_The_ Giant Sequoia
AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA
BY
RODNEY SYDES ELLSWORTH
WITH TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
J. D. BERGER
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924,
BY RODNEY SYDES ELLSWORTH
[Illustration: THE SUN WORSHIPPERS
Only at sunset does the Sequoia lose its dignity to become a thing
of beauty
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
+To My Grandmother+
_A living thing,
Produced too slowly to decay,
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed._
—+Wordsworth.+
PREFACE
That imposing calm which the great Sequoia of the Sierra Nevada exerts
over many came to be individually impressed upon the author during a
summer’s residence in the Mariposa Grove two years ago. Indeed, it
was the persistence of this spell that made him wish to know more
about this noble tree and caused him to inquire into its literary and
scientific associations. These studies at length stimulated another
desire—that of making the gist of the scattered and heterogeneous mass
of material, ranging from popular rhapsodies to scientific treatises,
available and accessible to all.
It was likewise the author’s ambition to effect a symmetrical
presentation if possible of both the popular and the scientific aspects
of the subject. Hence, the rhapsodies have been robbed of their purple
and the treatises have been faintly touched with imagination to make
them possess an interest for the general reader. By this it must not be
presumed that gravity and fidelity have been neglected. They have been
preserved throughout.
This book has been written primarily for the good of the greatest
number. It is not by a botanist for botanists, but by a tree-lover for
tree-lovers. And if from its pages there emanates, however faintly,
something of the inspiring and enobling presence of the Giant Sequoia,
the author will not have dusted off many an old volume and entertained
himself with an examination of its contents in vain.
The author is greatly indebted to Miss Cristel Hastings for her
untiring aid in the preparation of the manuscript. He also wishes
to extend gratitude to Mr. William T. Amis, who has rendered much
invaluable assistance and counsel. Hearty thanks are due various
Professors of the University of California from whom the author as a
student and friend has received many helpful criticisms and suggestions.
+Rodney Sydes Ellsworth.+
Berkeley, California,
April 17, 1924.
CONTENTS
+Part One+
SEQUOIAS OF YESTERDAY AND TODAY
I—+The Auld Lang Syne of Trees+ 13
II—+The Glory of the Mountains of California+ 23
+Part Two+
GIANT SEQUOIAS OF THE MARIPOSA GROVE
III—+Galen Clark+ 35
IV—+Wonder Trees+ 59
V—+Oldest of Living Things+ 89
VI—+The Eternal Tree+ 102
VII—+A Blossom of Decadence+ 115
+Part Three+
NAMING OF THE SEQUOIA
VIII—+A Name for the Ages+ 127
IX—+Sequoyah+ 134
+Bibliography+ 159
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Sun Worshippers Frontispiece
In the Court of the Giants 24
Galen Clark 40
Galen Clark Tree 48
The Cabin 64
Telescope Tree 72
Wawona Tree 80
Fallen Monarch 96
Grizzly Giant 104
Alabama Tree 120
Sequoyah 136
The Invincible Sequoia 144
PART ONE
Sequoias _of_ Yesterday
_and_ Today
+Chapter I+
THE AULD LANG SYNE OF TREES
The Sequoia is nature’s most magnificent endowment. King of trees,
it has no rival in size the world over, nor is it approached among
living things in age. Noblest of all conifers, it has the grandeur of
granite and the solemnity of marble. Venerable in aspect, it savors of
great antiquity, seeming always to wrap itself in the memories of the
past. So striking, indeed, is this feature of its appearance that the
intellectual traveler often wonders if its race has played a grander
part in the past. Is it a living survivor of an extinct age of monsters?
Time was, and not long ago, when such a question bearing on the
antiquity of the Sequoia would have been lightly considered. Now,
however, mankind is not altogether satisfied with things as they are,
but is mindful of how they came to be so, and the ceaseless searches
of science are unveiling the mysteries of the past. The spade unearths
a coin whose imprint betrays the beliefs or customs, the finish
or crudeness, of an ancient civilization. The discovery of a clay
tablet, the uncovering of a ruined temple or a forgotten tomb, sheds
fresh light upon the history of a people. Bit by bit the evidence
accumulates, and as the vision of the past becomes less dim science is
better able to conjure up before the mental eye the imposing pageants
of a world that has passed away.
Shakespeare calls the world a stage. The allusion, though, is confined
to men and women. But as the scientist views the great earth-drama
that has been enacted throughout the ages he sees a far more extensive
application of this thought. To him “the races of the children of
life” are the players, by reason of the fact that all life has been
superseded by more complex and more highly evolved forms. Indeed, for
millions of years countless multitudes of living creatures have played
their little parts on this earthly stage and have gone their way into
oblivion. The majority have left as little record as the autumn leaves
that drift by the wayside. These are the so-called “lost creations.”
Yet a sufficient number have been preserved for the later instruction
and delight of man. “Everything,” observed Emerson, “in nature tends to
write its own history. The planet and the pebble are attended by their
shadows, the rolling rock leaves its furrows on the mountainside, the
river its channel in the soil, the animal its bone in the stratum, the
fern its modest epitaph in the coal.”
These remains filed away in the archives of nature’s great storehouse
constitute the record of the rocks. And as science reconstructs a
civilization of yesterday from its rude implements, in a similar manner
it interprets the mute meaning of these fossils in the rocks. The dry
bones and empty footprints are given animation and pictured as they
are supposed to have been when alive. Great flying reptiles, called
_pterodactyls_, with an enormous wingspread of twenty-five feet, have
fallen into Miocene seas and have been entombed with the leaves and
muds of their shallow bottoms. Huge reptiles, called _dinosaurs_, have
stalked across the mud-flats of primeval lakes, leaving their broad
footprints in the oozy surface. The tide has come in and gently covered
the impression with a fine sediment and preserved it forever. Further
deposits of sediment have accumulated and the whole become submerged,
until, under constant pressure, they have been compacted into rock and
in the course of time have been raised again to dry land.
The record of the rocks discloses the fact that the Sequoia flourished
on the earth when these dragons of old time and their weird kin
inhabited it. Its forests extended over three continents and it blessed
with its shade these creatures more strange and huge than the earth
has since borne. Under its high, arching columns _dinosaurs_ took toll
of all that could be conquered. Within sight of its imposing forests
others, equally formidable, wallowed in shallow seas, while overhead
soared _pterodactyls_, neither bats nor birds, but giant lizards that
had acquired the power of flight.
This was millions of years ago. It was during the middle period of
life, or, what geologists term the Miocene. It was before the advent
of fur and feathers—aeons, almost, before man’s coming. In point
of time the antiquity of all living things on earth today is of a
recent yesterday when compared to the antiquity of the Sequoia. The
frail tenure of human works is as but a thousand years amid eternity;
nothing; a mockery.
The pick of the fossil hunter has unearthed fossil remains of Sequoia
leaves and cones in strata as early as the _Triassic_. This period
represents the morning of reptilian life and is the first of three
great ages of the Miocene. At its advent moving life had already safely
crossed the border-line of its dependence on water for existence and
had succeeded, slowly and laboriously, in invading dry land. Hence, the
Sequoia as a race has a claim to almost fabulous antiquity.
Memorials of the Sequoia’s ancestry are more abundant in the rocks
of the two succeeding periods of the Miocene, the _Jurassic_ and the
_Cretaceous_. Under the lava flows of Mt. Shasta imprints of its leaves
and cones are found. This is indubitable evidence that the Sequoia
existed in California at that time. Fossil remains have also been found
in localities ranging from “France and Hungary to Spitzbergen and from
Greenland to Oregon and Nebraska.” These stratified remains offer
positive proof that the Sequoia was a great genus covering the entire
Northern Hemisphere and that the now desolate Arctic regions, which
were then warm, were luxuriant with many of its species. In short, the
Sequoia was one of the chief garments of the earth’s vegetation during
Miocene times. Its forests must have been the most imposing the earth
has ever known. Truly, they were the forests primeval.
It is not a little remarkable that the Sequoia was in existence even
before the very mountains which are enobled today by its presence. The
vagaries of mutability have been such that it was actually present on
earth during the genesis of the Sierra Nevada and saw this range lifted
to its place in the sun. Indeed, the eternality of the hills is a
misnomer, for mountains have their birth and their youth, their old age
and their obliteration. Like successions of living forms they have had
their entrance and exit on this terrestrial stage.
During the early period of the Miocene, that country which lay between
the Rockies and the Pacific was a flat plain of low relief, with
meandering streams and vague divides. Occasional rounded hills broke
the monotony of this plain. These were but the abraded stumps of a
pre-existing mountain mass—the ruins of mountains that had been. About
_Jurassic_ time a general disturbance occurred in the present region
of the Sierra Nevada. This was accompanied by an intrusion of a vast
body of molten rock which, when solidified, became the granite of the
Sierra. During the _Cretaceous_ the entire region between the Rockies
and the Pacific again awoke and began to bulge at slow and intermittent
intervals. The Sierra block had its origin during one of these
upheavals and acquired a slight westward slant.
During the age that gave man to the world, the Sierra was uplifted to
the light. About the dawn of the _Quaternary_, the last of the great
divisions of geological time, the greatest manifestation of Sierra
mountain building took place. This convulsion of the earth hoisted the
snowy range to its present sublime elevation.
Following this upheaval came an age of ice. It is to this period that
Yosemite Valley owes its glaciation. In fact, the present indefinable
charm and fierce grandeur of the High Sierra are legacies of this reign
of ice. However, the glaciation of the Sierra must not be correlated
with the continental glaciations which ushered in the age succeeding
the Miocene. The former glaciation is “more properly to be regarded as
corresponding to the very last episode of that long and varied chapter
in the geological history of the continent,” states Lawson. Though
the final uplift of the Sierra block is a long time past as years go,
geologically speaking it is not remote. Indeed, the Sierra Nevada might
“safely be placed among the young and giddy mountains of our planet.”
From the comparative point of view, on the other hand, the waste of
years that have elapsed since the Sequoia first waved its magnificent
evergreen dome toward the heavens is bewildering.
Impressive as the evolution of the Sierra must have been, few of the
dramas of the earth which science has restored are more wonderful
than the restriction of the Sequoia exclusively to the mountains of
California. The record of the rocks following the great Age of Reptiles
tells quite a different story. With amazing abruptness all the rich
diversity of reptilian life apparently ceased. Some change seems to
have occurred, blotting it out forever, for not a scrap of evidence
remains of its continued existence. The _dinosaurs_ are no more; the
_pterodactyls_ have vanished. A new type of life, that of the mammal,
now holds dominion over the earth. Most astounding of all, the Sequoia
still carries on, even to the present day—living survivor of the Age of
Reptiles.
Authorities are not agreed concerning the causes that led to the
extinction of the reptiles. Science still ponders over the mystery. A
feature so extraordinary seems to demand an unusual explanation. Causes
of a violent cataclysmic nature are advanced as valid interpretations.
Yet science refuses to take cognizance of universal calamities and
considers them as apocryphal because they are too unnatural. Climatic
conditions, in the main, are probably responsible, for it is upon
climate that the wealth or poverty of life on the globe depends. That
which was a land of comfort, of abundant food, and of continual summer
may have become, through a process of alternate haste and deliberation,
a land of long winters, of bitterness and hardship. The good days
of the world were exchanged for hard times, and those who could
not survive were gathered to their forefathers. This, together with
volcanic eruptions which took place on a stupendous scale, followed by
glaciations of continental extent, apparently conspired in the ultimate
undoing of reptilian life. These causes, in all likelihood, are
responsible also for the shrinking of the majestic Sequoian woodlands
to a mere fragment of their ancient, vast extent.
About the end of the Miocene the earth became intensely active. In
its agitation some of its seething interior was exuded to the surface
in a deluge of lava. At the same time fountains of molten rocks shot
up from volcanoes, causing the heavens to rain fire about them, and
sifting ashes afar over the earth. Rivers and lakes floated up in
immense clouds of steam over which the blazing beacons suffused weird
colorings—lights and shades of an inferno that not even the pen of a
Dante would have the temerity to attempt to describe. A land of beauty
had become filled with forms of the gloomiest and ghostliest grandeur.
The great _dinosaurs_ looked with disquietude upon it all. Unable, by
reason of their cumbersomeness, to migrate to a gentler clime, they
stoically awaited their doom. The _pterodactyls_, terrified, fluttered
to the ground, flapping their great useless wings as the unearthly
flashes from the heavens fell upon them. The noble Sequoias, even
more impotent to make a retreat, held their ground until set afire or
enveloped in floods of molten lava. At length, having exhausted its
fury, this agent of wholesale ruin ceased as if stricken lifeless in
the midst of its maddest rioting, and the land became a far-stretching
waste out of which life had apparently gone forever.
The unknown complex of causes which brought about the ice age that
followed probably completed extermination of the reptiles, and
it certainly brought the Sequoia, as a race, perilously near to
extinction. The temperature became too cold for life adapted to the
warm conditions of the Miocene age. As a result, reptilian life paled
and declined, until finally its feeble flame flickered out entirely
with the arrival of the glacial epoch. The vast amount of water that
had been vaporized during the volcanic eruptions returned to the earth
in the form of snow. This accumulated in such enormous quantities that
continents came to be white worlds where the vacant sky communed only
with the silent ice. Pulseless and cold, these vast continental ice
caps were as eloquent of death as were the fiery lava flows. Uncharted,
trackless seas of ice they were, with all traces of earthly travail
buried far beneath them. And a terrible solitude was the lord of this
universe.
The scientific world is equally perplexed regarding the mysterious
chain of events that again caused the amelioration of climate. At
any rate, the warmth of summer gradually overtook the snows of
winter, and the ice wasted away. Like morning mist it vanished in
the sunshine. Lakes filled the yawning throats of volcanoes. Light
and beauty replaced ashes and death. Life, too, ebbed back from the
southland and conquered the desolation, filling the vacant world with
a glorious animation. But it was a different type of life that came.
Mammals instead of reptiles now held undisputed dominion. Of all the
rich diversity of life that flourished before the advent of the ordeal
of volcanic fire and the chilling empire of ice, apparently only the
Sequoia escaped utter destruction.
It is this singular survival that prompted John Muir to write of the
Sequoia as a “tree which the friendly pines and firs seem to know
nothing about. Ancient of other days, it keeps you at a distance,
taking no notice of you, speaking only to the winds, thinking only
in the sky, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among the
neighboring trees as would the homely mastadon and hairy elephant among
the bears and deer. It belongs to an ancient stock and has a strange
air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long
ago—the auld lang syne of trees.”
+Chapter II+
THE GLORY OF THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
But two species of the genus Sequoia carry on the noble line in these
feeble times. Scions of a race whose ancestors extend into the depths
of the ages, they seem to be not a part of this puny world. Gigantic in
proportion, they are not unlike uncouth vestiges of another age when
all things were molded on a monstrous scale. Numbering their years by
thousands, they are an “unaccountable oversight” in a world where lives
are limited to the psalmist’s span of years, and where there is no
hope of gaining the length of days of Methuselah and his kin. Indeed,
they appear to be more like mysterious strangers from some far star
than solitary and lonely survivors in the midst of an unfamiliar new
age. Patiently accepting the part of on-lookers, they disdain to take
their place in the active ways of the world and continue to exist for
no apparent reason other than to preserve the pristine glory of their
ancestors lest it die with them and leave the coming years.
Rarest of all tree species, these two survivors are the Giant Sequoia,
or _Sequoia gigantea_, and the Redwood, or _Sequoia sempervirens_. Both
are impressive in the mystery that hangs over their history. But it
is only this that they may be said to have in common. In almost every
other respect they are quite dissimilar. True, the Giant Sequoia is a
grander and more massive edition of the Redwood. However, the former
puts the latter in the shade as to girth, while the latter dwarfs the
former as to height. The Big Tree is unexceeded among trees in girth;
the Redwood probably outstrips all trees of the world in height. Rarely
does the Big Tree lift its towering column of verdure more than 280
feet into the heavens. Yet it attains an amazing trunk diameter of 20
to 27 feet well above its immense swollen base. The Redwood seldom
produces a trunk more than 15 feet in diameter and the average of the
larger trees range from 8 to 12 feet. Trees 280 feet high are not
altogether uncommon. Some even wave their evergreen crowns 340 dizzy
feet above the ground—truly a prodigious altitude for living shafts of
wood to attain.
The Big Tree keeps its youth longer than any known tree and for this
reason is acclaimed the oldest living thing. Frequently it reaches as
great an age as 2,500 years. A few Giant Sequoias are known to have
passed their three thousandth year. Seemingly, this figure fails to
convey a satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of such a great
age to the minds of popular writers. As a consequence, the age of this
grand tree has suffered unpardonable padding. Nevertheless, such
estimates are not conclusive and rest only on the speculative notions
of fanciful writers. The Redwood, on the other hand, while quite
noteworthy in longevity in the tree world, scarcely sees a thousand
summers. It must yield the palm in all honor to its greater cousin
which ranks first in age of all the worthies of the tree kingdom, and,
hence, in the world of living things.
[Illustration: IN THE COURT OF THE GIANTS
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
The _Sequoia sempervirens_ is one of the most consummately beautiful
of trees. Its beauty is as rare and undefinable as the blue on the
mountains in the hour of twilight, as startling and lovely as a
flower-clad April, as charming and delightful as the notes of a melody
that the winds bear away. And yet beauty is its least perfection. All
the cheerful gayety, the contented peacefulness, the warm companionship
that are the chief glory of other trees, the Redwood, too, possesses.
It is one of the most lovable and friendly of trees. But there is
nothing rough or common about it, nothing coarse or voluptuous. To know
it is to know something that is genuine. To admire it is to be unable
to look upon it with the cold eye of a judge, but with the reverence of
a worshipper and the veneration of a child.
The _Sequoia gigantea_ is formidable and sombre in aspect and
very often terrible to look upon. Impassive, unapproachable,
uncommunicative, it is the very autocrat of the forest. Godlike in
physiognomy, at times it is impossible to understand. It has a
loftiness of port, a dignity of bearing, a sublimity of energy that
command attention and win their way insensibly into the soul. Its
nature is as hard and flinty as the granite of the mountainside. But
in spite of all this highmightiness there is something forlorn and
pathetic, something sad and benign about it. All who know the pathos
in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished
will realize how replete this tree is with sadness and tenderness.
Grand though it is in the religious solemnity and silence that rest
upon it there is something pathetic about its very loneliness that
resembles sadness as mist resembles the rain. Assuredly, if the
_Sequoia sempervirens_ is the most lively and cheerful of trees, the
_Sequoia gigantea_ is the saddest and the grandest.
If the Redwood be considered Grecian in its glory, the Giant Sequoia is
Roman in its grandeur. Both produce forests of giants. In one beauty
and grace held splendid court; in the other greatness and magnificence.
The one is Grecian in its idealism, so divine in its loftiness as
to exert an elevating and ennobling influence, and so fine in its
perfection of form as to epitomize this immortal quality of Athenian
genius; the other is Roman in its invincible strength, so imposing
in its stolidity and massiveness as to embarrass its beholders, and
so baffling in its superiority as to thrill them with awe and fill
them with wonder. One is an emblem of eternal youth, ever sprouting
Phoenix-like from its ruins and pressing with youthful vigor upon the
faltering footsteps of its mouldering sires, exempt, like the immortal
influence of Greece, from mutability and decay; the other is an emblem
of permanence, a form of endurance standing among the temporary shapes
of time, a structure not unlike a Roman pile, built to withstand the
onslaught of the ages.
Today both species of Sequoia are confined to the mountains of
California. They inhabit the western slopes of its two systems of
mountains, the Coast Range on the West and the Sierra Nevada on the
East. The former parallels the ocean; the latter forms the backbone
of the State. Enclosed between these mountain chains lies the great
valley of California—a vast, oval plain, scarred all over with grain
fields and orchards, and mottled with shadows from the drifting sky
squadrons—with its two central rivers, the Sacramento and the San
Joaquin, meeting in its center and flowing with tranquil deliberation
through a series of bays, on through the Golden Gate to the Pacific.
In comparison with the vast distribution of the genus during Miocene
times these two surviving species now occupy a mere fragment of
territory. The Redwood is restricted solely to the coastal mountains;
the Big Tree obtains only in the Sierras. Together, by reason of the
lofty height of the coast species and the gigantic girth of the Sierra
species, they comprise a group of conifers unrivaled the world over.
Since they are found nowhere else, California rightfully merits John
Muir’s claim of being the “Paradise of Conifers.”
The _Sequoia sempervirens_ forms a tolerably uninterrupted belt along
the seaward side of the Coast Range. This belt is approximately 450
miles long and extends from just beyond the northern California
border-line, where it fades out noticeably, south to the bay of
Monterey. The maximum width of the Redwood belt is thirty miles and
reaches from nearly sea level to an altitude of 3,000 feet. In the
vicinity of Crescent City the Redwood approaches the ocean so closely
that its tiny cones scatter their minute seeds about the cliffs upon
which the wild waves of the Pacific beat. In the hot interior valleys
that lie parched and shimmering under summer suns—valleys that are
moistened only occasionally by winter rains, conditions are apparently
too unfavorable to permit of its growth, and the tree is absent. It
thrives only where the fog-laden atmosphere hovers about its crown.
Its feathery arms seem to drink in these hazy, lazy mists as if by
magic and to precipitate them into gentle showers. Along the river
flats frequented by sea fogs, where the soil and environment are
ideal, it attains its greatest development. Indeed, on the bottom
lands of the Smith River and the main fork of the Eel in Humboldt and
Del Norte Counties, the Redwood “completely monopolizes the soil and
forms virgin forests of the heaviest stands of timber in the world.”
“Stands,” according to Jepson in his monumental _Silva of California_,
“of 125 to 150 thousand feet, board measure, to the acre are not
uncommon. Instances of even two and one-half million board feet to the
acre are on record, while 480 thousand feet, not including waste, have
been taken out of a single tree.” When it is realized that good eastern
forests produce but ten thousand board feet to the acre, this statement
is striking. In fact, such an immense yield separates the Redwood from
all the timber trees of the globe.
The _Sequoia gigantea_ is more limited in its range than its fog-loving
cousin. Its belt is but 250 miles long and extends from the middle of
the American River, near Lake Tahoe, to Deer Creek in Tulare County.
It is found in the verdant center of the coniferous belt along the
middle heights of the Sierra. This zone of finest vegetation is located
between the altitudes of 4,600 to 8,000 feet above the sea where the
environment insures the most nearly perfect conditions for tree life;
where heat is tempered by elevation and the cold of winter is modified
by the proximity of a great sunlit valley. The area covered by the
Big Tree, however, fails to equal a hundredth part of that which the
Redwood occupies. This is due to the fact that the Giant Sequoia does
not occur in an uninterrupted belt. Unlike the Redwood, generally
speaking, it congregates in groves. Single trees are rarely found
alone in solitary grandeur. Preferring the society of its fellows, the
Big Tree is almost always found in “family clusters.” Though mingling
with Sugar and Yellow Pine, with White Fir and Incense Cedar, these
Sequoian groves never lose their identity. The size of the individual
Sequoias and their concentration within a definite area are sufficient
to set them conspicuously apart from the general forest.
Twenty-six of these scattered patches of forest giants sociably growing
with trees of shorter pedigree and lesser dignity have been enumerated
by Jepson. These groves logically form a northern and a southern group,
with the Kings River as the line of division. The northern portion
of the Giant Sequoia belt has so diminished in size that it consists
of but seven small groves so widely separated that three of the gaps
between them are from thirty to forty miles in width. The northernmost
group must be called a “grove” by courtesy, since it contains but
six trees half of which are less than three feet in diameter. The
southernmost, with the exception of the Fresno Grove, is the most
remarkable of the northern group. This is the famous Mariposa Grove. In
all these northern patches, the Sequoia is an epicure of climate and
site. It grows only in locally favored or protected spots where the
sunshine is abundant and the soil rich, deep, and moist.
The southern groves mark an almost continuous line through the
majestic, trackless forests of pine and fir from the Kings River
southward to Deer Creek. The gaps in the belt gradually become
increasingly narrow, and then cease altogether. The Sequoia may be said
to extend across the wide basin of the Kaweah and Tule Rivers in noble
forests broken only by deep, yawning canyons with rivers threading
their sinuous way down the center of each. Here, too, the belt widens
out, extending from the granite promontories overlooking the fading
line of tawny foothills to within sight of the summit peaks—regions
of rock and ice lifted above the limit of life. The largest and most
famous of these forests is the Giant Forest located near the mouth of
the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and within the confines of the
Sequoia National Park. This most wonderful of all American forests was
named by John Muir, who must have wept for joy when he stumbled upon
it. Thousands of trees are congregated in this forest, five thousand of
which are said to be veritable titans in size. It possesses, also, the
largest tree in the world, the General Sherman, which has a diameter of
36.5 feet and a height of 280 feet—measurements which easily entitle it
to wear the purple of the King of all trees.
In this glorious forest the Sequoia is indifferent alike to exposure
and soil, and is found growing in profusion on slopes of every
character, some even clinging to life on bare granite surfaces in a
way wonderful to behold. Multitudes of tender seedlings are continually
springing up in moist, sunny openings to carry on the royal line, and
companies of slender saplings are eagerly crowding up every slope
deserted by their elders, crowning all save the highest eminences.
In fact, the marvelous bounty of Nature has produced here the finest
assemblage of conifers known to botanical science. The entire region is
a billowy sea of evergreens, sinking and rising with the undulations
of the land with an unfailing luxuriance, the great rounded domes of
the giants swelling above the verdant canopy of pines and firs to mark
where the Sequoias sweep along the ridges, rise out of deep canyons, or
encamp on sunny meadows in conclave grand and solemn.
PART TWO
Giant Sequoias _of the_
Mariposa Grove
+Chapter III+
GALEN CLARK
The Giant Sequoia must have afforded pride and pleasure to the Creator
for it is the finest tree He ever made. Of a truth, there is not in all
the world a tree more wonderful.
And yet, man has flouted this “shade of His perfection.” Under its
shadow he has neglected to gain inspiration and strength. In the
restless trend of the times he has become engrossed in empty pleasures.
In the agitation and strife for wealth individual interests, and not
those of posterity, have become of moment. As a result only that
which offers the allurement of gain has been recognized in the great
Sequoia. Its solemn and stately forests have been invaded by the axe
and commercialism has turned reverence, not into beams and pillars for
places of worship, but into supports for grape vines and barbed wire.
Fortunately, the Mariposa Grove has escaped the fate which the axe
has brought many of its brethren. Like the groves of yore that were
God’s first temples it still stands, a virgin forest. The fluted
columns of its mighty trees are softened by the touch of centuries,
and so harmoniously are these venerable columns disposed that splendid
colonades are formed, giving the effect of a vast, many-pillared hall.
The airy masses of foliage that these great trunks mingle high in the
heavens form cathedral-like archways of the finest forest ceilings
imaginable. These magnificent interlaced archways soften the glare of
day and impart a dim religious light which suffuse shifting mosaics
of light and shade over the forest floor. Even the thick layers of
crumbling bark and the dessicated dust of ages serve to deaden the
footfall of the wanderer and to invest the gloom with a profound
silence. A deep Sabbath-like calm broods in the very air. Indeed, all
seems eloquent of worship. Here Nature stands with arms uplifted.
None escape the sacred influence of such a grove. None, save possibly
the white man. Deer with eyes of soft innocence trip timorously through
it; burly brown bear never shuffle heedlessly down its winding aisles;
and rarely does the noisy, impudent jay muster sufficient courage to
disturb its serenity. The Indian with his stone axe never harmed it,
nor has the myth that he lighted his fires against its trunks, thus
“wantonly destroying that which he was too rude to reverence,” been
substantiated. It is only civilized man who violates such a sanctuary
“just so long,” as John Muir so pithily expressed it, “as fun or a
dollar can be gotten out of them.”
Truly, the ways of man are at times past understanding. Under roofs
that his frail hands have raised he worships, yet he destroys with
utter disregard a Sequoian grove—a temple not made with human hands.
Such acts may be damaging. They may even be bad. But they are
manifestations of human nature—of the clay as it came from the hands
of the Potter. Happily, there are those among men who are of more than
common clay. Such a man was Galen Clark. It was he who first made known
to the world the Mariposa Grove and who faithfully guarded it for well
nigh a quarter of a century. He, above all others, rendered it the most
completely free from the axe and preserved it in the condition in which
his eyes first beheld it. Lest man forget, he saved it as a place of
play and prayer.
Galen Clark came to California in the days of the gold boom. Strictly
speaking, he was not of the Argonauts of ’49, since he was not seized
by the spell of the gold fever until 1853. Shaking the dust of New
York from his feet in October of that year, he joined the eager
multitudes who flocked toward the new El Dorado. The year 1854 found
him in the country of Mariposa taking part in the pick and shovel storm
that was then raging on its mountains. Not unlike the majority, he
failed to find “a chartless river running on fabled sands of gold.”
The chase of the fabulous ended; he took up the less fascinating but
more substantial occupation of a surveyor. Occasionally, however, the
gold lure again possessed him and he spasmodically returned to mining
with the flare-up of local bonanzas. It was while so engaged that he
contracted, through exposure and hardships that had already filled
the nooks of the gold region with the bones of strong men, a disease
of the lungs. The physicians, unable to lessen the great number of
hemorrhages, prophesied that he had not long to live. Now a member
of the dreary brotherhood of failures, health and strength gone, and
knowing that death would claim him soon, he did not become a dissolute
miner. Instead of finding a refuge in strong drink, he sought solace
through communion with the sweet wonders of the common earth and sky.
In truth, he went home to Mother Nature, and became a wanderer finding
peace on mountain tops and consolation in piney woods.
Singularly enough, his lungs healed. The climate had accomplished the
miracle. The bland and salubrious air rendered pungent by the balsamic
odor of Sierran forests, together with an abundance of health-giving
exercise, had cured the disease. More strange still, Galen Clark
attained the venerable age of ninety-six. Though he continued to lead
the life of a mountaineer, and constantly to expose his person to calm
and storm alike, he never suffered a recurrence of the malady.
It was during one of his mountain rambles that Galen Clark came upon
the Mariposa Grove in May of 1857. Having toiled up the slope of a
divide with the South Fork of the Merced flashing in its ravine far
below, he paused at the summit for rest. Upon gazing around, to his
amazement he was greeted by an immense tree. He immediately recognized
it as of the same variety and genus as the mammoth trees of Calaveras
which had so astounded the world subsequent to their discovery in 1852,
and which were, supposedly, the only trees of their kind in existence.
A cairn today marks the spot where Galen Clark caught his first glimpse
of the Sequoia, and this first majestic shaft upon which his eyes
rested in wonderment bears his name carved on a slab of granite hardly
more enduring than the tree itself.
Though not alone in this discovery, it is quite certain that Galen
Clark was the first white man to thoroughly explore the Mariposa Grove
and to make it known to the public. According to his own testimony he
was accompanied by one Milton Mann. “A few days later I was in the
lower portion of the Grove,” writes the discoverer in Foley’s _Guide
Book_, “and since the Grove was situated in Mariposa County, I named
it the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees.” It is not certain, on the other
hand, that Galen Clark and his companion were the first white men to
walk through the Mariposa Grove. The dauntless prospector, undoubtedly,
had also traversed this region. In his search for the imprisoned metal
that seemed to cry out to him for liberation all of this hitherto
unbroken solitude had become familiar ground to his feet. But if
any gold-seekers beheld the Mariposa giants earlier than 1857, the
discovery died with them.
It is sometimes claimed that one R. Hogg, a hunter employed by a
water company to keep its camp supplied with venison and bear meat,
discovered the Mariposa Grove in 1855. While in the pursuit of his
calling, he came upon three trees of a different nature from any others
in the forest. This he reported to Galen Clark and other acquaintances.
Later, in the summer of 1857, and following the discovery of the
Mariposa Grove, Galen Clark came upon the three trees reported by Hogg
in a gulch about one-half mile southeast of the Big Tree grove. The
largest of these stragglers, to which Hogg accredited a circumference
of more than ninety feet, was so badly burned by a forest fire in
1864 that it was afterwards blown down during a storm. The other two
eventually fell victims to the axe.
In April of his forty-third year (1857) Galen Clark settled on the
South Fork of the Merced. He had visited Yosemite in 1855. Therefore,
it was not without foresight that he staked out his claim beside the
trail running from Mariposa to Yosemite in the year that the Mann
brothers completed it. He selected a spot near the lovely expanse of
the Wawona meadow which lies in a basin-like depression encircled by
rolling mountains clad in forests of sugar pine that are no more. He
built a crude log cabin, thus making the beginning of the white man’s
Wawona.
[Illustration: GALEN CLARK AT THE AGE OF NINETY-SIX
Photo by A. C. Pillsbury]
It was not long before his visions of a teeming traffic that would
some day wend its steady way before his door en route to the Yosemite
became a reality. At first small straggling parties came at lengthy
intervals, then larger groups, and finally a steady stream of eager
travelers who desired to see the glories of Yosemite began to pass his
way. His establishment, too, kept pace with the increasing travel. It
varied from canvas and log to tolerably pretentious buildings as the
seasons went by. With the advent of the sixties it was known as Clark’s
Station, and was the heart of activity in this backwoods country.
By this time a trail connected Clark’s with the Mariposa Grove. So
impressed had the discoverer become with the importance of his find
that he had built a good horse trail of four miles in length, thereby
making the wonder trees of the Mariposa Grove more accessible to the
world.
A trip to the Yosemite in these early days involved much of hardship
without reward; much heat and dust and fatigue in the hope of
enjoyment. A ninety-two mile stage ride was necessary before reaching
Mariposa and an additional sixty miles on horseback. The first night
of the horseback journey usually found the traveler at Clark’s, the
second amid the solemn immensity of Yosemite’s granite cliff and domes
at Black’s, the first structure in the Valley pretentious enough to be
styled a hotel. Real enjoyment did not come until Clark’s was reached.
Here the traveler had arrived at the outer edge of the civilized world
and an atmosphere of romance surrounded the rest of the way. Europeans
and New Yorkers were prone to class the trip in the same category as
an expedition to little-known Tibet, and the friends of those who were
determined on making it urged that such adventurers, before they left
draw up their last wills and testaments. Nor is it to be wondered at
that tourists returning from Yosemite after such a journey should
speak vaguely of “obstacles and difficulties overcome and represent
themselves as having a kind of undefinable claim to the character of
heroes.”
Everyone who passed over the Mariposa trail carried away a pleasant
memory of Galen Clark’s quaint wayside inn and long remembered its
proprietor. The generous hospitality that he extended never failed to
win the admiration of his guests. Even celebrities from abroad paid
him tribute whenever they chanced to speak of him in later years, and
always remarked that he had made them feel at home beneath his roof.
The poor as well as the rich held him in esteem. No weary wanderer, no
matter how low his fortune or how humble his pack, was ever turned
away hungry or unrested. All were equally welcome, for he shared his
loaf with Indian and white alike. Indeed, the natives in the country
around loved him for his kind and gracious ways, sought his advice in
council, and called him “Father Clark.”
The early guide books that tell of these incipient days of pilgrimages
to the Yosemite rarely neglect to remark about the evenings spent about
the open campfire of this simple, upright, kindly man. They tell how he
presided over the social converse of the evening, how he narrated many
a mirth-provoking anecdote, freely exchanging wit and wisdom, and all
the while never indulging in boisterous laughter. They allude to those
trifles which memory often cherishes—“the slight intonations of his
voice indicating that something mildly sarcastic or funny was coming.”
Lastly, they usually conclude with a picture of the great sugar pines,
one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet high, solemnly standing
guard, the files of their fellows extending back into the mystic
blackness of the forest, the foremost calmly looking on the happy
scene, their shadowy clusters of needles brightening and glowing in the
flickering firelight.
Yet these noble qualities which Nature had planted in his being with
such munificence unfitted Galen Clark as an inn-keeper. Business was
too foreign to his temperament, and he was too utterly self-forgetful
to win success. His friends multiplied fearfully and wonderfully,
but fortune was unkind to him and led him into debt. So low had his
estate fallen by 1869, when the Mariposa County survey was made, that
he deeded half his Wawona property to one Edwin Moore. A few years
later he borrowed money with which to make extensive improvements.
These proved so unfortunately planned that foreclosure resulted. Again
Galen Clark faced the most discouraging ordeal that can come to man—the
making of a new start in life.
Until the late seventies the Mariposa Grove was accessible only by
foot or horse. The beginning of the seventies witnessed the completion
of the Mariposa road to Clark’s. In 1874 Washburn, Coffman, Chapman
and Company were granted permission to extend the Mariposa road
to Yosemite, with the privilege of collecting a moderate toll as
compensation for its construction. This road, which is now known as
the Wawona Road, reached the Valley in July of 1875. Its completion
was celebrated in Mariposa in the true holiday manner of the early
Californian. Bands and bluster and bunting were the order of the day.
One prominent citizen of the community delivered a flowery oration
and with an air of great electrical effulgence heralded the event
as the dawn of a new era. Indeed, returning travelers from Yosemite
could no longer lay claim to the laurels of heroes, for the journey
was now considerably shorn of its “terrors.” During the spring of
’78 or ’79 the present road from Wawona to and through the Big Trees
was built. The opening through the Wawona Tree in the Grove was made
in one of these years and vehicles began to carry the curious of the
world through this living tree. Clark’s Station was purchased by the
Washburn Company in May of 1875, and with the advent of the eighties
the present-day Wawona had seen its birth. Clark’s had become but a
memory.
Contrary to popular opinion, the quaint Log Cabin which is so redolent
with the breath of the fifties was not built shortly after the
discovery of the Mariposa Grove. It was built much later, too late,
in fact, to pose as “Galen’s Hospice” or to satisfy the lovely legend
that it sheltered from the stormy blast wanderers who found themselves
far from civilized habitation or human succor. Sentiment would fain
preserve this myth. However, truth is firm and in all honor it must
be stated that this cabin was not erected until 1885, and that it has
never given shelter save to curios and their merchants. The report of
the “Commissioners to manage the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove
of Big Trees” of 1886 forever proves how palpably against the weight of
authority this tale is. “Last year,” the report states, “a comfortable
and artistic log cabin was erected at a central point in the Grove
... and ornamented by a shapely, massive chimney with a cavernous
fireplace guarded by the traditional crane and pendant kettle.”
The first curio dealer to occupy the Log Cabin was “Old Cunningham.”
This quaint character made his curios in a hollow tree with the aid
of a jig-saw and tourists prized his wares the more knowing that they
were made on the spot. When his purse was fat “Old Cunningham” would
ride to Wawona to a saloon called the “Snow Plant,” where he was wont
to present the bottle and spin yarns. Hutchings left posterity a
delightful penciling of this old fellow. “The coach generally halts
at a large and deliciously cool spring near the Cabin, where those
who have come to spend the day will probably take lunch. Here, too,
we shall have the pleasure of meeting Mr. S. M. Cunningham, who knows
every tree by heart, its history, size, and name, and can tell you more
about them in ten minutes than any man could in an hour (as is the
usual case with such wags). I can see his bright and genial look, watch
his wiry form and supple movements while I write. There is one thing
especially noticeable about Mr. Cunningham—he is never discouraged
and sees always the bright side of things, so that when a storm is
swaying the tops of the trees until they bend together, he can listen
interestedly and tell you laughable incidents until your sides ache.”
With the waning of the gold excitement and the waxing of a stable
Statehood, those who were laying the foundations of the State began to
turn their faces toward the future. Gradually they came to see the need
of treasuring some of its natural heritages. They recognized the fact
that California had been lavishly favored with great natural wonders.
Nevertheless, they came to realize also that she was not so rich in
these as to be careless or neglectful of their preservation. They
likewise perceived, these far-seeing ones, that although California
possessed all of the Giant Sequoias, they were the most perishable of
all her treasures if left without protection. Destructive humanity can
little change the sublime granite forms of Yosemite. They will always
remain unspoiled, and mankind can hardly mar them more than could the
clouds that hover about their summits or the butterflies that flit
about their bases. It is true that man may plow Yosemite’s meadows
and cut down wildflower gardens that have never known a mower. He can
destroy its clusters of trees, rob Mirror Lake of its reflective charm,
stop the flow of its waterfalls. All this he can do. But however much
he tries he can but little alter or disturb the majestic repose of its
rocks. Yet he can lay low in a single day a Sequoia that waved its
arms to Sierran winds when the Carpenter of Nazareth was born. In one
short season he can reduce a hallowed Sequoian grove to an expanse of
blackened stubble where only charred stumps remain to mark where trees
once stood and “looked at God all day.”
Fortunately, however, these builders of a commonwealth saw the light
in time. Nor did they wink at it. Hence, the Mariposa Grove came to be
made safe from the axe through seasonable legislation and was spared
the fate that soon befell other Sequoian groves at the hands of greed
and commercialism.
Fortunately, again, Galen Clark was appointed Guardian of the Mariposa
Grove by the Governor. The choice was well and wisely made. In fact,
when John Muir said, “Galen Clark is the sincerest tree lover I ever
knew,” he spoke with fine truth and spirit. Never will Yosemite look
again upon the likeness of such a man. In the performance of his duties
as guardian of the Yosemite Grant he was not found wanting and proved
himself sterling by every standard incident to human nature.
In 1864 when kinsmen in their bitterness and hatred were destroying
one another, Senator Conness in behalf of certain influential citizens
of California introduced a bill into Congress and the law-makers of
Washington paused for a moment in the prosecution of the Civil War to
pass the Act which granted to the State that “cleft or gorge in the
Granite Peak of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ... known as the Yosemite
Valley with its branches and spurs, in estimated length fifteen miles
and in average width one mile back from the main edge of the precipice
on each side of the valley ... and the tracts embracing what is
known as the ‘Mariposa Big Tree Grove,’ not to exceed four square
miles....” In addition to this the Act stipulated: “the said State
shall accept this Grant upon the express conditions that the premises
shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation and shall be
inalienable for all time.” President Lincoln approved the Act a few
days before he made his famous speech on the field of the battle that
broke the Southern blade. Shortly after this Governor Low of California
formally issued a proclamation accepting the Grant. In it he warned
all persons against willful and malicious trespassing and made it a
misdemeanor to injure or destroy any of its treasures. In accordance
with the terms of the Act, the Executive of California then appointed
eight Commissioners to manage the Valley and the Big Tree Grove, naming
Galen Clark as one of them. On the second of April, 1866, the State
Legislature made formal and legal acceptance of the Grant and clothed
the Commissioners with the necessary power to make such regulations
as were requisite to its administration and control. At this time the
Legislature also authorized the Governor to appoint a Guardian to take
active charge of the Grove and the Valley. A small appropriation of two
thousand dollars was made for the purpose of making improvements during
the ensuing two years and an annual salary of five hundred dollars was
voted the Guardian.
[Illustration: GALEN CLARK TREE
Rock cairn to left marks spot of discovery
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
Life is not always a picking of flowers; often it is a plowing of
meadows strewn with hidden rocks. The latter proved to be the lot of
the Commissioners in connection with the Yosemite, for their progress
was blocked by the hostility of settlers who refused to relinquish
their claims. Litigation resulted and the Commissioners encountered
only censure and antagonism in their attempts to make of the Yosemite
a playground for the people. Happily, they were not so handicapped
in their management of the Big Tree Grove, yet here, too, they had
difficulties to contend with.
Chiefly among these was the problem of human vandalism. Constant
vigilance was necessary to guard against those who seemed to take an
insatiable delight in destroying all within their reach. Truly, the
besetting sin of all “pilgrims” the world over is their unquenchable
lust for “specimens.” Like priests of the Capuchin Convent who
“unfailingly show some memento of a saint—a bone of his body, a thread
of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood—before they
extol his miracles,” the “pilgrims” who journey to Nature’s shrines
must, at all hazard, carry away some bit of the shrine to awaken the
wonder of the rustics at home. Or, if they are thwarted in this, it
becomes imperative for them to inscribe their poor little names in
some convenient place on the shrine so that all who run may read. What
a pity some justly wrathful Sequoia cannot fall on some of these
defamers and crush their “eyeballs into dust,” thereby intimidating
them and their kind into forever desisting from such acts.
The Commissioners were plagued with vandals of yet another sort—the
camper and the sheep-herder; the one starting forest fires through
negligence, the other purposely to insure better grass for his
“hoofed locusts.” In 1889 the Grove was threatened with disaster.
A fire, started because of a camper’s carelessness or through the
deliberate design of sheep-herders, secured sovereign possession of
the surrounding forest and in one place invaded the Grove itself. In a
few days the entire annual appropriation was used in saving the Grove
from the angry flames. When their fury was finally conquered, black
scars that only time could obliterate remained. It was this memorable
fire that consumed the Lone Giant, the largest decumbent monarch in the
Grove.
Since the Commissioners had no control over outside forests bordering
on the Grove, this calamity indicated the need of building a fireline
to arrest the progress of future conflagrations. The necessity of
clearing the Grove of its dense masses of inflammable undergrowth was
also made apparent. This growth not only obstructed a view of the older
trees, but it rendered them inaccessible for close inspection. It also
made for poor reproduction by depriving seedlings of light. It choked
and starved the younger trees, while it robbed the patriarchs of their
much needed moisture and hindered their growth. Hence, to render these
harmful features negligible, the Commissioners decided to clear the
Grove of its underbrush. The appropriations of the next five years were
used toward this end. By 1895, all the acreage within the ambit of the
Big Tree Grant had been treated to the brush scythe and the grubbing
hoe, and the fire menace reduced to a minimum.
No less worthy of attention are the extensive additions and
improvements made during these years upon the roads. Each of the main
clusters of Sequoias was rendered accessible and travelers could
make a complete tour of the Grove viewing its principal wonder trees
from the stage, as they do today. The State had received the Grant
approachable only by trail. In an amazingly short time, considering
the meagerness of appropriations, the State had rendered the Grove
accessible to other than hardy travelers. Young and old, the physically
fit and the infirm, could now enter it with comfort and safety. In
all fairness it must be conceded that the State had made the Mariposa
Grant more suitable for the particular use for which it had been
appropriated. The Commissioners had administered the Grove for the
good of the greatest number. They had taken positive steps to protect
it from the carelessness of the thoughtless and the wantonness of the
ignorant. Unquestionably, they had proved scrupulously careful in their
administration of the trust imposed in them.
Yet even so commendable an accomplishment as this only aroused a storm
of criticism. The removal of the fire-inviting underbrush shocked
the nerves of sentimentalists who advocated the preservation of the
Mariposa Grove “in the condition in which it won the admiration of
its discoverer and appealed to the enthusiasm of the world.” They
lamented over the fancied catastrophe. They fell into near convulsions
over the thought that the virginal beauty of the Grove was no more,
because its “flowering shrubs” had been grubbed out. Even the _Century
Magazine_ took up the bodeful cry. Joaquin Miller’s statement that he
had travelled from Babylon to Jerusalem “without seeing so much as a
grasshopper, or a bird, or a blade of grass in a land that was once
an Eden” was quoted as a prophecy of the Grove’s condition in the
near future if these “destructive tendencies” continued. Alexander,
they pointed out, mourned because Greek ivy would not grow on the
tower of Babel and inferred that such would be California’s lot when
her eyesight sufficiently improved to see the need of enhancing the
grandeur of her Sequoias by garlands. And all the while they failed to
see the irony of their plea. They did not know that sentiment, like
ivy, can cling to a very flat surface.
Nor is this all that the Commissioners accomplished. To their list of
achievements must be added yet another. In order to make the Grant of
1864 a treasure that “all shall share and none shall be the poorer for
sharing,” they warred against unscrupulous commercial enterprises.
Hawkers continually pressed forward their schemes in honeyed words to
make travelers the victims of innumerable petty charges and vexations.
However, the Commissioners who were all men of high principles would
have none of them. Concessioners who proved unprincipled in their
treatment of tourists were summarily deprived of the means with which
to accrue further ill-gotten gains. In all truthfulness it can be
stated that throughout the entire forty years of State control[1] the
various Commissioners never sullied their hands in graft. Though they
received not a penny in salary and often laid out considerable sums
to swell the meager appropriations of the State Legislature, their
office was never used for the purpose of gain. In short, they carried
a trusteeship that concerned the high honor of the Commonwealth of
California in a manner which justifies the pride of the people.
In all this glorious work Galen Clark, as Guardian, stands head
and shoulders above his colleagues. He had that desire to serve
without its selfish qualities. Not inspired by the love of fame and
reputation, he did not toil for self-aggrandizement, like many men. He
considered the interest of the people higher and purer than that of the
individual. It was this interest that he ever held paramount, that he
always best served. To him the highest patriotism was expressed by the
man who thought not of honor of self or of individual reward, but who
lost himself in the larger and dearer interests of the Commonwealth;
who so loved it for its own sake that he was content to be forgotten.
In this respect Galen Clark succeeded in a manner so striking that it
deserves the name of art, not of artifice. He is practically unknown
today. Yet he rendered the people of California, and even of America, a
singular service.
“As Guardian he enjoyed a longer contact with the management of the
Grant, off and on, than any other single individual. He was reappointed
again and again by succeeding Governors as Guardian, and after
twenty-four years of service in this capacity, he voluntarily retired,
carrying with him the respect and admiration of every member of the
Commission, of all the residents of the Valley, and of every visitor
who enjoyed the pleasure of his personal acquaintance.”
The tribute paid him on his retirement in 1897 by those with whom he
was so long officially associated is worthy of full quotation:
+Whereas+: Galen Clark has for a long number of years been closely
identified with Yosemite Valley and has for a considerable portion
of that time been its Guardian; and
+Whereas+: He has now, by his own choice and will, relinquished the
trust confided in him, and retired into private life; and
+Whereas+: His faithful and eminent services as Guardian, his
constant efforts to preserve, protect and enhance the beauties of
Yosemite; his dignified, kindly and courteous demeanor to all who
have come to see and enjoy its wonders, and his upright and noble
life, deserve from us a fitting recognition and memorial; now,
therefore, be it
+Resolved+: That the cordial assurance of the appreciation by this
Commission of the efforts and labors of +Galen Clark+, as Guardian
of Yosemite, in its behalf, be tendered and expressed to him:
That we recognize in him a faithful, efficient and worthy citizen
and officer of this Commission, and of the State; that he will be
followed into his retirement by the sincerest and best wishes of
this Commission individually, and as a body, for continued long
life and constant happiness.
Galen Clark did great things, but apparently fame accompanied him to
the grave. Few know of him today. One of the most kindly of men, he had
a simplicity so intense that at times it appeared ridiculous to men of
sense and candor. Never offending by superiority, modesty composed the
very fabric of his being. To be rather than to appear was the ruling
passion of his long life. Having an insuperable aversion for bluster
and bombast, he talked about himself rarely, and then only with the
greatest of reticence. It was only after much persuasion on the part of
friends that he was induced to write his charming and authoritative
account of the _Indians of Yosemite_ in 1904. Doing nothing for the
sake of personal display, he never forced himself into the limelight.
Unobtrusive and unpretentious, he had all that unaffected humility that
some believe to be the essence of Lincoln’s greatness.
No account of Galen Clark would be complete if it failed to touch on
his love of Nature. “He was fond of scenery,” testifies John Muir,
“and once told me that he liked ‘nothing in the world better than to
climb to the top of a high ridge or mountain and look off.’ Oftentimes
he would take his rifle, a few pounds of bacon, a little flour and a
single blanket and go off hunting, for no other reason than to explore
and get acquainted with the most beautiful points of view. On these
trips he was always alone and indulged in the tranquil enjoyment of
Nature to his heart’s content.”
Few, indeed, have been more sincere in their love of Nature. He loved
not only all her moods, both beauteous and terrible, but all her forms
from the lowliest flower in the dust by the roadside to the loftiest of
Yosemite’s cloud-caressed cliffs. But he lacked the power of expressing
his affections. Like Muir, he “read the great book spread out before
him;” unlike Muir, he was not gifted with a magic pen. Probably he was
too sensitive to his poverty of language to attempt to describe the
fairy-like beauty, the rare delicacy, and the wondrous tints of an
Alpine blossom—“that beautiful creature that catches the smile of God
from out the sky and preserves it.”
Twenty summers in the Yosemite formed in Galen Clark an attachment for
the Valley that was deep and lasting. Nearing the sunset of his life,
like the patriarchs of old, he dug his own grave in the little cemetery
near Yosemite Falls. With his hands he hewed his own tombstone from
one of the granite blocks the elements had plucked from the cliff over
which the snowy flood of the grand Yosemite Falls descend sonorous, and
soft, and slow. Taking up a few seedling Sequoias from the Mariposa
Grove, he transplanted them at the four corners of his last resting
place so that they would shade the grave of their blessed benefactor in
the years to come. A man of great age, he must have brooded on death
and become familiar with its mystery so that the end did not come as a
surprise.
One day in 1910, at the age of ninety-six, the end came and in sorrow
and in silence all that was mortal of Galen Clark was laid in the
sacred earth, his kindly soul passing on to where, beyond the booming
voice of the great fall he so loved, there is peace.
+Chapter IV+
WONDER TREES
The Mariposa Grove belongs in the category of the world’s impressive
wonders. It presents the most remarkable exhibition of the Sequoias
growing between the American and the Kings Rivers and displays Nature’s
finest handiwork on the fraternity of the king of all trees. It
contains the essence of the most imposing qualities of the Sequoia and
is unlike any other grove in its very compactness. Concentrated in its
small extent are trees in every phase of development from nurseries
of tender seedlings obtaining their feeble hold on life and groups of
graceful saplings not half arrived at the maturity of treehood, and
just disclosing their impatience to be kings, to venerable patriarchs
that are numbered foremost in the world of living things—giants
so freighted with age that they exemplify Doctor Johnson’s famous
metaphor, “and panting Time toiled after him in vain.”
The Mariposa Grove is superior to other Sequoian tracts in its
accessibility, lying as it does in a shallow, crater-like depression
near the top of a forested ridge at an elevation of 6,000 feet above
the sea and a distance of sixteen miles as the crow flies from the
Village in Yosemite Valley. This ridge, upon which the Grove is
situated, runs in an easterly direction between Big Creek and the
South Fork of the Merced, having as its culmination Mt. Raymond, a
rocky promontory upon which the snow lingers even in July.
The Grove is approachable over the Wawona Road which winds upward
along the south rim of Yosemite Valley. After passing southward in a
meandering course through twenty-seven miles of Park forest, the road
drops to Wawona from where it again ascends 1,500 feet within eight
miles before reaching the portals of the Mariposa Grove. Once within
the Grove, but a comparatively brief period of time is required in
which to review its salient features. With little effort it may be
completely explored and studied. So harmoniously are its wonder trees
disposed within the utmost smallest space that all of them may be
viewed from a passing vehicle. In fact, even the most cursory journey
through the Mariposa Grove will suffice to give an impression of the
singular, solemn dignity of the Sequoia.
Possibly much of the world-wide fame of this Grove is due to the fact
that it has been brought the nearest to civilization of the several
Big Tree groves. Yet interest in it should not spring merely from such
a consideration, for it lies in happy proximity to the grandeur of
Yosemite’s cliffs and domes. Indeed, it is as distinctive a feature
of Yosemite National Park as the Valley itself. Time was when the
importance of the Mariposa Grove was little if at all recognized. In
the last decades of the nineteenth century the Calaveras Grove held the
center of the stage. The latter was then the most accessible. Because
of this it became the Mecca of naturalists and celebrities of the
day who made pilgrimages across the continent in order to visit it.
Therefore, the Calaveras giants loom large in the earlier literature of
the Sequoia. But with the passing of the stagecoach and the hitching
post—with the coming of the “winged wheels” and the “iron horse,”
the Mariposa Grove ceased to bloom unseen. Instead of the Calaveras
Grove it became the more easily reached. Inevitably the pendulum of
popularity swung toward it and yearly the tide of travel that flows its
way increases.
The tendency to wander into the wilderness that obtains in these
feverish times is advancing the popularity of the Mariposa Grove.
Mankind is coming more and more into sympathetic contact with Nature.
Yearly thousands of over-civilized people are discovering that nothing
so renews the health of the body, so refines the mind, so affords
a margin of leisure for the soul, or so has the power to quiet the
“restless pulse of care” as communion with Nature. They are discovering
that real recreation and enjoyment are not found in crowded cities or
fashion-hampered hotels. As a result, unspoiled woods and mountain
solitudes, brawling brooks and soundless lakes, flowers and stars, rosy
dawns, sunset golds and twilight purples are fast becoming the wealth
of nations. All this is glorious and full of promise. It lends a happy
tone to the times. Truly, if it persists in increasing, the Mariposa
Grove is destined to enjoy a tremendous tomorrow.
The Grant made by Congress in 1864 really embraced two distinct groups
of the Giant Sequoia. Because these approach within but a few yards
of each other, they have come to be looked upon as a single body. The
Upper Grove, according to Whitney, contains 365 trees of a diameter
of one foot and over. This makes, as the old guide books were wont
to point out, “a tree for every day in the year.” The Lower Grove is
smaller in area and contains but 182 trees, which are more scattered
than those of the Upper Grove. In both groves there are hardly
more than 125 Sequoias over 40 feet in circumference, yet these in
themselves are so imposing that to view them is compensation for a
journey half the circuit of the globe.
The road enters the Lower Grove, describing a figure eight in passing
through it and the Upper Grove. The Sergeant of the Guard and the
Four Sentinels guard the gateway. Their bright color and port, rather
than their size, at once attract the eye. Soon other monarchs, among
them the prostrate Father of the Forest, are passed. Then the Grizzly
Giant, standing alone in the grandeur of its own solitude, chains
the attention. Upward wanders the road, passing from one marvel to
another. Each seems to surpass its predecessor, and finally, when
the road passes through the Wawona Tree, it seems the chief wonder
of them all. But when this Highway of the Giants winds back again to
the Log Cabin, the traveller learns that the real wonder has been
reserved for the last. Here he will find himself in the midst of a
most magnificent grouping of Sequoias. Over half a hundred are within
sight of the Cabin. But not until, after examining one after another,
letting the eye roam over their fluted columns and upward into the
blue-green depths of their far-away tops, walking around some and into
the enormous hollows of others, climbing up the sides of still other
prostrate trunks and stepping them off from end to end, will a proper
realization of the immensity of the Sequoia be possible.
The more remarkable trees of the Mariposa Grove have received names
to individualize them. But even this practice of late has been
carried too far. The names of states, cities, and persons have been
indiscriminately tacked to trees that were on earth when the stones
of Rome were laid. That such comparatively trivial and frivolous
designations so inconsistent with the grandeur and nobility of the
Sequoia should be permitted is amazing and regrettable. It detracts
seriously from the finer appreciation of the tree and renders its
groves “freak museums” which are looked upon with a “Barnum eye”
as merely “side-show curiosities and big things.” Assuredly, such a
practice is to be unreservedly condemned.
Whitney attempted to avoid just such a result as this by distinguishing
the greater Sequoias by numerals. However, the undesirability of such a
method is at once apparent when pressed into service. Such featureless
monotony as “Number 15, fine, sound tree; Number 304, largest and
oldest tree in the Grove; Number 262, half-burned at the base,” and the
like (as Whitney recites in his _Yosemite Guide Book_) is produced.
Obviously, the trees must be individualized by names. But why attach
a name such as Andy Johnson to a tree that saw the light of day when
Pompeii was destroyed? Affixing names of such temporary notable
figures of the day to a Sequoia savors almost of ticketing the name
for an “adventitious immortality.” At any rate, whether it be the tree
or the man so honored, probably either would live as long in memory
without the connection. If a Sequoia must be labeled, let some striking
attribute of the tree itself be the governing factor in selecting the
designation.
Foremost of the Sequoias in the Mariposa Grove is the Grizzly Giant.
It is among the most massive-stemmed trees of the world and ranks
with the oldest inhabitants of the earth. Yet a mere statement of
its size little serves to convey an adequate impression of the tree.
Measurements are, after all, only relative criteria, at best. As
well give the tailor’s measurements of Lincoln as an index of his
greatness as to try to convey the fascinating immensity of this tree by
saying that it is 204 feet high and 31 feet in diameter at the ground.
Its stockiness is truly remarkable. Its sturdy trunk tapers upward so
slightly to the first great limb—reputed to be six feet in diameter;
the size of a mature pine—that the diametric variance is almost
imperceptible. Nor is its base excessively expanded. No more, really,
than is necessary for strength. In fact, it seems almost too slight an
expansion to serve as a diagonal brace or instep for the support of
such a gigantic structure upon the earth. Consequently, the diametric
measurement of the Grizzly Giant at the ground justly signifies its
enormous bulk. Yet even this cannot be accurately obtained for its
base has been so badly gnawed by flames that a true measurement is not
possible.
[Illustration: THE CABIN AND ITS MAGNIFICENT SETTING
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
Several Sequoias press closely upon the Grizzly Giant in girth. The
Lafayette Tree is easily its counterpart, having a ground diameter of
29.4 feet. But in this case the swell at the base is excessive and
the trunk itself has less than two-thirds the diameter of the Grizzly
Giant. The Columbia Tree even exceeded the Grizzly Giant in girth and
must have measured at least 110 feet in circumference before fire
claimed half its base. Viewed from the Cabin it is extremely imposing
and almost as grand and picturesque in its old age as the Grizzly
Giant. Standing on a steep slope, its stem appears to be fully as
massive as that of the patriarch of the Grove, while its great elbowed
limbs and its high top, “bald with dry antiquity” and scarred with
tokens of old wars, vest it with a venerable charm. However, a scramble
through the dense brush on the up-hill side reveals a large burnt
hollow in which a dozen persons could comfortably stand. If sawed
close to the ground its stump would be shaped like a crescent moon. A
tape stretched around it and across its concave surface would record
a diameter of 25.6 feet. The Washington Tree is a foot less in girth
at the ground than the Grizzly Giant, yet measured 10 feet above the
ground its trunk is a few inches larger in diameter, being 20.7 feet.
Nevertheless, it tapers far more and is not nearly so imposing in its
pillar-like stateliness as the tree that presides over the Mariposa
Grove.
After all, mere figures have their limitations. They are not expressive
of Sequoian size. This may be due to the columnar character of the
Sequoia’s trunk. It rises smooth and unbroken by protuberance of any
kind for a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet. Vastness is so artfully
given emphasis and completeness that the whole is not a monstrosity.
Symmetry is so perfectly achieved that there is no straining for
enormity. What would be a commanding height for a building on a flat
level surface appears not out of the ordinary in the Sequoia. This is
perhaps why a first glimpse of the Sequoia is sometimes disappointing.
Examination and meditation are necessary before the grandeur of the
tree “grows” upon the observer. Then he is filled with a feeling of awe
that no grandeur of architectural pile could possibly inspire.
The Mariposa Grove possesses the tallest of the Sierra Sequoias, the
Mark Twain Tree. This magnificent specimen lifts its proud head 331
feet into the sky. Thus, it would reach nearly two-thirds of the
way up the lofty Washington Monument and would over-top the dome of
the Nation’s Capitol. Yet those who gaze upon it for the first time
depart doubting. Seeing is not believing. Its appearance is anything
but that of the tallest Giant Sequoia on the globe. Nevertheless, the
measurement is accurate and authentic and must stand.[2]
Other Sequoias rank close seconds to the Mark Twain Tree in height. The
Captain A. E. Wood, with a height of 310 feet, is not far behind. The
Columbia, 294 feet high, the Nevada, 287 feet, and the Georgia, 270
feet, are all exceptional trees. In fact, a score of others could be
enumerated before the imperial Queen of the Forest would be reached,
whose 219 feet of trunkage place it within the average height of the
Giant Sequoia.
Most perfectly formed of the Sequoias of the Grove is the Alabama
Tree. The pioneers called it the “Pillar of the Temple.” It has
developed under full sunlight and is magnificently balanced in all
its proportions. Truly, it is one of the finest examples of “Nature’s
forest masterpieces,” as John Muir was wont to designate the Sequoia.
Fit to support any temple, it stands marvelously perfect, unmarred
by fire, untouched by disease, undisturbed by the violence of the
elements. Centuries have passed over it, centuries that have noted many
disasters in the march of civilization, and yet it has remained free
from accident. Its heroic stem is as roundly perfect and as regularly
tapered as though turned in a lathe. Unbroken by a limb upwards of
nearly two hundred feet, with an instep that adjusts itself to the
mass it supports with elegant finish, it discloses a trunk with deeply
and widely furrowed ridges not unlike a pillar that Phidias might
have fashioned. But no pillar ever conceived by man bore a tint more
ravishing or a luster more superb than this. When spotted with shifting
patches of golden sunlight, its cinnamon-reddish trunk would put to
shame the richest colorings of Numidian marble.
Nor has any pillar of stone ever supported a more exquisite structure
than the crown of this Sequoia. Possessed of almost an artificial
finish, it is a gracefully trimmed, singularly perfect dome. The
supports of this crown leave the trunk in a woody wilderness of huge
arms, wild in ungovernable expression, knotted and confused as those of
giants who toss their arms in anguish. These great limbs, regal-hued
in rose and purple, dissolve themselves abruptly into masses of stumpy
branchlets which in turn spray out into a soft film of deep blue-green
foliage. Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish against the skyline
exactly where this arch described by the foliage ends and where sky
begins. So subtile are the edges of this crown that they appear to melt
away into the heavens. Yet more wonderful is the flame-like semi-halo
visible along the crest of this tree just after a rain. Ruskin noticed
this light on pine trees. “The whole outer crown,” he states, “becomes
a thing of light, dazzling as the sun itself, for every minutest needle
is bedewed and carries a diamond, as if living among the clouds it had
caught a part of their glory.”
Never has Nature presented a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison than in the trunk and foliage of the Sequoia.
They are at the opposite ends of the scale. One presents the utmost
massiveness of outline; the other the most delicate curvature and
grace. The trunk has qualities of permanence, classic mightiness,
enduring power, and the colossal dimensions that go with two thousand
years of age; the foliage possesses qualities of fleetness, ephemeral
frailty, fragile beauty, and the airy nothingness of a dream.
Nearly all the other Sequoias of the Grove have had their perfection
marred by three agents of destruction—time, fire, and man. The
remarkable manner in which they have triumphed over their destroyers
makes them unique among trees. Seared, scarred, and mutilated all
their lives, they have carried on in their great, patient, rugged
fashion. Accidents seem unable to disturb more than momentarily their
peaceful way. Calamities that would vanquish other trees only serve
to quicken their hardy, tenacious growth. Almost invincible, they
appear to know neither despair nor defeat. Even when overthrown by the
combined strength of the elements of heaven and earth, though uprooted
and prostrate, they refuse to perish utterly. Would that man had the
stamina of the Sequoia.
Time has not laid a heavy hand on the Sequoia. On all living things it
leaves its trace. But never within the compass of human reckoning has
time alone been able to take off a Sequoia. Fire must first prepare the
way by eating through the center of gravity of its trunk. Then, and
only then, are the tempests able to overthrow it. This is because the
scanty foliage of the tree never makes for top-heaviness. One of the
most interesting habits of the Sequoia is the pruning of its own top.
Unnecessary limbs are rarely retained. Not infrequently in Sequoian
groves when there is neither wind nor other apparent cause, a crash in
the night is heard and at dawn the ruins of a limb are found beneath
one of the Giants. Evidently the Sequoia knows that a tree which
carries its crown two hundred and fifty feet above its base cannot
wrestle with the fury of the winds under full sail. Consequently, it is
only after fire has deflected one of these columns from its plumbline
and when the mass of earth about its roots has been softened by rain or
snow, that the gales succeed in prostrating the Sequoia.
The Fallen Monarch and the Fallen Giant are the two most noted of this
category in the Mariposa Grove. The former, when standing in the full
glory of prime, must have been the equal of the largest of the lordly
monarchs of today. Its bark gone, its sap-wood decayed, its base badly
fire-scarred, it still measures over 85 feet in circumference. But
for all its great size, its refusal to perish is even more wonderful.
It is not a mouldering mass which tourists can idly kick about, but a
solid trunk whose wood is as firm and sound as on the day the tree fell
to earth. How long the bleached ruin of a tree may have lain on the
forest floor is mere conjecture. How old this monarch was before its
fall is an equally fascinating speculation. It may be that the circling
sun looked down upon it as a graceful sapling when Cheops raised
the Pyramids on the plains of Gizeh. Nor are these vast, unmeaning,
sepulchral piles erected to the great who exhausted the splendor of
Egypt in their building, apparently more enduring than this decumbent
monarch.
The other, the Fallen Giant, fell during a storm in the early
seventies. Its mammoth prone trunk may be seen from the Cabin porch
today. Since its fall a troop of cavalry have been lined up in
formation upon it and a coach-and-four has been driven along its trunk.
Living, it stood among the foremost of the Grove. It was known as the
Andy Johnson Tree and was one of the famous giants of pioneer days. Now
all its glories have shrunken into a “curiosity,” for tourists take a
special delight in clambering up and stamping upon its grey surface to
test the soundness of its wood.
But the destructive work of time as a whole has been of less
consequence than that of fire. Of all the tragedies and great passions
of the elements that cross the silent life of a Sequoia, none can
compare with the sinister work of this forest fiend. Fire alone
seems able to inflict irreparable wounds, and nothing else, not even
disease, apparently ever injures the heart of a Sequoia. The immense
black charrings on many of the noble trees of the Grove bear silent
testimony to great conflagrations of the past. Yet, in a sense, the
Sequoia triumphs even over this arch enemy. Fires that totally destroy
its neighbors only assail its vitality after many and repeated attacks.
Enormous areas of its base may be burned and yet the tree will live on.
So erratic, indeed, may some of these injuries become that daylight
is let through the tree. Even if it be advanced in age, it will still
continue to put forth green leaves, persisting in a really remarkable
manner in the face of misfortune to which a lesser tree would
immediately succumb.
[Illustration: TELESCOPE TREE
Light may be seen through this tree, hollowed by fire.
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
The Haverford, the Stable, and the Hermit’s Cabin are notable for
the large fire-created cavities of their bases. The Haverford has
had its broad base entirely hollowed out by flames which have burned
a three-chambered archway through the tree across two spurs, the
distance of which is 35 feet, and, transversely, 33 feet. Garrulous
stage-drivers of early days, whose creative faculties at times spurred
them on to daring mendacities, called the Haverford the “Tree of
Refuge” and alluded to the fact that 30 horses found safety and shelter
within its hollow trunk during a severe storm. When it is determined,
however, with certainty that but half this number of horses really were
sheltered, the size of this cavern in the base of a living tree is
still sufficiently striking.
The Stable Tree has a capacious hollow in its base almost forming a
room eight by twelve feet. It was because “Old Cunningham” manufactured
his quaint stock of curios in the hollow of this tree that it gained
the fitting appellation of the “Old Curiosity Shop.” Later when the
soldiers of the Government patrolled the Grove they tied their mounts
within this room-like hollow—a practice which eventually caused it to
be known as the Stable Tree.
The Hermit’s Cabin is a charcoal-lined circular chamber with a very
fine domed ceiling. It affords a spacious room in which some denizen
of the mountains could dwell in princely comfort and contentment. Wild
beasts may have made it their forest lair in the past, and the Indian
may have flaked his arrowheads within it while waiting for a storm to
pass. It is not altogether improbable that some failing miner may have
used it for his hermitage, seeking solace in the vast, silent bowers of
shade about him and submerging himself in the immense peacefulness of
the Grove—wandering, rambling at will, pausing to drink at a spring,
or anon to examine a flower, or to warm himself in the sun, bewildered
yet charmed by the fascination of it all; a dreamer seeming to hear the
laughter and voices of dear ones at home, but in reality listening to
the songs of birds.
But there are Sequoias even more fire-tortured than these. The
Telescope Tree is an erect, burnt-out, tubular trunk 220 feet high. Its
heartwood is completely gone. Tourists may enter it and look up through
its chimney-like cylinder to the blue sky above. Internally, its
appearance is that of a tree from which life has gone forever, while
externally it appears to be a perfectly sound tree. Of course, its top
is a ruin. But one up-turned limb remains. This abounds in the spirit
of intense life, for its bossy patches of deep blue-green foliage still
bear cones whose seeds perpetuate the endless cycle of the royal race.
Thus this tree—hardly more than a mere barkcovered shell, clings to
life with a Roman tenacity—the epitome of vitality.
Pluto’s Chimney is yet more of a ruin. It is nothing but a huge old
stub of a tree, blackened and burned inside and out. So forbidding
and fearsome is its interior aspect that some call it the “Devil’s
Dungeon.” But for all its dismal repellence, it, too, has its story to
tell. Like a battle-scarred veteran, its blackened body tells mutely
of a mighty struggle bravely waged against the forest fiend. The sun
lights its gloomy circular vault and sheds a troop of bright sunbeams
upon its dead walls as though to bless them and warm them back to life.
Even winter’s clouds sift snow in its burnt-out shell as though to cool
its fire-ravaged sides.
Yet another of these enormous charcoal-lined cylinders lies prostrate
not far away. Early travelers were accustomed to pursue each other
through it on horseback. But this pastime was put to an abrupt end by
a nearby Sequoia falling across it and breaking in the roof. Since
then spring floods have deposited considerable quantities of sediment,
lessening its diameter, so that today a man can just walk erect through
it. Still other similar fragments, the monuments of departed monarchs
of other centuries, dot the forest floor. To search these out is a
pleasure worth the climbing of a mountain to enjoy. Through ragged
knot-hole openings charming and enchanting glimpses of the forest may
be obtained. Seemingly, all that is unattractive is hidden from view
and the beauties of the picture can be contemplated at leisure.
Far greater than the destructive work of time is that of man. Against
his double-bitted axe the Sequoia is completely powerless. Ironically
enough, the larger and more remarkable the tree the more certain
and swift its doom. The rarity of the species is no bar against its
destruction. Indeed, man seems even eager to barter this most priceless
heritage for a handful of yellow gold. Wherever greed has had free rein
the Sequoia has been lumbered. For the past fifty years cuttings in
privately owned holdings of Sequoian tracts have continued unchecked.
The axe has removed a large part of the Sequoias in the Redwood
Mountain, Merced, and Tule River regions, and the sawmill is still at
its work of destruction in the magnificent forests of the Kings and
Kaweah River basins. “Earlier cutting,” states Sudworth, “took only a
part of this timber, but the later operations have removed practically
every tree.”
Has man no regard for the past—no sentiment of conservation for the
future? How can he trace the arduous survival of the Sequoia through
geological ages without acquiring a peculiar admiration and love for
it? How can he look upon such a living monument which connects the past
with the present and blink at its intellectual and aesthetic value?
When the Germans bombarded Rheims in 1914 and Turkish cannon demolished
the Parthenon of Athens in 1687, all lovers of architecture and the
beautiful stamped such acts as barbarism. But the rose window of Rheims
and the colonades of the Parthenon _can_ be restored. They were merely
man-made. Living things, however, once destroyed are forever lost to
the world. When the axe destroys a Sequoian grove it is irrevocably
gone, for, after all, “only God can make a tree.”
Were the commercial value of the Sequoia in any manner adequate to
its monumental value, all this vilifying would be but simon-pure
sentimentality. Could the wood of the Sequoia be used as girders and
columns in great halls and solemn cathedrals, its commercial use would
somewhat befit the nobility and heroic proportions of the tree. But it
is otherwise. The light, soft, brittle wood of the Big Tree unfits it
for supporting ponderous roofs and massive balconies. No wise architect
would use it in this manner. In fact, nearly every wood grown on the
American Continent is superior to the Big Tree in the weight it will
sustain.
Few other trees in their lumbering exceed the Giant Sequoia in
wastefulness. More lumber can be obtained from ash or maple than from
the Sequoia of the Sierra. This is due to the enormous size of the tree
and the brittle character of its wood. When a falling Sequoia strikes
the ground with the force of many thousands of tons, any inequality
of the earth’s surface suffices to break its trunk. Blasting must
then be employed to reduce the great pieces to sizeable dimensions
for handling. This results in fragments of all sorts unsuited for
commercial use, to say nothing of the great loss of that which is
cracked and splintered beyond all hope of salvage. “No where on the
face of the globe,” says Dudley, “can there be found more wasteful
lumbering. One-half to even three-fourths or seven-eighths of the great
trunks of the Sequoias of the Converse Basin (near the Kings River)
were broken and rent beyond use in falling.” In substance, breakage is
so great that the major portion of the wood is suitable only for grape
stakes and fence posts and the like. If no other tree save the Sequoia
could furnish these products, the destruction of its forests might be
justifiable. Hence, no other conclusion can be reached than that the
lumbering of the Sequoia is wholly unnecessary and deserving of the
severest condemnation.[3]
Yet more must be told. Much vandalism has been committed on the Sequoia
by man. Early accounts are filled with these “botanical tragedies”
which were perpetrated whenever the venture appeared profitable. For
instance, in 1878, a butchered specimen of the Giant Sequoia was
shipped from Tulare City to San Francisco for exhibition purposes and
gain. It was the largest Sequoia the vandals could find in the forest.
Fourteen feet above the ground they made the first cut and for twelve
days nine men disturbed the age-old peace of the place with the ring
of axes and the rasp of saws. Finally, the monarch that had defied the
passions of the elements for centuries fell, conquered by the blade.
Then the inside of the stump, which was 21 feet in diameter, was hewn
out to within a dozen inches or so of the foot-thick bark and the
hollow shell sawed into fifteen gigantic slabs. With indefatiguable
energy, a road six miles in length was constructed to haul these out of
the forest. Each slab made a load for eight horses, while two railroad
cars were required to transport them all. The so-called “curiosity”
was set up on Market Street as the largest tree yet discovered in
California. Strangely enough, this act elicited hardly a whisper of
indignation or a word of protest from Californians who seemed to regard
the exhibit as a “real novelty.”
The Calaveras Grove suffered grievously at the outset from such
barbaric acts. Two of its most imposing trees were destroyed. One of
the grandest trees in the Grove was bored down with pump-augers by five
men in twenty-two days in order to make a dancing floor—butchered, in
other words, to make an American holiday. Its great trunk, 302 feet
in height and 96 feet in circumference, was hacked and chopped by the
usual “pilgrims” desirous of securing specimens of their visit. The
other, the “Mother of the Forest,” was stripped of its bark in 1854
to a height of 116 feet—veritably “skinned alive” so that its bark
could be sent to the Crystal Palace in England, where the curious of
Europe could see how large and fine California’s Big Trees really were.
Naturally enough, this act brought death to the tree. “For years,”
Hutchings remarks, “its majestic form perpetually taunted the belittled
and sordid spirits that were the authors of her ruin. Yet the elements
sympathized with her unmerited disgrace and attempted to hasten her
dismemberment to cover the wrong.” In the early part of the present
century a fire almost completed the work. Now but a great blackened
trunk remains with two disfigured limbs bent upward like human arms as
if to say, “Forgive them, for only in darkness does vandalism flourish.”
Fortunately, the Mariposa giants have escaped all this ignominy.
The serenity of the grove has been unbroken by the death chant of a
Sequoia. It has never echoed to the measured chopping of the axe, the
droning swish of saws, the hoarse call of teamsters, the clanking of
irons, or the shrill whistle of the donkey-engine. The sawmill has
eaten its destroying way all around its boundaries, leaving desolation
in its wake. But the Mariposa Grove has been spared this fate. A more
noble use has been found for it.
[Illustration: WAWONA TREE
The curious of the world have passed through this Sequoia for half a
century
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
Only two trees within the boundaries of the Grove have been touched by
the axe—the Wawona and the California. Both have huge openings hewn
through them. However, this cutting has not been the work of vandalism,
for fire had prepared the way by almost tunneling through them. It was
possible, therefore, to complete the opening with little injury to the
tree in each instance. Indeed, it is not impossible that both of these
Sequoias will go on living long after the generation that let daylight
through them has been all but forgotten. The passage-way through the
Wawona was cut during the late seventies when Henry Washburn built
the first road through the Grove. The opening in the California Tree
was made much later, so that tourists could experience the novelty of
driving through a living tree in the late spring when the snow was yet
deep in the upper part of the Grove where the Wawona stands.
In all the world there is probably not another tree more celebrated
than the Wawona. It is neither wonderful in the massiveness of its
great red stem, or glorious in the symmetry of its domed crown; nor has
it the venerable picturesqueness of the Grizzly Giant, or the port,
pomp, or perfection of the Mariposa Tree. Its fame rests simply upon
the ten-foot passage-way through its base. Pictures of it appeared in
geographies over half a century ago; stage coaches have passed through
it times innumerable to the amazement always of certain of their
passengers without discomfort, and now thousands of automobiles drive
through it annually.
Of the wonder trees of the Mariposa Grove perhaps none offer a greater
object lesson to man than the Faithful Couple. From earliest times
mankind have destroyed each other and the fallacy of war has yet to be
learned. The Faithful Couple represent two trees that warred with each
other all their lives, never realizing the value of peace until, in the
weakness of their old age, they united their almost spent strength to
fight the greater battle against death.
They are the sole survivors of a former commonwealth of seedlings.
In company with a community of tiny trees they began their lives
on ground cleared for their reception by the fall of a giant of
a former generation or by a ground fire. Either of these agents
exposed the mineral soil so necessary to the life of the germinating
seed. Sunlight, too, must have been sifted down in proper amounts
since but little shade can be endured at any stage of the Sequoia’s
existence. Even then the hold this zealous crop of seedlings had on
life was precarious. From the instant they cast their tiny shadows on
the ground, excessive moisture, erosion, and wind threatened their
existence. Indeed, many must have perished in their earliest infancy
from these dangers.
As soon, however, as their branches and their roots began to interfere
with each other, a struggle of yet another sort ensued, and each
seedling began to battle fiercely with its neighbors for light and
nourishment. At the same time each exerted a beneficial influence
over the other by preventing the winds from drying out the soil or
the rains from carrying it away. Each was a member of a “protective
union,” mutually making for better conditions of growth which gave them
greater strength to carry on the fight for life. Strangely enough, each
continually comforted and assisted while at the same time attempting
to destroy each other, for they were the most deadly of enemies. Each
was shouting “excelsior” and endeavoring to rear its head above those
of its fellows in the race for the skies. “Aspire or die,” became the
watchword of the group. Gradually the most fit of the Sequoian youths
over-topped their slower rivals, eventually shutting off their share of
sunlight and ultimately snuffing out their lives. For generations this
struggle toward the sun went on, as terrible as it was silent, each
survivor eliminating its rivals. And all the while the sun, the one
object of this eternal striving, neither knew or apparently cared.
As the number of the defeated increased and the veterans became fewer
and fewer, the struggle became less intense. At last, but two of all
the host that started the fray of perpetuity versus extinction were
left. These remained to preach the aristocracy of the forest—that
it is of the best and for the best. The weak and unfit had been
vanquished. Only the straight-trunked and the strong lived to enjoy the
commonwealth of the sky. They were the chosen few. Now, unable to lift
their proud heads higher into the clouds, because Nature cannot pump
water to such dizzy heights, these two giants attempted to crowd one
another off the earth. Not satisfied that they had found a place in the
sun, they had to bear each other’s ill will. The struggle continued,
but each was as powerful as the other. At length, having wasted their
energy in useless conflict, they came to terms. Embracing, they finally
united in confiding communion the better to brave whatever blessing or
blast fate might bring them in their declining years. Have they learned
the worth of peace too late?
Near the Cabin stand four wonderfully perfect Sequoias. So military in
precision are they, so formal and rigid in their poise, and so perfect
in alignment, that they seem to be standing ever at attention. Hence,
they have been designated as the Old Guard. Others, however, prefer
to call them by the more poetical name of “Sun Worshippers,” for, as
the sun traces its long descent of midsummer afternoon, it throws a
golden shower of sunshine upon them, and they in turn appear to revel
in all this glory. Their great limbs, the size of ordinary trees, seem
uplifted in prayerful attitude, while nearby companies of pine and
fir appear to gather about these four high priests of the sun like
worshippers in humble veneration. At sunset, during the silent battle
between light and darkness, this effect is singularly impressive. Their
fine round trunks seem to glow, not unlike red-hot steel drawn from
intolerable flame, and their cool green domes are splashed with floods
of vermillion, gold, and purple, as the fading light plays its changing
wizardry upon their delicate foliage. Only at such a time does the
Sequoia lose its crushing dignity and its overwhelming complacency to
become a thing of beauty. Then, as the shadows steal forth and enfold
the solemn forest, and the red trunks burn lower and lower until,
finally, like lamps they go out, a mighty calm settles upon their
silent crests where departing day lingers in a last caress.
No review of the Mariposa giants would be complete without due mention
of the Fallen Hero Tree, which was dedicated by the American Legion of
California in the summer of 1921, to the Unknown Dead of the World War.
Surely, no dedication could be more fitting, for nothing living is more
monumental than the Giant Sequoia. Besides is it not better to preserve
monuments than to build them? “Almost no structure,” declares Dudley,
“erected by human hands has come down to us intact through the lifetime
of a Sequoia; and few that we can admire which are hewn from inanimate
marble or granite can be compared to a living organism vast in life
and complete in the records of every year of its existence. An empire
or republic may be compared with the life of this great tree, but what
empire or republic has lived twenty-five centuries? None worthy of the
name. Then, in the building of the Sequoia, no blood has been shed
through all its twenty-five hundred years of life, no injustice or
oppression have secured the means necessary for its construction, no
hatred or strife has been engendered, no accident occasioning pain or
suffering—no extinction of human life has left a stain on the history
of its growth.”
Again, from the standpoint of art and permanence, no dedication could
be more appropriate. Few living things merit a higher place in art
than the great Sequoia. It appeals to the highest intellectual and
spiritual qualities of man. Of all trees it is the most dignified and
majestic. After a shower its crown is oftentimes vested with a nameless
light—a glory not of this earth—never seen on granite crag or marble
temple. Then again no living thing is more enduring than the Sequoia.
Tombstones that mark the graves of the known heroes will have become
cornerless and the names they bear will have been obliterated by the
elements; those who knew and loved the names will have run their brief
course and be laid at rest, as will their children and many generations
after them, before the Fallen Hero Tree ceases to transmit to the
coming ages the memory of the Unknown Dead who fought, suffered, and
died in the Great War.
Assuredly, the Mariposa Grove has other values than that of a mere
“show place.” Aside from the size and age of its far-famed trees, the
Grove has power to inspire and its lesson to teach. Its trees have
stood steadfast for centuries indifferent to time and tide, the better
to admonish mortal man lest he forget his littleness. To contemplate
them in cold calm without feelings of reverence is impossible. No
artist has yet been able to adequately depict their God-like composure
and their haunting grandeur. Indeed, they are as gloriously beyond the
brush as they are above words. That stirring apostrophe of Byron to the
ocean is the nearest approach in all literature to their greatness.
Most mysterious of all natural wonders, they have looked on events that
distinguish centuries. Over them has been drawn the mantle of the past
and within them are locked many of the secrets of history.
To stand in the presence of such ancient things is to be able to sense
something of the riddle propounded by the inscrutable Sphinx. And
yet more wonderful is such an impression by moonlight. On every hand
tower the stern columns of the Sequoias, their shaggy crowns gemmed
with stars. About them are grouped other tree hosts, rising in files
and striving in vain to emulate the ample girth and majestic height
of the giants. These lesser trees are pines with a perfection almost
faultless, cedars as beautiful as those of Lebanon; and firs with a
grace not unlike that of hills sculptured by rain drops. Among these
are yet others—trees crooked and short and stumped; trees tall and slim
and slender. Through the rents in the roof of this aged forest the
moon looks in, sending long arrows of light to investigate some pitchy
obscurity, splashing the forest floor here and there with blotches
of silvery light and banding the open spaces with monstrous slanting
shadows of Sequoian columns. Formless masses of impenetrable darkness
loom everywhere. All the rest is a region of half-light in which
everything is seen and nothing recognized. All is wrapped in a cloak of
unreality, lending a weird, almost theatrical effect. Shadows move with
a ghostly sound throughout the cavernous chambers. The perpetual peace
of night is upon the forest.
Then it is that the Sequoia is almost holy in its tremendous power
to inspire reverence. Only in the solitudes of the sea where there
is no trace of land or sail to break the fearful circle set upon the
surface of the great deep is such an impression of the mystic charm of
space received. Here the immensity of sea and sky is comparable to the
over-shadowing majesty of the Sequoia. The soul is overwhelmed with
solemnity. The immeasurable calm and solitude of it all overflows like
a tide. One seems on the threshold of oblivion. Life’s endless toil and
endeavor are at an end, for one has caught a glimpse of the immortal.
+Chapter V+
OLDEST OF LIVING THINGS
When that intrepid botanist-explorer, David Douglas, who in his lonely
wanderings along the Pacific endured numberless hardships that he might
make the flowers and trees of the coast known to science, first saw
the Redwoods while traveling through the Santa Cruz forest in 1830,
they invoked in him feelings of the most profound awe. He hesitated to
describe them lest he fall into discredit among his friends in England.
“New and strange things seldom fail to make strong impressions,” he
wrote in his Journal, “and are therefore frequently over-rated. This
tree gives the mountains a most peculiar, I was going to say, awful
appearance—something which plainly tells me that we are not in Europe.”
Little did this awestruck wanderer know that yet larger trees stood in
these princely forests of the Western world. In fact, almost a quarter
century elapsed before the presence of the Giant Sequoia was made
known. John Bidwell has sometimes been accredited their discovery in
1841. But the more acceptable and authoritative record of discovery
is that of A. T. Dowd who, while hunting, came quite by accident upon
the Calaveras Grove eleven years later. Even then Dowd’s story was
accepted with much doubt and it was necessary to resort to a ruse in
order to induce even a few skeptical workmen to confirm the discovery.
Still the truth of David Douglas’ moralizing on the over-rating of
strong impressions asserted itself, and traveler after traveler had his
reputation for truthfulness sorely tried until almost a “convention
of naturalists” had seen the mammoth tree and given their unanimous
testimony as to its size. Then the great Sequoia became an almost
meteoric celebrity, for few plants have attracted as much attention in
so short a period of time. Since then the Sequoia has been lauded in
every land as the largest and most nobly proportioned of trees. It has
found its way sometimes in a most engaging manner into literature. For
instance, in Victor Hugo’s _Toilers of the Sea_, an old seaman who had
gathered from his voyages many wonderful stories, tells a child of a
hollow tree in California “so vast that a man on horseback could ride
one hundred paces inside.”
Yet the prodigious size of the Sierra Sequoia is hardly as wonderful as
its remarkable age. That it should become known as the oldest living
thing that human eyes can look upon is truly marvelous.
The elements to which the Sequoia is indebted for its great age are as
enigmatic as they are controversial. Foremost of these is the tree’s
intense desire to live. It seems never weary with the weight of years,
and is blessed with a tenacity, a faith in life granted to no other
living thing. From the finely interlaced network of its shallow root
system to the utmost tip of every tiny needle, it displays a fervent
love of life.[4] Indeed, there is a joy in noting the eager attitude
of the foliage as it stretches out toward the light to gather the
sunshine. Every unnecessary and useless branch is promptly discarded
and the entire energy of the tree is devoted toward putting forth new
foliage the better to capture the sunbeams.
The altitude in which the Sequoia grows produces the loveliest verdure
of the Sierras. All seems submersed in an ocean of sunlight. It is a
region lifted above the thirsty foothills and yet far enough below the
vacant solitudes of perpetual ice and naked rock to be free from the
searing heat and dust of the former and the tragedy and wreck of the
latter. John Muir so delighted in the “glorious floods of light” that
pervaded this region that he referred to the Sierra, not as the snowy
range, but the “Range of Light.”
This abundance of sunshine, then, helps to explain the splendid
conifers that the middle heights of the Sierra produce. The amount of
solar heat sensibly affects the growth of trees. It is in the presence
of sunlight that the green coloring matter in leaves is able to digest
plant food. Yet this is not the all-important factor. Moisture plays
a most potent role, also. The distribution of the lingering patches
of the Sequoia reveals the powerful influence of moisture over the Big
Tree. In the northern limits of its range, the Sequoia exists at a
lower altitude (4,500 feet) where moisture is plentiful, while in the
southern portion of the belt it climbs nearer the summit peaks (7,000
feet) where the drying heat of the San Joaquin plains is modified by
elevation. The inexorable force exerted by moisture over the Sequoia is
even better demonstrated by individual trees. All the better specimens
are found growing in well watered places. Springs often bubble forth
from the wide-spread masses of sponge-like Sequoian roots, indicative
of the constant underground irrigation system that supplies the tree
with mineral nutriment. The stunted are nearly always found growing in
the dryer spots, looking very rusty but resolute; the thrifty tower
about boggy meadows or along the drainage of water courses whose waters
roar in their channels in flood time and trickle from pool to pool with
faint murmur in Autumn after the azalea has bloomed and the mountain
lilac has lost its badge of Spring.
Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive a tree that has established
a more adequate and harmonious relationship in concordance with both
climate and soil. Under the most constant stimulus of the elements
so vital to the growth of trees in general, the Sequoia is sustained
by soil, deep and rich, by sunshine, and by moisture, as well as by
the other elements which it, in common with other associated trees,
derives from the air. Nevertheless, the sugar pine often enjoys such
idyllic conditions, as do the silver fir and the incense cedar. Yet the
Big Tree exceeds them all in size. Since it so outranks its fellows
in girth and longevity, the Sequoia must, therefore, possess certain
superior innate qualities that are found wanting in other trees.
Theoretically, there is no limit to the girth of trees. There _is_
a limit, however, to the height of a column which Nature, working
silently through centuries, builds. One theory holds that this limit
is governed by the distribution of sap. When the tree attains a
height beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, upward growth
practically ceases and all appreciable growth is in girth. Since there
are no limits to dilation, the tree is capable of indefinite expansion.
Normally, however, counteracting causes which at first retard, then
arrest, are continually at work, finally checking the progress
of growth. The tree most completely free from such counteracting
influences logically attains the greatest size and age.
This, then, is the keynote of the Sequoia’s great age. There is a limit
to its height, but none, apparently, to its rotundity. So long as
the growth of the Big Tree is unimpaired, it continues with patient,
steady, indefatigable energy to add ring after ring to its stem year
after year, century after century. In time the old channels become
clogged with insoluble matter taken up by the roots and the annual
layers become successively consolidated until the united cells attain
such strength that the vast wooden pillar defies the onslaught of the
elements. It stands a monument of power, emblematic of the limitless
desire to live.
“Trees,” states Asa Gray in his famous essay on the _Longevity of
Trees_, “far outlast all living things. They never die of old age,
but only from injury or disease, or, in a word, from accidents. If
not destroyed by accident, that is, by extrinsic causes—they do not
eventually perish, like ourselves, from old age. It is commonly
thought that they are fully exposed to the inevitable fate of all
living things, but this springs from a false analogy which we have
unconsciously established between plants and animals. This popular
analogy might, perhaps, hold good if the tree were actually formed like
the animal, all parts of which are created at once in their rudimentary
state, and soon attain their fullest development so that the functions
are carried on throughout life in the same set of organs. If this were
the case of the tree it would likewise die sooner or later of old age.
“But the tree is an aggregate of many individuals united in a common
trunk and why should not the aggregate, the tree, last indefinitely? To
establish the proper analogy, we must not compare the tree with man,
but with the coral formations in which numerous individuals, engrafted
and blended on a common base, conspire to build up immense coral groves
which have endured for ages; the inner and older parts consisting of
the untenanted cells of individuals that have long since perished,
while fresh structures are continually produced on the surface. The
individuals, indeed, perish; but the aggregate may endure as long as
time itself. So with the tree.
“Only the leaf may be said to die of old age. It lives but a single
season and is the proper emblem of mortality. But the leaves are
necessarily renewed every year, so are the other essential organs of
the plant. It annually renews not only its buds and leaves, but its
wood and its roots; everything, indeed, that is concerned with its life
and growth.
“Though the wood in the center and large branches—the produce of buds
and leaves that had long ago disappeared—may die and decay; yet, while
new individuals are formed on the surface with each successive crop of
fresh buds, and placed in as favorable communication with the soil and
the air as their predecessors, the aggregate, the tree, would appear to
have no necessary, no inherent limit to its existence.”
Of the many chapters of evidence gathered by this American botanist on
the remarkable age of certain trees, none made mention of trees older
than the Sequoia. The ancient oak which cost the poets much mental toil
in their panegyrics to its strength and endurance falls far short of
the Sequoia in age; nor do the lordly Cedars of Lebanon, “from which
the sacred writers derived so many noble images,” nor the venerable
yews, “whose branches were used by our pagan ancestors to deck the
graves of the dead as the emblem of immortality,” exceed it in years.
The Mexican cypress may have witnessed the rise and fall of the Aztec
Empire, but they are not coeval with the Christian era that has seen
the decay and death of a score of empires. Sengal Baobabs and Teneriffe
Dragon Trees may be reputed to be the “most ancient living monuments in
the world,” but they do not antedate Solomon’s time.
Since no tree, apparently, surpasses the Sequoia in longevity it
must enjoy an immunity from the causes that take off other trees.
Ordinarily, weakness in trees results from a diminution of resistance
and rejuvenating power, or a loss of vitality. The protecting bark is
often lacerated and stripped away through accident, creating wounds
through which insects gain easy entrance to carry on their insidious
work. Fire often exposes the tender tissues in which the spores of
fungi find lodgment and breed disease. Instances of the death of trees
through these causes are legion throughout the forests of the Sierra.
The magnificent silver firs seldom live to see their three hundredth
birth year, and though externally of sound and fair appearance, when
cut they are not infrequently found to be a mass of watery, decayed
wood inside. Through a loss of vitality the noble sugar pines likewise
are often devoured by larvae soon after reaching maturity.
[Illustration: FALLEN MONARCH
This tree shows no evidence of decay after decades of mountain
weather
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
Yet strangely enough, the Sequoia appears untouched by the forces of
decay. This tale of a struggle into being, of a life lived, of decay
and death, is written on all of Nature’s works. The way of life and
its destined end is toward oblivion. But causes that conspire to bring
about the end of trees in general appear unable to quench the vitality
within a Sequoia. It rarely ever shows the slightest evidence of
weakness, and appears never to be defiled by the ravages of disease.
Injuries only of the greatest magnitude are a source of irrecoverable
loss. Indeed, Sequoias that have great holes burned in them are
magnificent in their refusal to accept defeat. They summon their
splendid resources, clutch the soil with a broader and deeper hold in
their determination to enjoy life to the very last. So long as there is
a sound root left, it is the way of a Sequoia to cling to life. No one
who has an appreciation of the wonders of Nature can behold this grim,
steadfast, dogged resolution that prevails against all odds without
feeling the beauty of such an unconquerable spirit.
The wood of the Sequoia seems to be provided with every refinement of
durability. Natural decomposition is slow and its wood wastes away
insensibly like granite. So resistant is it to weather, to the rigorous
and incessant forces of obliteration, that it is hardly an exaggeration
to affirm “that a log cabin built of Giant Sequoia logs on granite will
last as long as its foundation.” The resinous matters that pervade
wood are considered a preservative against decay. Hardwood has always
been indicative of durability, whereas the wood of the Sequoia is soft
and brittle. But for all its softness and lack of resin, though hoary
and mossy with age, and deformed by centuries of violent storms, the
Sequoia is nearly always sound _from the sapwood to the center_, and
this is more than can be said of nearly all the “remarkable and curious
cases” of trees that have enjoyed a great longevity as cited by Asa
Gray.
Most impressive of the excellent qualities of the Sequoia, however, is
its amazing vitality. In the ability to recover from accident it is
probably excelled by no other tree. The shadows of twenty centuries
may sleep beneath its boughs, yet its growing power is as active as
ever, the tree ever rallying in apparent youthful vigor to replace
its broken, tempest-tossed crown. It defies even the wrath of heaven.
Though lightning may shatter a pine to splinters, it can but knock off
fifty feet, more or less, of a Sequoia’s crown. Never has it been
known to have destroyed a Sequoia outright. “Thousands of years the
Sequoia stands offering its head to every passing cloud as if praying
for heaven’s fire as a blessing,” observed John Muir. “Then when the
old head is off, every bud and branch becomes excited like a colony of
bees that have lost their queen, and tries hard to repair the damage.
Branches that for centuries have grown out horizontally at once begin
to turn upward and all the branchlets arrange themselves with reference
to a new top of the same ineffably fine contour as the old one. And
curious enough, all very old Sequoias have lost their crowns in this
manner. Of all living things, they seem to be the only ones able to
wait long enough to be struck by lightning.”
The power of a Sequoia to heal an immense fire scar is another
noteworthy manifestation of its vitality. Its resistance to fire is
almost incredible. Its massive, unresinous bark offers an almost
asbestos-like exterior to the eternal antagonist of the forest. Its
wood, too, is so non-resinous in character that it burns with marked
sluggishness, and it is only after repeated attacks by fire that the
wood will be consumed.
Even when fire has made serious inroads the Sequoia refuses to be
discouraged. It musters all its energy and attempts to heal the
burned area by extending the living tissue over the blackened wound
and reuniting the broken circle of its cambium layer. This healing
occurs in a rhythmical and pulsating manner accompanying the seasons,
beginning along the margins of the burned area. Each year the layer
of new wood-tissue encroaches slowly and patiently upon the injured
area, diminishing the charring until the two opposite folds touch one
another. In a few years the bark is pinched out and once more the
annual layers become continuous around the tree. The wound is healed,
and as the centuries pass it recedes deeper and deeper within the heart
of the tree, unchanged and never a source of decay.
The late Dr. Dudley examined the stump of a lumbered Sequoia in the
Converse Basin which registered the effects of great forest fires. He
found the tree to be 2,171 years old when cut down. At the age of 516
years the tree suffered its first burn, acquiring a scar three feet in
width. One hundred and five years were required to heal the injury.
A second burn occurred when the tree was 1,712 years old, making two
wounds, one twelve inches in width, the other two feet. One hundred and
thirty-nine years passed before these scars were covered. Then, when
the tree came to be 2,068 years old, a tremendous conflagration burned
a great scar eighteen feet wide and thirty feet high. This was still
unhealed when the tree was cut down. Professor Dudley estimated that at
the rate of the above healing it would require at least _four centuries
and a half_ to repair the result of the injury done by this last forest
fire.
No other tree could have lived under similar circumstances without
becoming diseased or decayed. This greatest among trees stands alone
in its superb resistance to insect and fungi attack, and this, coupled
with a marvelous recuperative power, enables it to withstand injuries
of such considerable magnitude, and to endure long enough to recover
from them. Its vitality, as deep as it is tenacious, and its very love
for living, vest it with this sublime power. Symbol of an unconquered
will, the Sequoia has caught more of the immortal than any other
living thing. The Gordian Knot of its existence would never be cut
were it possible to protect it for all time from fire and the axe.
Had it remained untouched by flames of the past, the vastly shrunken
present-day habitat of this great tree might possibly contain the
ragged rear guards of the departed giants of the Miocene, and a single
Sequoia would be old enough to establish a paleontological era.
+Chapter VI+
THE ETERNAL TREE
The Grizzly Giant is among the first born of the living things of the
earth. It bears greater evidence of extreme age than any other living
Sequoia of the Mariposa Grove and may be of a former generation. The
companions of its youth are dead and buried in their graves of leaf
mold and it seems to have been nearing its prime when the other lofty
monarchs of today were unknown. Grand and unconquerable, mightiest of
the mighty lords of the forest, it stands like an agonized Sampson
of the woods, blind and lost, with a hundred great arms groping and
reaching out. Like all Nature’s works of power, it seeks to express
more than it can convey. Homeric in its gravity, marble in its
impassiveness, and majestic in its tranquility, it is unapproachable
among things that live. Aspiring toward the clouds and on speaking
terms only with the heavens, its equanimity seems unruffled by storm
or tempest; its sweet serenity unsullied by anger, hatred or other
passions unworthy of an immortal nature. For a thousand years the
earliest rays of dawn have gilded it. For ten centuries departing day
has lingered and played on its summit. Surely the mellow notes of the
hermit thrush issuing forth from such loftiness sound more angelic
there than elsewhere.
Joseph Le Conte left posterity an indelible picture of this tree. “Of
all the trees of the Grove, and, therefore, of all trees I have ever
seen, the Grizzly Giant impressed me the most profoundly; not, indeed,
by its tallness or its symmetry, but by the hugeness of its cylindrical
trunk, and by a certain gnarled grandeur, a fibrous, sinewy strength
which defies time itself. The others with their smooth, straight,
tapering shafts towering to a height of over two hundred feet seemed
to me the type of youthful vigor and beauty in the plentitude of power
and success. But _this_, with its large, rough, battered trunk nearly
thirty feet in diameter—with top broken off at a height of two hundred
and four feet, with its great limbs six to eight feet in diameter,
twisted and broken—seemed to me the type of a great life, declining but
still strong and self-reliant. Perhaps my own top with its departing
foliage made me sympathize with this grizzled giant; but I found
the others, too, standing with hats in hand and gazing in silent,
bare-headed reverence upon this grand old tree.”
The size of the Grizzly Giant is sufficient to stimulate the mind to
silent musings. Often this leads to “cord wood contemplations,” for
the mind, in attempting to realize the prodigious amount of timber
such a stem might contain, is naturally apt to associate unknown
quantities with known. Ordinarily, a statement on the size of this
tree, if unsupported by other known comparison, is of little import.
That it requires a short journey to walk around it; that twenty
people can hardly encompass its girth touching hands; that fourteen
horses, head to tail, can just encircle its base, serve to visualize
the measurement. If it were pierced by a lofty arch, two street cars,
side by side, could pass through it; or, if it were hollowed out into
a round room with a row of seats cut out of the solid heart wood, a
round table could be set in the center and fourteen guests could be
seated about it with uncrowded ease. If it were cut into lumber, two
hundred cords of firewood and over half a million board feet[5] could
be obtained from its trunk, while its shattered crown would still lie
untouched on the forest floor, a beautiful rosy red and emerald ruin
awaiting the coming of some all-devouring forest fire.
The Grizzly Giant has long been the subject of much unpardonable
exaggeration by popular rhapsodists. There is little doubt but that
this tree, presumably the most ancient thing endowed with life on the
planet, may fairly claim an almost fabulous antiquity. It has escaped
the usual accidents to which the Sequoia is heir, and, as a result, has
attained a longevity that far exceeds the ordinary life-span of the
species. Since this is known, the age of the Grizzly Giant can be
stated approximately. Its exact age, however, can never be ascertained
until the annual rings of its trunk are counted, and this cannot be
accomplished without felling the tree.
[Illustration: GRIZZLY GIANT, THE ETERNAL TREE
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
Nor is it possible to determine the age of a Sequoia merely from its
diametric measurement. Up to the present century there prevailed
a common belief that this could be done and that great size was
indicative of great age. If a tree measured ten feet in diameter, the
supposition was that another of the same species twice as large would,
accordingly, be twice as old. However, Dudley, who spent many summers
in the logged areas of the Converse Basin, found this to be untrue
of the Sequoia. One tree thirty-nine feet in circumference proved to
be 2,171 years old; while another twice its circumference, or nearly
eighty feet, was 1,510 years old.
From a close study of various age classifications, it was believed
that the annual growth could be calculated. But even this method has
been found unreliable. After a careful study of various ages, Jepson
determined upon an average basis of twenty years of growth to every
inch. The unfortunate tree in the Calaveras Grove which was ruthlessly
cut down that its stump might serve as a dance floor had a diameter
of twenty-seven feet, exclusive of bark. Thus, its computed age would
have been 6,480 years; whereas, its true age was but 1,300 years.
Notwithstanding the impossibility of determining the age of a Sequoia
from its diametric measurement, the ages of a representative number of
felled Sequoias are definitely known. From these it has been possible
to ascertain that the average age of the tree is between 900 and 2,100
years. The oldest Sequoia found by Dudley showed 2,425 annual rings,
while the most ancient tree logged thus far in the Converse Basin
had an age of 3,148 years. John Muir counted over 4,000 rings on a
“majestic, old, fire-scarred monument” in the Kings River forest.
These are the oldest trees of which science has definite record.
Consequently, it would not be rash to estimate the age of the Grizzly
Giant at 3,000 years. Figures, however, of 8,000 years and more are
assuredly absurd and fabulous; and yet, they are given by several
authors of credit, and by a distinguished authority on fishes in
particular.
A pile of stones that has looked upon great events possesses an
indefinable something that stirs the mind profoundly, lifting it
to a higher level of feeling. Byron touched the keynote of this
sentiment when he spoke of the “mountains that looked upon Marathon.”
Feeling the need of some witness of that event, his imagination
vested those blind mountains with sight. Likewise, in beholding the
gathered companies of crag and spire from the summit of Mt. Whitney,
Clarence King was overwhelmed with a sense of the power and tragedy
of geological struggle. Feeling that this splendid mass of granite
was contemporaneous with great events, he endowed it with a quality of
consciousness. Yet how infinitely more sublime is this feeling when the
object is a living thing. What changes have occurred on the earth since
the tiny seed of the Grizzly Giant sent down its first threadlike roots
to the mineral soil! Thirty centuries are spanned by its life. Even
at thought of this the mind teems with images and memories of events
that have transpired during the life and growth of this single tree,
it endows the blind yet living column with sight, places it upon some
lofty height, and imagines that far below it sees “the far-winding path
of human progress, from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into
the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time.”
The great white race which dominates the world today had made its
entrance on the stage of history when the Grizzly Giant began its
existence. And within the lifetime of this tree, this race, known as
Indo-European, has made vast and noble contributions to the culture of
man. Indeed, most of the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice
and tradition in every decade since have been the triumphs of these
gifts of the Indo-European peoples.
Drifting southward tribe by tribe from their grassland homes between
the Danube and the Black Sea, these ancestors of the present people of
Europe, came into conflict with the first civilizations four or five
thousand years ago.
Among the first to be victorious were the Persians. These barbarians
fell upon the effeminate city-dwellers of the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers, reduced the conquered to slaves and set themselves up as the
aristocrats of the land. But civilization conquered them and they
became refined, lost their original hardihood, and were, in their turn,
conquered by other barbarians who, too, became civilized. These were
the Greeks under Alexander the Great. They infused new blood into the
stagnant pools of culture they found in the Orient, and the product
was Hellenism. But Greece, too, fell into a decline and came under the
dominion of Rome, whose stability, organization, and power advanced
culture again. At length Rome grew weak like the others, and became
unable to defend herself against other roving hordes of Indo-Europeans.
Fortunately, however, she preserved this precious thing known as
civilization long enough for the barbarians to respect it and enabled
the Christian Church to shelter it during the Dark Ages. Such is the
drama of the growth of civilization which occurred on the earth during
the time when the Grizzly Giant was making its patient climb toward the
sun.
The greatest empire of the Bronze Age, Egypt, had fallen; Babylon
showed evidence of decay; Palestine was at the zenith of her career;
and Homeric Greece was laying the foundation for classic Greece, when
this oldest of trees was sprouting from its tiny seed, unpacking its
tender leaves, and taking its first feeble hold on life. The Trojan War
(1194–1184 B. C.) was a very recent event, for prosperous and wealthy
Troy had been destroyed by a few Greeks who resented her commercial
rivalry. Homer was not yet born, hence the epic of the burning of Troy
and the rescue of a beautiful woman had yet to be written by this poet
of supreme genius. The Hebrew nation had not reached its golden age
under Solomon, but David had vanquished the Philistines, united his
people, driven the Canaanites out of Jerusalem and made himself King
of an extensive empire. This, then, was the status of the civilized
world around 1100 B. C. The code of Hammurabi was already more than a
thousand years old; the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was almost as old as the
Christian religion is today; the Great Wall of China had nearly nine
hundred years to wait before its first stone would be laid (214 B. C.);
while Rome, the Eternal City, lacked over three hundred and fifty years
of its traditional founding (753 B. C.)
While the Grizzly Giant was a sapling, a Sequoia of awkward and
ungainly mien, bushy, bent, and crooked by the weight of winter snows,
the Assyrians were gaining a great ascendency in the East. They had
developed war to a high point of perfection by equipping an army
for the first time with iron weapons and chariots drawn by horses.
“Whenever they swept through a land they left a trail of ruin and
desolation behind. Around smoking heaps which had once been towns,
stretched lines of stakes on which were hung the bodies of rebellious
rulers flayed alive; while all around rose mounds and piles of the
slaughtered heaped to celebrate the great King’s triumph. Through the
clouds of dust rising along the main roads of the Empire men of the
subject kingdoms beheld great herds of cattle, horses, asses, flocks of
sheep and goats, and long lines of camels laden with gold and silver,
the wealth of the conquered, converging on the palace of Nineveh.
Before them marched the chiefs of the plundered kingdoms carrying the
severed heads of their former rulers about their necks.” And mothers
prayed then as now that there would be no more War.
While the Grizzly Giant was yet a youth, the Persians gained the
lordship of the East and lost it later to Alexander the Great. Greece,
under Pericles, raised human culture to the highest pinnacle yet
attained; Herodotus founded history; Buddha saw his vision of the
serenity of the soul; Confucius left to posterity his code of personal
conduct. During this fruitful period of man’s advancement, the Grizzly
Giant had become conscious of its destiny and had begun to aspire
heavenward and attain its place in the sun. Having a form of conical
perfection, it was very aristocratic in its trimness. Densely clothed
with-short whip-like branches from base to tip, it gradually arose
in fringed growths which narrowed pyramid-like toward the sky with
charming grace. Other trees show their trunks and knotted boughs, but
this tree was compact like a Sequoian cone, and permitted no branch to
be seen. Its foliage was of the most exquisite fineness, resembling a
series of morning-glory blossoms strung on a string, and forming the
softest of forest scenery. The tree had a suppleness which, compared
with its present-day rigidity of old age, was as sensitive as the
leaves of the quaking aspen.
When it reached the glory of prime and attained the lusty strength of
maturity, it had lost its youthful characteristics and assumed the
nobility of the Sequoia. Having shed the purplish, leaden-gray, flaky
bark of early years, it had taken on the deep red, fibrous bark that
distinguishes its royal nature. Having also discarded all of its lower
branches, it disclosed a straight, regularly tapering trunk fluted with
long parallel furrows. This great shaft, both inspiring in its height
and uplifting in its stateliness, supported a magnificent dome-shaped
crown. In this sumptuous top a multitude of tiny cones ripened
annually and sent forth myriads of golden-winged seeds on the Autumn
breezes. Soaring now above all the lesser trees of the forest, it lost
its desire to go yet higher. Serene and grand, this king of trees
presented that “perfect combination of beauty, strength, and grandeur
which marks it the noblest of God’s trees.”
At this time Imperial Rome, sitting on her seven hills, was the center
of the world’s culture, its progress and power. Rome had enjoyed two
centuries of peace—the longest period of order and prosperity mankind
has ever known—and had reached her greatest territorial extent under
Hadrian (138 A. D.) Julius Caesar had destroyed the Republic; Augustus
had founded the Empire; the Star of Bethlehem had proclaimed the
Birth of the Saviour; Palestine had become a holy land; the world had
received the Christian conception of the dignity of labor and the
brotherhood of man, and Calvary had witnessed the spectacle of the
Crucifixion. Already Nero had inaugurated Christian persecutions by
illuminating his gilded palace with human torches, and the Cross had
begun in earnest its conquest of the world.
When Alaric knocked at the Gates of Rome, the Grizzly Giant had arrived
at full maturity. Its base had become greatly enlarged, the better
to bear up its great weight; while its crown had grown more open,
displaying enormously large, gnarled, and knotty branches, each bearing
a dense mass of blue-green foliage that melted impalpably away into the
sky like vagrant shreds of clouds.
And from the Fall of Rome to the present day, the Grizzly Giant has
passed through maturity and on into life’s late afternoon shadows.
It first saw the light of day when European civilization was in its
dawn and has continued apace with its progress, the epitome of the
advancement of the Indo-European peoples. Empires have risen, reached
the zenith of their power, and passed on to decay and oblivion within
its life time. Nations have succeeded Empires, and these, too, have
been followed in their turn by other world powers, like meteors in the
sky of history, and this aged monarch has reigned on. Like some ancient
thing of the dead ages, it seems to have been forgotten by death so
that it might live on until the sun is a burnt-out cinder in the sky.
Impassive, resolute, and self-possessed, it stands unmoved and
unaffected by the world about it, unconcerned with its pompous shams,
its trite pride, its hollow vanity. Grizzled and picturesque with
age, it still clings to life with sublime tenacity. The lightnings of
countless clouds have failed to take its life; the snows of a thousand
winters have shattered and broken its royal crown; the storms of
over ten centuries have stripped it nearly bare of its bark and have
mercilessly washed the soil from its roots, while the insect foes and
fungi pests of three thousand years have left it as unharmed as fitful
winds leave the heavens. The oldest living thing, triumphant over
tempest and flame, verdant and fruitful, giving shelter to all seekers
thereof, and sending forth flocks of singing feathered creatures
annually from its great crown like its own flocks of winged seeds from
its cone, the Grizzly Giant stands—content.
+Chapter VII+
A BLOSSOM OF DECADENCE
Is the great Sequoia a tree that dreads tomorrow? This mournful
question was raised over a half century ago by prominent naturalists
of the period. Imbued with the idea that all living things have their
day in this world of evolving forms of life, they were unable to see a
future for a tree whose race has played so large a role in the past.
Acquainted with the northern groves where the Sequoias are nearly
all aged, they could see in them only pitiful, fast-dwindling stands
desperately huddled in patches where environment insured conditions
ideal for tree life. This they accepted as evidence that the Sequoia
stood at the brink of extinction; that it had outlived its day of
vigor and progress, and was but a race in its dotage. The surviving
remnants were hardly more than a faint echo of past glory, displaying
“the munificence of departing greatness” but expressing, as a race, a
blossoming of decadence.
Among the first to sound this note of alarm was Asa Gray. Addressing
a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in 1872, he stated: “The _Sequoia gigantea_ of the Sierra exists in
numbers so limited that the separate groves may be reckoned upon the
fingers, and the trees of most of them have been counted, except near
the southern limit, where they are said to be more copious. A species
limited in individuals holds its existence by a precarious tenure, and
this has a foothold only in a few sheltered spots of a happy mean in
temperature and locally favored with moisture in summer. Even then,
for some reason or other, the pines, the firs, and even the incense
cedars possess a great advantage and wholly overpower the Sequoia in
numbers. Seedlings of the big trees occur not rarely, but in a meagre
proportion to those of associated trees; and small, indeed, is the
chance that these seedlings will attain to ‘the days of the years of
their forefathers.’ The force of numbers eventually wins. Whatever the
individual longevity, certain if not speedy is the decline of a race in
which a high death rate afflicts the young.
“In the commonly visited groves _Sequoia gigantea_ is invested in its
last stronghold, can neither advance into more exposed positions above,
nor fall back into drier and barer ground below, nor hold its own in
the long run where it is under the present conditions; and a little
drying out of the climate of the region, which must have been much
moister than now, would precipitate its doom.”
Man, seemingly, has conspired with Nature in bringing the Sequoia under
the inexorable law of extinction. He lacks respect for this priceless
heritage of earlier ages, for already many of the most magnificent
stands of the Sequoia have been logged. If commercialism is allowed to
go its wayward way unchecked, posterity will soon be robbed of these
last remaining remnants of the forests of the Miocene. Even now man
is bringing the age of Mammals to a close. Soon there will be no wild
life left except in those spots that are given protection. Outside of
these areas, all life will be destroyed save those plants and animals
that have been reclaimed from the wild. Then man will stand alone and
unchallenged amid the wreck of creation.
Happily, this melancholy cry is not the expression of an actual fact,
at least, so far as the Sequoia is concerned. Enough Sequoian tracts
have been made safe from the axe to insure the future of the race and
to prevent ultimate destruction at the hands of man. Nor is the tree in
danger of natural extinction if the salvaged Sequoian tracts reproduce
in sufficient numbers to continue the struggle for existence. If this
can be proved to a reasonable certainty, then the Sequoia, as a race,
is not fated to be without descendants.
Unlike the Redwood of the coast, the great Sequoia of the Sierra does
not reproduce by root or stump sprouts, but from seed only. The seeds
are in cones exceedingly small for so colossal a tree, being hardly
larger than a small egg. These ovule bodies are composed of thirty
to forty closely packed, woody, persistent scales, each with four to
six seeds at its base. Two years are required for the cone to mature,
and by early Autumn of the second year their olive green, purplish
color has faded to a dull yellowish brown, the cone has shrunken and
the scales parted sufficiently to liberate its seeds to the wind. So
insignificant looking are these tiny seeds that few fail to marvel
that they should contain the actual germ which produces the largest
inhabitant of the world’s forests. But the size of a mustard seed, with
membranous disk-like wings, they are so light that they make a sound
almost imperceptible to the human ear in their glancing and wavering
fall to the forest floor.
Not less impressive is the abundance of these seeds. Over three hundred
are contained within each cone. John Muir counted on two ordinary
specimen branches over four hundred and eighty cones containing at
least one hundred and forty thousand seeds. This led him to state that
“millions of seeds are ripened annually by a single tree, and in a
fruitful year the product of one of the northern groves would contain
enough to plant all the mountain ranges of the world.” Surely, the cone
of the Sequoia presses closely upon the classic pomegranate in the
number of its seeds and may well be considered the symbol of abundance.
During the droning days of Autumn when the air is freighted with a
calm, serious stillness, and a thousand wild creatures are occupied
with tasks that fulfill an instinctive provision for a coming want,
the squirrels are busy gathering the Sequoia cones, small as they are.
Throughout these quiet days the sound of their dropping may be heard
and grey-furred bodies may be seen coming down the great red trunks
with nervous, jerky vehemence—trunks whose bark has known the tiny
feet of others of their voluble kin decades ago. Securing the cones
they have cut down with their “ivory sickles,” these diligent little
harvesters store them away for winter use. Often forgotten, these
cones, buried at the proper depth for germination, become the means of
further perpetuating the race of the giants.
Other creatures, too, are laying up provisions for the winter. Birds
are amazingly industrious. Some are gathering with much fuss into
flocks preparatory for southward flight, while others, with thoughts
of chill days to come, are busily searching out every cranny for a
morsel of food, mere atoms against the huge, lofty trunks. Blue-jays
are indulging in their usual pilfering, making more noise than all the
rest of the forest folk combined. Insects also seem unusually active.
Happy, gauzy-winged bits of concentrated gayety, they while away their
little hours in the mellowed sunshine. Giving no thought to the frosts
and short days to come, transitory and carefree, they offer the most
tragic contrasts, dancing and humming about the immortal Sequoia.
When winter comes and all is in keeping with the great sleep of the
forest, it is blossom time for the Sequoia. For everything else the
beauty of life’s expansion is ended. The pines have become funereal
in their aspect; the firs have lost their gayety. The underbrush,
bowed with the weight of snow, is stripped of its bright leaves. Sear
and brown, they lie heaped in hollows where the wailing Autumn winds
left them. The flowers, too, are in their graves. The robins are
gone. Even streams are silent and buried. But the Sequoia, living an
almost enchanted existence, is quite beyond reach of every influence
suggestive of winter’s repose. Though all life about it may cease, it
must blossom forth. Producing myriads of minute flowers at the ends of
branches formed the previous year, it fairly bursts into bloom, dusting
the snowy ground, like a gigantic goldenrod, with golden pollen.
Contrasting the prolific abundance of Sequoia seeds with the scarcity
of seedlings, it seems logical to conclude that the Sequoia is not
reproducing. It is true that seedlings are rare in the northern groves,
although seed production there is as great as elsewhere. This has been
construed as evidence that the seeds are infertile and bears out the
sad prophecy of Asa Gray that the Sequoia is a wan and weary survivor
of the Age of Reptiles and has that inferiority about it of all
things that go back into the past. Tainted with antiquity, it is
supposedly losing its power of reproduction.
[Illustration: ALABAMA TREE, A PERFECT SEQUOIA
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by A. C. Pillsbury]
The southern groves, however, throw quite a different light upon the
question. There reproduction is manifest on every hand. Companies of
seedlings are springing up everywhere determined to carry on the noble
line. They are found growing not alone in moist glens where the soil is
rich and deep, but also on rocky ledges and steep hillsides seemingly
bare of all nutriment, some even battling for life with their roots
wedged in crevices of granite beds. Exuberant and heavy with an output
of green foliage, these monarchs of the future promise anything but an
inability to maintain the forest in its most perfect vigor.
The fact that the Sequoias in the northern part of their range show
lack of reproduction is not due to a loss of viability of their seeds,
but to other causes. Wherever the thick layer of leaf mould is stripped
away exposing the mineral soil and the proper amount of sunlight is
sifted down, plantations of thrifty seedlings promise renewal of the
race. But where the overhead shade is unbroken and the litter on the
forest floor undisturbed, the seedling succumbs long before its tiny
roots can reach down through the decaying vegetable matter to the
soil beneath. In the southern groves where the ravages of the lumber
mill and fire have been extensive enough to open up the dense shade,
tearing the ground and baring it to the sunlight, the Sequoia has
displayed an admirable ability to seed over the desolated areas. But in
the northern groves where sunlight and soil conditions are unfavorable
to the development of seedlings, reproduction is practically at a
standstill.
In the Calaveras Grove Sudworth found a few seedlings “where storm
had made an opening in the forest and a ground fire had exposed a
little mineral soil. Apparently good use had been made of the first
opportunity for reproduction,” he goes on to state, “for young big
trees were vigorous in the full enjoyment of the sun.” The same may be
said to be true of the Mariposa Grove. Reproduction, as a whole, is
always evident when proper conditions obtain, for numberless seedlings
may be found growing on spots bared of the forest litter and open to
the sun. With continued protection these bid fair to replace the old
giants of the present.
It is also of interest to note that seedlings are the exception
throughout the Redwood belt. This is not due to sterility of the
seeds, but to the same causes which have conspired in Big Tree forests
to prevent reproduction. The dense shade and the heavy ground litter
present conditions most unfavorable to germination. Indeed, were it not
for the Redwood’s unique habit of sprouting shoots from stumps and old
roots, they, too, would be as completely splendid in their poverty of
young trees as the northern groves of the Giant Sequoia.
The causes, then, of the death of seedlings, especially in the northern
parts of the Sequoia’s range, are not, as was first commonly supposed,
due to the drying out of the climate, the loss in vitality of the race,
or the fact that the Sequoias are being vanquished by competitive and
more lusty species. Given favorable soil and light conditions the tree
“still possesses that strong inherent reproductive power that permits
survival of the fit.”
It is true that the Sequoia has not extended its range since
post-glacial time. If it has, the monuments of its extension have
remained no more enduring than those left by departed bees and
butterflies, for in the gaps between the Sequoia groves, not a
root-hole or a trench made by a falling giant has been discovered. The
fact that such records are well nigh imperishable, taken in conjunction
with their abundant presence in the groves themselves, led John Muir to
conclude that their absence outside is indicative of the non-extension
of the species beyond its present limits since the glacial period that
gave the Sierras their aspect of savage grandeur. Before this epoch,
however, it is believed that the Sequoia extended in an unbroken belt
along the Sierra and that the present-day gaps mark the paths of these
great ice rivers. In fact, wherever the glaciers once wore their bodies
into the canyons, the Sequoia is found wanting. And though the tree
has not re-united its broken clusters, it has held its own ground
against rival species. John Muir took this as evidence that the Sequoia
exhibited no decadence since the glacial period.
The unequivocal conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that the
Sequoia is in no danger of extinction. It has not lost the original
hardihood of its race. Nor is the present but the epilogue of the
imposing part it has played in the past—it is the augury of a yet more
splendid future awaiting a race whose ancestors reach back into the
borderland of the forgotten ages.
PART THREE
Naming _the_ Sequoia
+Chapter VIII+
A NAME FOR THE AGES
The infinite deal of trivial fussiness that has clustered about
the botanical name of the Giant Sequoia is, indeed, a grievous
misfortune. The tree must regard it all with consummate unconcern.
Alone with the past and having a dignity not of earth in its mien
it stands as indifferent to agitation that has to do with the petty
passions of humanity as the far-away patient stars. Suggestive of
no strife save that of emulation, it looks with complacent disdain
upon life’s vanities; its strange medley of littleness and greatness,
its commingling of folly and wisdom. Yet for all the great Sequoia’s
majestic aloofness, its name has become embroiled in endless bickerings
and surrounded with technicalities apt to nip any budding enthusiasm
for botanical nomenclature.
In order to avoid interminable confusion it is necessary that the
plants of the earth be systematically classified and that there be no
deviation from the rules governing their classification. Foremost of
the rules that have been laid down is that of priority. This dictates
that the first name given a new plant in point of time must prevail.
If contention or ambiguity arise, priority decides the case, and the
first botanical designation bestowed stands for all time, regardless
of whether it be appropriate or not. Designations of a subsequent date
are entitled to rank as synonyms only. Because of its rigor, this law
should admonish botanists to exercise good taste in giving scientific
names to hitherto unnamed plants. Another important rule is that
the name of the new plant must appear in an accredited publication,
otherwise it is technically regarded as unpublished and consequently
discarded.
Shortly after the discovery of the Calaveras Grove, the tale of its
wonderful Big Trees found its way into print. The Sonora _Herald_
appears to have been the first newspaper to give an account of the
Giant Sequoia. This was republished in the _Echo du Pacific_ of San
Francisco, appearing later in the London _Athenaeum_ of July 23, 1853.
Whitney believes the latter to be the first notice of the tree to
appear in Europe.
Naturally, these accounts excited botanists. Specimens of the Big Tree
were presented to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
early in 1853. Unfortunately, however, the Academy was unable to
properly describe the new plant, since it had no references on hand
which would enable its botanists to publish a proper scientific
description of the mammoth tree. Specimens were subsequently sent East
to Torrey and Gray, but again ill fortune attended them and they were
lost in crossing the Isthmus of Panama. Meanwhile, William Lobb, an
English seed collector, on seeing specimens of the recently discovered
vegetable wonder, believed he recognized a species new to science.
He secured a sufficient quantity of Sequoia cones, foliage, and wood
to characterize the tree and departed for England in the Autumn of
1853. These specimens found their way into the hands of Lindley, who
hastily described them in Gardner’s _Chronicle_ of December 24th, of
the same year. Thus Lindley, a botanist of no particular eminence, was
the first to give a scientific description of the Giant Sequoia, and
American botanists lost both the opportunity and honor of naming a very
remarkable plant.
Overlooking the close relationship of the Big Tree to the already
scientifically described Redwood, Lindley considered it “an entirely
new coniferous form ... an evergreen of a most imperial aspect,” which
he called _Wellingtonia_, adding the specific name of _Gigantea_. The
Duke of Wellington had been dead but a year and his greatness had
not yet gained the perspective of historical time; hence, Lindley’s
designation. “We think,” he wrote, “that no one will differ from us in
feeling that the most appropriate name to be proposed for the most
gigantic tree which has been revealed to us by modern discovery, is
that of the greatest of modern heroes. Wellington stands as high above
his contemporaries as the California tree above all the surrounding
foresters. Let it, then, bear henceforth the name of _Wellingtonia
Gigantea_.”
In bestowing on an essentially American tree the name of an essentially
English hero, Lindley showed execrable taste. He might have foreseen
that such an act was almost certain to fire those who felt a consuming
contempt for anything British. Promptly the fine rules of botanical
nomenclature were thrown overboard, and Americans, eager to make a
self-righteous display of their enmity, proceeded on no principles, and
with terrible energy of language, to disturb the designation. Gradually
the agitation centered upon changing the name _Wellingtonia_ to one
bearing reference to Washington. Nor was any evidence brought forward
considered too trivial to substantiate the reasons for this change.
Perhaps the most withering rebuke of all was that of Winslow. In the
_California Farmer_ of August, 1854, appeared the following: ... “as
Washington and his generation declared themselves independent of all
English rule and political dictation, so American naturalists must, in
this case, express their respectful dissent from all British scientific
stamp acts. If the Big Tree be a _Taxodium_, let it be called now and
forever _Taxodium Washingtonium_.... No name can be more appropriate;
and if, in accordance with the views of American botanists, I trust
the scientific honor of our country may be vindicated from foreign
indelicacy by boldly discarding the name now applied to it, and by
affixing to it that of the immortal man whose memory we all love, and
honor, and teach our children to adore.”
Even Asa Gray felt entitled to rush into the field. In September of the
same year he published, on his own authority, an account stating that
the Redwood and the Big Tree did not differ sufficiently to warrant the
establishment of a new genus; adding “The so-called _Wellingtonia_ will
hereafter bear the name imposed by Dr. Torrey, namely, that of _Sequoia
Gigantea_.” But since there is no documentary evidence to show that
Torrey had published this description, the quibble remained unsettled.
The English stood at their guns and the storm raged on. Surely, if so
venerable a Sequoia as the Grizzly Giant could have been endowed with
a consciousness and could have thought about this ostentatious parade
of pettiness, it would not have been inspired with that “high and
ennobling sense” of the intellectual destiny of the human race.
Happily, the issue was quieted for a time.[6] At a meeting of the
Société Botanique de France, held on June 28, 1854, the illustrious
French botanist, J. Decaisne, discussed at length the relationship
of the Redwood and the Big Tree. He pointed out that though they
differed in leaf structure, the former having yew-like leaves in two
ranks, the latter small, scaly, cypress-like leaves in regular spirals,
the two species belonged to the same genus _Sequoia_. Therefore, in
compliance with the rules of botany, he called the new species _Sequoia
Gigantea_. Other botanists quickly recognized the correctness of his
view, and _Wellingtonia Gigantea_ was permitted to fall upon evil days.
Nevertheless, it is due to this accident of the generic agreement
between the Redwood and the Big Tree that the Giants of the Sierra bear
the name of Sequoia instead of that of Wellington.
But this botanical storm had no sooner died down than another developed
in its place. Inasmuch as the derivation of the name Sequoia was
uncertain, this was sufficient provocation to call forth much diversity
of opinion. Again spectacled wise men sought to satisfy their passion
for exactness and their propensity to doubt. Guesses fantastic in the
extreme were advanced and the subject presents another silly spectacle
of pedantry.
According to Jepson, the Redwood was collected by Thaddeus Haneke in
1791. Archibald Menzies, a member of the famous Vancouver Expedition,
is reputed to be its second botanical collector. Specimens of his
collection came before the notice of Lambert, the able English
botanist, who, considering it as of the same genus as the Bald
Cypress, published it in 1824 as _Taxodium Sempervirens_. However, this
designation was not allowed to stand, for twenty-three years later
the Redwood was recognized as a distinct genus. In the year 1847 the
celebrated Austrian, Endlicher, established the genus _Sequoia_ and
gave the world the now well-known _Sequoia sempervirens_.
Unfortunately, Endlicher failed to make a statement concerning the
origin of the word Sequoia, leaving its meaning to be inferred. Gordon
in his _Pinetum_ stated that it was probably derived from the Latin
for “sequence,” alluding to the fact that the Redwood was “a follower
or remnant of several extinct colossal species.” Kotch was inclined to
hold the name in light estimation, claiming its source to be entirely
fanciful. De Candolle, a contemporary with Endlicher, thought it of
California origin, probably taken “from some native word and written
more or less correctly.” But others have kept their heads better in the
matter. Both Hooker and Englemann believed it derived from the Cherokee
Indian, Sequoyah. At least, it is edifying to know that Endlicher was
an eminent linguist as well as a botanist. It is not improbable, then,
that he was acquainted with Sequoyah’s colorful career and named the
tree in honor of this aboriginal illiterate, this magnificent savage,
who groped in darkness to give his people letters, and found the light.
+Chapter IX+
SEQUOYAH
Had Sequoyah lived thirty centuries ago, Plutarch, and after him
Shakespeare, would have made him immortal. Had he invented an alphabet
then, similar to that which he invented for his people, the Cherokees,
he would have been hailed as one of the benefactors of the human
race. But as it is, the world’s knowledge concerning his achievement
may be said to sleep. The records of his life are hidden from the
average reader, while his fame is suffering the fate of many worthy of
antiquity—perishing from memory for want of an historian. Already the
twilight of uncertainty is throwing its shadows across his history.
Yet no savage is more worthy of remembrance. The life of Sequoyah was
radiant with the prime quality of greatness—_virtue_. It is true that
mankind admires the men and women of the past who have spoken great
words, done great deeds, and suffered noble sorrows. Few of these,
however, possess that quality of virtue which inspires emulation.
Indeed, only those whose names are written in gold on the sombre
chronicles of the past inspire to imitation. Sequoyah’s achievement
easily entitles him a place among the great characters of all time,
while his life of service stirs a strong desire to emulate, for he
strove to save his unhappy race from extinction in the noblest way a
savage ever sought.
Despite this, his name and fame go untrumpeted and unsung. Meanwhile
mankind is frantically fashioning statues to rest idly on pedestals, or
building magnificent edifices whose marbles glisten in the sunlight,
in commemoration of men of frailer virtue. Yet Sequoyah’s name is
borne by apartment houses and tomato cans. Apparently it remains for
the most gigantic and remarkable tree on the surface of the globe, the
Sequoia, to save his name from oblivion and to attempt to correct the
indifference of a so-called superior race.
Authorities are agreed that the birth, breeding, and fortune of
Sequoyah were low and that his greatness rested on a life of labor.
They are in disagreement, however, as to the date and place of his
birth, and have been able merely to offer conjectures concerning his
parentage. These mists of uncertainty that surround Sequoyah’s earliest
years are, undoubtedly, due to conditions of early frontier life.
The fur trader, who represented the outer edge of the advancing wave
of European civilization, was the first to penetrate the American
wilderness in his exploitation of beasts. Early in the settlement of
America he entered the country of the Cherokee which then embraced the
beautiful reaches of the southern Appalachians. The Cherokees received
the trader with hospitality and kindness, and a lucrative traffic in
furs soon resulted; the trader offering professions of regard and
extracting exorbitant profits. To better secure the faith of the
savage, thereby insuring the success of their venture, many of these
traders married Cherokee women. Some, fascinated by this wild life of
freedom, reverted to savagery and became “squaw men,” but the great
majority adopted this method of wife-taking to avoid a bill for board
and lodging, and then speedily disappeared as soon as their trading
enterprise was over.
An episode of this nature occurred just prior to the termination of
the French and Indian War. Of the married life of this couple there
is little record. It is quite certain, however, that it was of short
duration and that the trader concerned gathered together his effects
and went the lighthearted way of other traders before him, and was
never heard of again. The babe born to this deserted mother soon
afterwards was called by the Cherokees George Gist, presumably the
name of the father, while the mother bestowed upon the infant the more
musical name of Sequoyah.
Tradition has it that the mother of Sequoyah was a woman of no common
character and energy. To the end she remained true to her faithless
husband and lived alone, maintaining herself by her own efforts and
caring for her babe with a devotion that would put many of her
more polished sisters to shame. Unaided, she cleared a little patch,
carrying her babe about while she broke the ground with a short stick
and planted it with Indian corn. “That she is a woman of some capacity
is evident from the undeviating affections for herself which she
inspired in her son, and the influence she exercised over him. This
is all the more extraordinary since Indian women are looked upon in
the light of servants rather than companions of man, and males are
taught early to despise the character and occupations of women.” But
with Sequoyah it seems to have been otherwise, for he carried a lofty
respect for his mother to the grave.
[Illustration: SEQUOYAH
From original painting made in 1828]
As a babe, it is said that Sequoyah had an air of infantile gravity
about him which was emphasized by a contemplative light which shone
in his little black eyes. As a boy he was much alone and thoughtful,
having no fondness for the rude sports of others of his age. He
preferred to assist his mother rather than to become proficient with
the bow. It is said that he occupied his boyish leisure carving milk
pails, skimmers, and other useful objects, displaying at this early age
the mechanical side of his genius. He even milked the few cows with
which fortune had favored his mother, and on occasions aided her in her
labors in the field. This failure to scorn a woman’s pursuit and trim
his sail to the unchanging breeze of Indian tradition only brought
down on him a torrent of abuse from grey-beards and caused youths to
rail at him like chattering birds. Young Sequoyah, however, calmly and
silently bore all this disgrace and followed the dictates of his reason
with unflinching gravity—a characteristic he displayed throughout his
life and which some hold as the keystone of his greatness.
When Sequoyah attained manhood’s estate, the Thirteen Colonies had won
their independence, and Daniel Boone had led the first settlers into
the blue grass country of the Cumberland. In these times the English,
French, and Spanish hotly vied with each other for the control of
the valuable fur trade of the “Old Southwest,” and their pack-trains
threaded their way out of Cherokee country in unceasing strings,
bearing the rich peltry of the wilderness. In this work of destruction
of wild life the Indian had innocently come to play, by far, the major
role. Nor is it altogether improbable that Sequoyah, who by now had
become a hunter, aided in the extermination of the buffalo that still
lingered in the valleys of the Ohio and the Tennessee.
It is also likely that Sequoyah would not have escaped the degradation
into which the red man was falling had not an accident befallen him
while hunting which rendered him a cripple for the rest of his life.
The coming of the rifle, a new and powerful sinew of war, and of the
chase, brought in its train a hopeless dependence on unscrupulous
traders for powder and lead. The introduction of whiskey further
conspired in the ruin of a proud people. Drinking had become the pledge
of cordiality on the frontier, and Sequoyah had become as much addicted
to the vice as his fellow hunters. Later events proved that Sequoyah
possessed an intellect elevated above the sphere in which it was
placed. Had he not become a cripple, however, it is doubtful whether
he would have meditated upon the decaying fortunes of his race, which
meditation led him to make his remarkable invention. Thus, paradoxical
as it may at first appear, misfortune often precipitates a chain of
events that ultimately end in accomplishment of great import.
Unable to follow the pursuits of manhood, Sequoyah now faced the
humiliation of donning petticoats and of performing the servile labors
of woman’s lot among the Cherokees. Such a prospect would, indeed,
have broken the spirit of an ordinary Indian, and especially so if a
stain had been affixed to his character such as that which Sequoyah
had incurred in his youth by assisting his mother. But it must be
remembered that Sequoyah was not of common clay. The traits manifested
in infancy and boyhood now stood him in good stead and opportunity was
given to bring them to fruition. One trait, an extraordinary mechanical
ability, was first pressed into service; the other, a remarkably
analytical and philosophical mind, was given leisure in which to
become mellow, until, in the ripeness of time, it should find its
proper exercise.
The Cherokees were a people fond of display. It occurred to the
intuitive mind of Sequoyah that an opulent livelihood could be secured
in the manufacture of silver ornaments. As a hunter he had visited the
white settlements and had seen the blacksmiths smelt ore and fashion
trinkets. Endowed with good powers of observation and possessed of
an innate skill with his hands, he set to work without the aid of an
instructor to make his own bellows and tools. Within a comparatively
brief time he became a master in the art of silver working and in the
end became such an expert artisan that he developed this art to the
highest point attained by the Indians of North America.
Astonished, his people came to gaze upon one of their own race who
possessed the skill and ingenuity of the white man. Such uncommon
accomplishment merited high recognition. He became a wonder in their
eyes. The fame of his handiwork spread far and near, and they flocked
to his door, eager to give him employment. Then it was that Sequoyah
began to enjoy an unprecedented popularity. Affable, accommodating,
and unassuming, having a nature too truly great to be spoiled by the
recognition of his superiority, success only nourished the greater
qualities within him. The women especially attracted by his skill,
bestowed their smiles upon him, but, like Alexander, “he found a
counter charm in the beauty of self-government and sobriety and on the
strength of this passed them by, as so many statues.” The braves of the
tribe likewise courted his friendship and his shop became the center
for male gossip. Since Sequoyah was not lacking in the social graces
of his tribe and since the munificence of his table increased with his
fortune, he came more and more to spend his time in receiving visitors
and in discharging the duties of hospitality. Lastly, even the elders
of the tribe sought his favor and welcomed his voice in their councils.
Wishing to identify his wares, Sequoyah employed a literate half-breed,
Charles Hicks, to write his name, from which he made a die. With this
he stamped his name on all the silver he fabricated. Many of these
ornaments remain in the proud possession of the scattered and forgotten
remnants of the Cherokees. Prized beyond price, they are a reminder
of the glory of the past. Just as the crumbling ruins of antiquity
speak of the pride and pomp of yesterday, so do these treasured silver
objects remind their possessors of the Golden Age of the Cherokee.
As the years went on, Sequoyah’s philosophical nature ripened and
he came to ponder on the future of his fast dwindling race. This
problem was probably first brought to his attention during the social
gatherings held under his roof, for the Cherokees were sensitive to
the superiority of civilized man and quick to note the cardinal
points of difference between themselves and the whites. Often they had
wondered at the ability of the white man to “talk on paper.” But after
considerable inquiry they became convinced that the power of recording
and communicating thoughts by means of writing was the product of some
mysterious gift which the white man alone possessed. Nevertheless,
Sequoyah was unable to dismiss the problem as lightly from his mind as
his brethren had done. It was odious to Luther that the devil had all
the best tunes; likewise it was odious to Sequoyah that the white man
should have a monopoly on the power of written expression. At length
he decided that writing was not the result of sorcery, but a faculty
of the mind which could be acquired. Hence, he concluded that he could
solve this mystery and give his people “talking paper” like that of the
whites.
His reflections on this problem were further stimulated by the
progress of events. The day of the trader had passed, while that of
the settler had come. The swelling tide from Europe had settled around
the Cherokees, and the frontier of settlement had begun to continually
spill over into the Cherokee country. What was even more maddening,
encroachments were on the increase and held no promise of abating.
At last in despair, the Cherokees appealed to the “Great Father” in
Washington to stem the tide. A treaty followed, clipping away a
goodly portion of their ancestral domain. The ink on it was hardly dry
before another wrested from them still more thousands of acres of rich
land. In each treaty the Federal Government recognized the Cherokee
claims and titles and solemnly declared it to be “the last and final
adjustment of all claims and differences.” Obviously, the Cherokees
were shocked by these acts of treachery. The fact that the hand of the
“Great Father” was gloved and that it purported to throw continual
favors in their path did not make them less apprehensive of the menace.
Yet they were convinced of the folly of an appeal to arms through a
realization of the inequality of the struggle. Therefore, they did that
which no other Indian tribe in the face of calamity has ever done. They
attempted to combat civilization by becoming civilized themselves. At a
great council they organized themselves to form a Federal Union after
the United States, and set to cultivating the arts of peace and the
ways of civilization.
By this time Sequoyah had become imbued with the idea that the secret
of the white man’s superiority lay in his power of communication by
writing. Indeed, he struck a salient note here, for the invention
of writing has made tremendously for the superior advantages of
the civilized races over the primitive. “The mind and the pen have
ultimately, in all ages, been mightier than the sword. Rome, the
conquerer, was led in chains by Greece, who, though herself over-run
by barbaric Romans, compelled them to adopt, respect, and maintain her
institutions.” History, in fact, is replete with instances of people
who have been able to ward off the effects of conquest because they
were intellectually above their victors. But this superiority has
always preceded conquest; it has _never_ followed it. Unfortunately,
Sequoyah was ignorant of this. Nevertheless, the mere fact that such an
ideal had its birth in the mind of an untutored savage is sufficient to
vest it with sublimity.
Inspired with the thought of saving his people from conquest by giving
them the power of the pen, he took up his great work at the age of
forty-nine, in the last year of Jefferson’s Presidency. Ceasing his
labors as a silversmith, he began carving strange characters out of
bark and spending hours wrapped in thought. His fellow tribesmen were
unable to understand his singular behavior. They thought it but the
work of madness for their great silversmith to lay aside his hammer
and bellows, to quit his social circle, and of a sudden to become
seclusive. Sequoyah, however, refused to reveal his secret, knowing
full well the attitude of his fellow tribesmen in regard to the
impossibility of discovering a supposedly supernatural power of the
whites. His popularity suffered a quick decline, and his friends fell
away like leaves from Autumn trees attempting to justify their actions
by scoffing and sneering. Then Sequoyah began to taste in full
measure the vinegar of derision and to learn that gratitude is but a
lively sense of favors to come. Notwithstanding, he preserved the usual
calm behavior and serenity of mind that had attended him from infancy,
always turning from the storm without to the sunshine of hope within
him. And after twelve years—years of persevering labor and repeated
failure—years of ridicule in which his faith in his people must have
been sorely tried—he perfected his remarkable invention of the Cherokee
Alphabet.
[Illustration: THE INVINCIBLE SEQUOIA
The large fire-made cavity in the Haverford suggests the tree’s
great vitality
MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by H. S. Hoyt]
It is a notable fact that the great works of the imagination have
usually been produced by men nearly innocent of schooling and
scholarship. Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Burns, and Abraham Lincoln
were all self-taught men. Sequoyah was an absolute illiterate, yet
he invented an alphabet. He had no acquaintanceship with the English
language, for he disdained the aid of missionaries, and for this reason
the most elemental principles of our alphabet were unknown to him. He
reasoned, and with no little correctness, that a knowledge of English
would be of no avail because of the peculiarities of the Cherokee
language. With his own unaided intellect he fashioned a syllabary so
extraordinary that it astonishes even the learned, and proved himself
a mental giant. Evidently he did not recognize the stops of the human
mind, which is almost wholly imitative. Indeed, some of his biographers
are unwilling to give him this honor, claiming that his invention
was not altogether free from borrowing. But for all that, there are
still those who hold that Bacon wrote that which is attributed to
Shakespeare. Because man shows an extreme poverty throughout the
history of invention, because he rarely tries to do over again that
which has been once accomplished, and because he is quicker to grasp
and more capable of appropriating, independent inventions are the
exception rather than the rule. It must be conceded, in all fairness,
that Sequoyah’s syllabary was an invention “par excellence.”
Having first conceived the notion that speech could be represented by
characters or signs and that if these signs were uniform they would
convey the idea intended by the writer, he set out to devise a symbol
for each word or idea of the Cherokee tongue. His first step, in other
words, was in the direction of the simple pictograph. As the experiment
progressed, however, his symbols multiplied fearfully, until, at the
end of three years he had thousands of them. It would have been almost
impossible for the human mind to retain such a complex multitude of
signs. Happily, Sequoyah had a sufficient sense of the practical to
realize this. Hence, he abandoned this experiment and started again by
making a study of the construction of language itself.
Even a people as cultivated as the Chinese have never made the next
stride which Sequoyah took. The Chinese still employ the lowest stage
of writing in all its absurd prolixity with the result that long years
of study and a memory above the average are required for its mastery.
This is largely the reason, too, why intellectual democracy is so
noticeably absent in China. The Chinese language is too elaborate
in structure, too laborious in use, and too inflexible in form to
thoroughly saturate China’s teeming millions and to meet the need of a
simple, swift, and lucid communication of thought. Our alphabet, on the
other hand, answers these requirements. “It is because the Egyptians
passed into the glory of the true alphabet that the Phoenicians
simplified and improved it, and that the Greeks were able to transmit
it to occidental civilization that western nations have been able to
make such tremendous mental progress and established such a wide and
common knowledge.” It is quite obvious that Sequoyah was not blundering
when he discarded his pictograph system if he would achieve his ideal.
After long and patient study he began a search for the unity of speech.
At length he discovered that _sound_ was the key in the construction
of language. Then by attentive listening for another period he
discovered that the sounds in the words spoken by the Cherokees could
be analyzed and classified and could be represented by hardly more
than a hundred syllables. Further analysis revealed two distinct types
of sounds, vowels and consonants. Classifying the sounds according
to this division, he found that there were six vowel and seventy-two
consonant sounds. Thirty-seven sounds still remained unclassified.
By dint of further analysis he found that these were of a hissing or
guttural nature. In an ingenious way he represented the former by seven
combinations and the latter by one. As a result, in this expeditious
manner he was able to write a copious language vastly wealthier in its
vocabulary than ours, with but eighty-five characters.
The best authorities are agreed that our alphabet is, in some respects,
the greatest invention of the human mind. Yet it is not the product of
a single mind, but the accretion of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek
wisdom extending over a period of at least three thousand years.
Excellent as our alphabet is, it fails to outrank that of Sequoyah in
point of felicity and ease of mastery. Ours is superior in that it
goes to the unit of speech, _sound_, and has characters that stand for
sound. Sequoyah’s alphabet had characters that stood for combinations
of sounds or syllables. Our alphabet is the only sound-for-a-sign
system of writing yet invented. It is an alphabet of letters, while
that of Sequoyah was an alphabet of syllables. James Mooney claims that
it ranks second to all systems of writing ever known to the world.
It certainly could not have been the work of other than a gigantic
intellect.
It was not without considerable difficulty that Sequoyah induced a few
skeptical and superstitious Cherokees to learn his alphabet after he
had completed it in 1811. These few who were the first to try it out
did so merely to expose the delusions of the alphabet-maker, but as the
lesson progressed, though they had come to scoff, they began to admire
until, finally, when the lesson was finished they were convinced that
the seemingly impossible had been achieved—that the Cherokees could
“talk on paper” like the whites. This time Sequoyah’s rise to fame was
meteoric. News of his invention spread like wildfire throughout the
tribe, and, at a public test made before the assembled Houses of the
Cherokee Congress, his alphabet was officially adopted as the means of
elevating the tribe. Sequoyah had become the Cadmus[7] of his nation.
Then occurred a spectacle without a parallel among primitive people;
that of gray-bearded savages studying in groups with unfettered zeal
in order to become the equal of the white man in knowledge. Almost
overnight the entire nation became an academy. To be able to read and
write became a craze with the Cherokees. Never was Plato’s fine phrase
of a people being “possessed and maddened with a passion for knowledge”
better exemplified. Mass meetings in abundance were held and the new
method of “talking on paper” was taught virtually wholesale. It was
even common to see groups teaching each other in cabins and along
the roadside. “Within a few months thousands of formerly illiterate
savages, without the aid of schools or the expense of time or money,
could read and write.” In fact, by the time the Monroe Doctrine was
promulgated in 1813, reading and writing had become so general among
the Cherokees that “they carried on a correspondence by letter between
different parts of the nation and were in the habit of making receipts
and giving promissory notes in affairs of trade. Directions were even
inscribed on trees indicating the different roads.”
This is manifest evidence of the ease with which Sequoyah’s syllabary
was learned. “In my own observation,” states Phillips, “Indian children
will take one or two years to master the English printed and written
language, but in a few days can read and write in Cherokee. They do
the latter, in fact, as soon as they learn to shape letters. As soon
as they master the alphabet they have got rid of all the perplexing
questions that puzzle the brains of our children. It is not too much to
say that a child will learn in a month by the same effort as thoroughly
in the language of Sequoyah that which in ours consumes the time of our
children for at least two years.”
Sequoyah next paid a visit to the Arkansas Cherokees. This band had
separated from the main body when the Cherokees decided to combat
civilization with civilization and had moved west where they could
enjoy the ancient ways of their ancestors. Though this body had spurned
all civilized innovations and had clung slavishly to tradition,
strangely enough, they readily seized the new art Sequoyah brought with
him and learned it with a zest that almost put their eastern brethren
in the shade.
In the Autumn of this same year, 1823, the Cherokee Council publicly
acknowledged Sequoyah’s service to the nation by sending him through
their President, the noted John Ross, a silver medal commemorative of
his achievement. So highly had the Cherokees come to esteem Sequoyah’s
greatness that five years later they elected him to represent them
in Washington. There he was cordially received and recognized as an
intellectual peer. On this occasion he sat for his portrait. The Treaty
of Washington of 1828 reveals that he still enjoyed high favor from the
Government, for it provided for a sum to be paid to Sequoyah and his
heirs “for the great benefits he has conferred upon the Cherokee people
in the beneficial results they are now experiencing from the use of the
alphabet discovered by him.” It is worthy to note that for many years
the Government paid this pension—_the only literary pension it has ever
paid_.
The Cherokees had now passed into a state of semi-civilization. They
had a National Congress which had passed laws against intemperance
and polygamy. They had a national press and a national newspaper, the
_Cherokee Phoenix_. The first copy of this unique paper appeared on
February 18, 1828. It was printed in both English and Cherokee by a
hand press which had been purchased in Boston, shipped by water to
Augusta, Georgia, and then transported laboriously by wagon over two
hundred miles to the Cherokee national capital. Such a journalistic
record is without rival in primitive society, and the _Cherokee
Phoenix_ holds the honor of being the father of all aboriginal
newspapers.
Rapid strides, economically as well as politically and intellectually,
had been made. Many Cherokees had amassed considerable wealth and
enjoyed some of the refinements and luxuries of a more polished
society. The majority of them possessed herds of cattle, together
with horses, hogs, and sheep. Husbandry was so efficiently practiced
that some products were actually exported, as evidenced by the large
cargoes of wheat and tobacco that were floated on flat-boats down
the Tennessee to New Orleans. The manufacture of woolen and cotton
cloth had even assumed a productiveness permitting of exportation. In
short, prosperity was on the boom and everything augured well for the
Cherokees’ happy attainment of civilization.
But fate had willed it otherwise. The Cherokees had reached the zenith
of their advance. Gold was discovered in their domain in 1829. This
event led to dishonorable deeds of the white man and gave the annals
of American-Indian history another black page. In their rapacity, the
border ruffians of Georgia violated the sacredness of treaties and with
a vicious disregard for the rights of their legal owners, appropriated
by violence the rich lands of the Cherokees. Gradually all the fine
achievements of these splendid savages melted into thin air. When the
United States Supreme Court decreed that the misappropriated Cherokee
lands be returned to their rightful owners, President Jackson, a
frontiersman and an Indian hater, defied its authority with his famous
rebuke, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce
it.” Finally, after nearly nine years of agitation and disquietude,
negotiations with the Government ended in the Ridge Treaty, an infamous
concoction which was brazenly sustained. By its means the remaining
fragment of what was once the Cherokee Nation were exiled at the point
of the bayonet to a country beyond the Mississippi.
Unfortunately, the new home allotted to the Cherokees proved to be
inhospitable. The land was claimed by the Osage as their ancestral
hunting ground, and the already impoverished Cherokees had to hold it
by force of arms. Nor were the Osage the sole authors of their woes.
The Arkansas band resented this intrusion of their eastern brethren.
Fratricidal war broke out and the tribe became further wasted. Warred
on from without, and torn by strife within, the Cherokees, as a people,
were in danger of extinction. Foreseeing this end, Sequoyah and others
attempted to avert it. As President of the Council of the Arkansas
band, he was largely instrumental in effecting a reunion which put an
end to strife and declared the Eastern and Western Cherokee “one body
politic under the style and title of the Cherokee Nation.”
Sequoyah was by this time in his eighty-second year and well merited
the boon of rest and relaxation. Lest he leave no margin to his life
and crowd it to the very end in his devotion to his people, he retired
from active political life. But his forceful mind denied his crippled
and aged body the rest it deserved. Speculative ideas possessed him and
he formulated a theory that he could devise a universal alphabet for
the red man. Under the dominion of this newer and deeper ambition he
came to feel that he had yet a mission to perform. Though his people
had suffered an excess of calamity, his spirit was unbroken. Having
sounded the depths of human disappointment, he rose again, full of
courage and faith in the salvation of his race. Not in the habit of
taking the advice of others and not having lost one jot of his most
distinguishing characteristic—intensity of purpose—he determined to
make an investigation among the remote tribes of the West in search of
some common element of speech.
Securing a few articles of Indian trade and loading these on an ox cart
driven by a Cherokee boy, Sequoyah set out upon his last quest in 1843.
Such a linguistic crusade the world will doubtless never again witness.
Everywhere he was received by his red-skinned brothers of the plain and
of the mountain with the utmost respect. Eagerly they furnished him
with the means of prosecuting his inquiries. That reticence which they
so notoriously displayed to Caucasian scientists was absent. Nor is
this to be wondered at, for here was a scientist of their own race who
had come to renown and they rested assured that he came not among them
to discover their inferiorities or to prepare the way for exploitation.
With his boy companion he crossed the boundless plains, and, like
Kipling’s _Explorer_, “hurried on in hope of water or turned back in
search of grass.” Puzzling his way through the Rockies, he camped in
meadows of softest velvet sweet with flowers, or above the tree line
amid the grandeur of frost shattered peaks and perpetual snows. Then
turning toward that scorched and waterless expanse unrelieved by the
shade of a solitary tree, he crossed the Colorado Desert and entered
the Mexican Sierras. Here, it is said, his boy companion died of
exposure and hardship, and somewhere in the silent places of these
desolate mountains this grand old man buried the lone partner of his
wanderings.
An ancient myth current in the lodges of his forefathers told of a lost
band of Cherokees who had wandered ages ago into northern Mexico. Vexed
by chilling frosts and scorching heat, Sequoyah began a search for his
lost kinsmen. Enfeebled of limb and yet strong of heart, he pursued
his solitary way, ever straining toward the distant horizon to find
what might be beyond. But he had over-estimated his strength, and not
far from the Rio Grande, in the State of Tamaulipas, this “splendid
wayfarer” reached the end of his trail and watched with fast-dimming
eyes the pearl-gray smoke of his last camp-fire curl toward the heavens
as he drew nearer to eternity.
The greatest of his race, Sequoyah sleeps beyond the Rio Grande. No
monument marks the last resting place of this American Cadmus. His
bones, denied the privilege of sepulchre, were picked by slinking
wolves and wheeling buzzards, and left to bleach in the sun until the
winds had buried them in the sands. His alphabet, too, is destined to
pass away with his race, but his name will never pass into oblivion,
for it is borne by the largest, the oldest, the most magnificent of
trees, the noble Sequoia. This alone is sufficient to preserve his
memory forever.
BIBLIOGRAPHY[8]
GENERAL
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+Jepson, W. L.+—1910. _Silva of California._ (University Press,
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+Kellogg, A.+—1884. _Redwood and Lumbering in California Forests._
(Edgar Cherry & Co., San Francisco). pp. 76–102.
+Muir, John+—1901. _Our National Parks._ (Houghton-Mifflin Co.,
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GALEN CLARK
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Edition, pp. 339–348.
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San Francisco). “Introductory Sketch of the Author.” pp. IX-XVIII.
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Bigelow & Co., Cambridge). pp. 1–23.
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WONDER TREES
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+Hall, William L.+—1911. “Uses of Commercial Woods of the United
States.” U. S. Forest Service, 1887–1913. _Bulletin_ 95, pp. 57–62.
+Hutchings, J. M.+—1860. _Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in
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140–148. 1886. _In the Heart of the Sierras._ (Pacific Rural Press,
Oakland), pp. 214–232, 256–263.
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York). _Handbook of Yosemite National Park._ Ed. by Ansel F. Hall, pp.
237–246. 1910. _Silva of California._ (University Press, Berkeley), pp.
145–146.
+Kellogg, A.+—1882. “Forest Trees of California.” (California State
Mining Bureau, Sacramento). Reports, 1880–1921. Vol. 2, Appendix. 1884.
“Essay on Redwood.” (Edgar Cherry Co., San Francisco). _Redwood and
Lumbering in California Forests_, pp. 102–107.
+King, Clarence+—1902. _Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada._ (Chas.
Scribners & Sons, New York), pp. 49–53.
+Kneeland, Samuel+—1871. _Wonders of Yosemite Valley and of
California._ (Alexander Moore, Boston), pp. 47–51.
+Osborn, Henry Fairfield+—1912. “Preservation of the World’s Animal
Life.” (American Museum of Natural History, New York). _Natural
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+Pinchot, Gifford+—1899. “A Primer of Forestry.” U. S. Forest Service,
1887–1913. _Bulletin 24_, pt. 1, pp. 44–65.
+Sudworth, George B.+—1912. “Present Conditions of the California
Big Trees.” (American Museum of Natural History, New York). _Natural
History_, 1900–1924; Vol. 12, pp. 227–236.
—— 1917. “Our Big Trees Saved.” (National Geographical Society,
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pp. 1–11.
—— 1923. _Rules and Regulations of Yosemite National Park._ U. S. Dept.
of the Interior, p. 13.
OLDEST LIVING THING
+Dudley, William R.+—1913. “Vitality of the Sequoia Gigantea.”
(Stanford University Pub., Palo Alto). _Dudley Memorial Volume_, pp.
33–42.
+Eisen, Gustav+—1893. “Native Habits of the Sequoia Gigantea.” (T. S.
Brandegee, San Francisco). _Zoe_, 1890–1900. Vol. 4, pp. 141–144.
+Gray, Asa+—1844. “The Longevity of Trees.” (Otis Brooders Co.,
Boston). The _North American Review_, 1815–1924; Vol. 59, pp. 189–238.
+Lemmon, John G.+—1890. “Cone-Bearers of California.” (California State
Board of Forestry, Sacramento). Biennial _Report_, 1886–1921; Vol. 3,
pp. 165–166.
+Magee, Thomas+—1895. _Immortality of the Big Trees._ (William Doxey,
San Francisco). pp. 61–77.
THE ETERNAL TREE
+Breasted, James H.+—1916. _Ancient Times._ (Ginn & Co., Boston). pp.
157–158.
+Chase, J. Smeaton+—1911. _Yosemite Trails._ (Houghton-Mifflin Co.,
Boston). pp. 126–143.
+Gray, Asa+—1854. “On the Age of a Large Tree Recently Felled in
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1857. (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston). _Proceedings_,
1864–1923; Vol. 3, pp. 94–96.
+Hill, C. L.+—1916. _Forests of Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant
National Parks._ U. S. Dept. of the Interior, p. 15.
+Huntington, Ellsworth+—1912. “Secret of the Big Trees.” (Harper &
Bro., New York). _Harper’s Magazine_, 1850–1924; Vol. 125, pp. 92–302.
Re-printed 1913. U. S. Dept. of the Interior. 24 pp.
+Jepson, W. L.+—1910. _Silva of California._ (University Press,
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Sons, New York). _Handbook of Yosemite National Park._ Ed. by Ansel F.
Hall, pp. 240–241.
+Le Conte, Joseph+—1875. _Journal of Ramblings Through the Sierra
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A BLOSSOM OF DECADENCE
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(Annual _Report_, 1880–1913). Vol. 21, pp. 571–574.
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577–581.
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Berkeley). p. 144.
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A NAME FOR THE AGES
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SEQUOYAH
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Grant of 1864 was ceded back to the Nation in 1906 and became
incorporated in Yosemite National Park, which was created sixteen
years earlier.
[2] This measurement was made in June of 1912 (as were the other
measurements given on these pages) by David A. Sherfey, resident
engineer of the Park at this time.
[3] The wood of the Big Tree must not be confused with that of the
Redwood, for the latter has a very high economic value as a
commercial wood, and is noted for its many excellent qualities.
[4] Scientifically speaking it is not proper to attribute a will to a
form of plant life. Its use here is in a non-scientific sense.
[5] Computations made at the ground, thirty-one feet, give over
three-quarters of a million board feet; while those made eleven
feet above, where the diameter is but twenty feet, give only a
quarter of a million feet of lumber. The figure given above is,
therefore, a fair one. Random statements that this tree contains
a million board feet of lumber rest on no substantial basis.
[6] The interesting question raised by Sudworth in 1898 whether the
specific name should be _Gigantea_ or _Washingtonia_ is discussed
in Bulletin Number 17, U. S. Forest Service, Page 28.
[7] A mythical Phoenician who brought letters to the Greeks and in
whose honor the people of Thebes erected a magnificent edifice
known as the Cadmeum.
[8] The author desires to offer grateful acknowledgement for the
extensive and liberal use he has made of this bibliography in the
preparation of the manuscript. He is further indebted to Clarence
King’s _Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada_; Mark Twain’s
_Innocents Abroad_, Vol. II; and to the writings of Bret Harte,
for many suggestions and numerous happy phrases.
Transcriber’s Notes:
• Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
• Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
• Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.Project Gutenberg
The giant sequoia : $b An account of the history and characteristics of the big trees of California
Ellsworth, Rodney Sydes
Chimera56
Graduate