_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.”