Chapter IV: Part TWO (2)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.