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 To him “the races of the children of life” are the players, by reason of the fact that all life has been superseded by more complex and more highly evolved forms.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.