 fire; she called her new home Flying Spur, but it burned in the 1990 Yosemite A-Rock Fire, which also destroyed her historical papers.
- Three Names for Katherine (with Hannah Smith) (fiction, 1960)
- The Heart-Holding Mountains (fiction, 1961)
- Wawona's Yesterdays (1961)
- Stop the Typewriters (fiction, 1963)
- Theodore Parker Lukens, Father of Forestry (1969)
- John Muir in Yosemite National Park (1972)
- Yosemite and Its Innkeeper (1975)
- The Ahwahnee (1977)
- Yosemite's High Sierra Camps (1977)
- The Yosemite Chapel, 1879-1979 (1979)