The General Sherman is the largest tree on earth, and it may be the
oldest living object that has a place in the sun. It is thirty-six and
one-half feet in diameter and two hundred and eighty feet high. Nearly
as large are the General Grant and the Grizzly Giant. A number of
veteran sequoias are more than thirty feet in diameter and nearly
three hundred feet high. Many are more than twenty feet in diameter,
and thousands have a diameter of ten feet or more.
[Illustration: THE FOUR BROTHERS
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK]
The Big Tree (_Sequoia gigantea_) is scattered in thirty-two groves
along the western slopes of the Sierra for a distance of two hundred
and sixty miles. Most of the trees are between the altitudes of five
thousand and eight thousand feet. There are gaps of miles between
groves. The southern extension has a continuous forest for seventy
miles, except where it is cut in two by cañons, and it contains a
majority of all Big Trees. There are three Big-Tree groves in the
Yosemite National Park, one in the General Grant, and twelve in the
Sequoia. One of these twelve is the famous Giant Forest.
The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks have more than a million
Big Trees. Of these, more than twelve thousand are ten or more feet in
diameter. A few of these trees are upwards of three hundred feet high,
but the majority are about two hundred and fifty feet.
Galen Clark, who made a long and careful study of the Big Trees,
expressed the opinion that the Grizzly Giant was at least six thousand
years old. A number may be four thousand or more years of age, but the
majority probably are less than three thousand. Careful counts of the
annual rings of trees that have been felled show that a number of
these had lived more than three thousand years. One had more than
four thousand annual rings. W. L. Jepson, author of "The Trees of
California," believes that the general tendency is to exaggerate the
age of the living Big Trees.
These trees bear seeds each year. In a fruitful year a Big Tree may
produce one million seeds. These are exceedingly small and light. The
tree blooms in late winter, while the earth is still covered with
snow. The flowers are pale green and pale yellow. The cones are bright
green and are about two and one-half inches in length. They shed their
seeds as soon as they are ripened, but the cones sometimes cling to
the trees for months. If the seeds alight on freshly upturned soil or
soil recently burned over, they usually sprout and grow vigorously.
They do best in the sunlight. But if the seeds fall upon a grass- or
trash-covered forest floor, they fail to sprout.
With branches nearly to the earth, the outline of a young tree is that
of a slender pyramid. As the tree ages, the lower branches fall off.
In middle-aged trees, the trunk commonly is free of branches from
fifty to one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The tiptop of
aged trees usually is a dead snag, surrounded by living, up-curved
side branches from the trunk. The original tops of nearly all old
trees have been smashed by lightning.
Usually in young trees the bark is almost purplish; in old ones it is
cinnamon-color. This bark is fire-resisting, is from one to two feet
thick, and is good protection to the vitals of the tree. The roots are
short, but the base of the trunk is heavily, artistically buttressed.
Living or dead, the Big Tree has extraordinary durability. It has
exceptional vitality and recuperative power. Its long life probably is
due to the fact that it is almost immune from insect pests, the most
deadly enemies of all other kinds of trees. Men, fire, and lightning
are the worst enemies of the Big Tree. Most of the old ones have had
their heads shattered by lightning again and again, but they still
insist on living and will produce a new top even though the old one is
entirely smashed off. These trees appear to be almost immortal. Unless
they starve or meet a violent death, they live on and on.
John Muir says that the wood in the Big Trees has an endurance almost
equal to that of granite, and gives the following illustration. He cut
a piece of sound wood from the trunk of a fallen monarch that had been
lying upon the earth several hundred years. In falling, the trunk of
this Big Tree was cracked across in a number of places. Into these
cracks fire ate its way each time a forest fire swept the locality.
Each of these fires probably was separated from the following one by a
number of years, and it probably took a great many burns to cut this
slow-burning wood into sections. But at last this was done. Between
the ends of two of these sections a fir tree took root and grew. After
all these years, and after the fir tree had lived three hundred and
eighty years, the sections of the Big Tree still lay upon the ground,
apparently as sound as the day the tree fell.
All Big-Tree groves appear to have gone through forest fires. It is
probable that most of these groves have been repeatedly fire-swept.
Many of the trees show fire-scars that cannot be entirely healed for
centuries.
The Big Tree has been called the noblest of a noble race. Its enormous
size, its excellent proportions, its serenity, its steadfastness, its
age, make it the most impressive living object. John Muir, in
commenting on the imperishable nature of the sequoia, says he feels
confident that if every one of these trees were to die to-day,
numerous monuments of their existence would remain available for the
student for more than ten thousand years.
But the Big Tree is not verging toward extinction. Its greatest danger
is from general destruction by man. The Big-Tree area has not
diminished, but probably has slightly increased in the last few
thousand years. Seeds sprout readily and young trees grow vigorously.
John Muir thus comments concerning the tree and its distribution:--
The Big Tree (_Sequoia gigantea_) is Nature's forest masterpiece,
and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things. It belongs
to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a
strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited
from the long ago--the auld lang syne of trees. Once the genus was
common, and with many species flourished in the now desolate
arctic regions, in the interior of North America, and in Europe,
but in long eventful wanderings from climate to climate only two
species have survived the hardships they had to encounter.
The Big Trees probably were discovered by General John Bidwell in
1841. John Muir studied them for years, and then gave to the world an
accurate account of them.
The Big-Tree groves, he says, are growing in the soil-areas off which
the ice first melted at the close of the ice age. The wide gaps
between the various sequoia groves were areas occupied by the large
and long-enduring glaciers. The topography of the mountains plainly
shows that the areas where the groves are were places protected from
the ice-flows of the heights. The gaps would naturally have received
the main ice-flows from the heights.
In the south the Big-Tree forests are in the areas that were
effectively buttressed and shielded from ice-flows. Consequently these
areas were early opened at the close of the ice age. The
forty-mile-wide gap between the Stanislaus and the Tuolumne Groves was
a channel filled with a glacier probably long after the groves to the
north and the south started to grow.
Did the sequoia endure the long ice age in these few places where the
groves are now growing? The pine, fir, spruce, and other forest
species in the Sierra may have been planted with seeds from trees that
survived in the south. But as the sequoia is found nowhere else, the
question arises, did it survive somewhere near the localities in
which it is now growing?
An acquaintance with the Big Trees, an understanding of them, gives us
one of the most impressive and lasting ties to be had in nature. These
trees ever impress one with a nobility of character. Seen at midday,
or at early morning when their lengthened shadow gives strange tones
to the scene, or in the serene, strange moonlight, or when, wrapped in
restless mist, they loom vast and mysterious, or in a storm, they are
ever marvelously steadfast and calm. Long may they live!
At the Big Trees, the first act of Horace Greeley, the celebrated
editor, was to take out a pencil and figure on the lumber contents of
one. These veteran trees have a higher value.
Lincoln, in his lecture on Niagara Falls, said: "The mere physical
fact of Niagara Falls is a very small part of the world's wonder. _Its
power to incite reflection and emotion_ is its greatest charm."
Lincoln might have calculated the mule-power of the Falls if
ruined--changed from the higher value of a scenic spectacle to common
commercialism. Why tell how many hovels or how many feet of sewer
might be constructed out of the Library of Congress; or the number of
cobblestones that could be manufactured from the Washington Monument?
As well tell the number of forts that might have been built with the
marbles and the energy that were put into statuary and the inspiring
arts, as to consider or measure Big Trees in lumber terms.
The sequoia is one of the monumental wonders of this round world. It
is the oldest settler--the pioneer of pioneers. Each venerable giant
numbers his years by centuries. Each was already old when nations of
the present were born. Gone and forgotten are the nations that
were--gone the flags that waved in the wind when these trees began to
cast their shadows.
And it may be--for nations with all their pomp and pride are
short-lived--that every flag that now flaunts the sky, that every
nation now on earth, will pass out of existence long before these
patriarchal trees lie down at last upon the mountains. Some of these
trees have already out-lived more than fifty generations of mankind.
Some of them are likely to look upon a score or more of passing
generations of the human race. These trees might tell a thousand
stirring stories to the one possessed by the Sphinx. The Sphinx is of
lifeless stone. These trees are alive. They have lived through
countless changing scenes. But which shall be accounted the more
striking and wonderful, the passing pictures in the centuries they
have looked upon, or the moving, changing scenes in the centuries that
they are yet to see?
These Big Trees have endured fire, flood, lightning, landslide, gale,
drought, and earthquake, but have never hauled down their evergreen
banners. They have triumphed over the changes of ten thousand
seasons; watched and waved through centuries of sunlight and storm.
Countless times the sun has projected a silhouetted shadow of their
stupendous plumes against the mountain side. They have worn monumental
robes of snow flowers; they have stood silent in the light of
thousands of autumn moons; and they are still upon the heights to
inspire us with their steadfastness and their splendor.
The landmark and the heritage of the ages are these splendid trees,
these immortal evergreens. Their historic lore and unequaled grandeur
give them amplitude and poetry enough to kindle and enrich the
imagination. Let them live on; they will bless those who make the
sacred pilgrimage to see them, and they will be a "choir invisible" to
all who simply know that upon the sublime Sierra they still wave
grandly.