The largest trees in the world are
those forest giants of California which grow on the
western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas, and nowhere
else on the globe. People carelessly call these
grand trees “redwoods” or “big trees,”
but their family name is Sequoia, an Indian chief’s
name. When the trees were first discovered, in
1853, accounts of their height and size were sent
to England. Supposing this giant to be a new
tree, it was there christened Wellingtonia,
and also gigantea for its immense measurements.
While Americans were trying to have it called Washingtonia,
a famous Frenchman who knew all about trees decided
that the specimen sent him was certainly a sequoia,
as named by a German professor some six years before
this time. So the tree was called sequoia
gigantea and quietly went on growing, unmindful
of the four nations who had quarrelled over its christening.
Why, indeed, should it bother its lofty head with
the chatter of people whose countries were unknown
when this mighty tree was full grown? For these
séquoias are the oldest of living objects and
have probably been growing for four thousand years.
How do we know this? Well, when a fallen trunk
is sawed across, one can see rings in the wood, and
it is thought that each ring is a year’s growth.
John Muir counted over four thousand of these annual
rings on the stump of one of the Kings River trees.
These fine old trees grow in groves,
and of the nine or ten groves the Calaveras and Mariposa
are the best known. The Calaveras group of nearly
a hundred mighty trees was the first one discovered,
and four trees here are over three hundred feet high.
The fallen “Father of the Forest” must
have been much higher, for it measures a hundred feet
round its trunk at the root end. A man can ride
on horseback for two hundred feet through its hollow
trunk as it lies on the ground. Many of the standing
trees hollowed out by fires are large enough, used
as cabins, to live in.
The Mariposa grove of Big Trees, being
not far from Yosemite Valley, is the best known, as
thousands of tourists visit both places. There
is a big tree at Mariposa for every day in the year,
and two very wonderful ones, the Grizzly Giant and
Wawona. Stage-coaches drive into the grove through
the tree Wawona, which was bored and burned out so
as to make an opening ten by twelve feet. A wall
of wood ten feet thick on each side of this opening
supports the living tree. The great Grizzly Giant
towers a hundred feet without a branch, and twice that
height above the first immense branches that are six
feet through. This was, no doubt, an old tree
when Columbus discovered America, yet it is alive
and green and still growing.
The largest tree in the world is the
General Sherman, in Sequoia National Park, and it
is thirty-five feet in diameter. This means that
the stump of the tree, if smoothed off, would make
a floor on which thirty people might dance, or your
whole class be seated. You can scarcely imagine
what a mighty column such a tree is, with its rich
red-brown bark, fluted like a column, too, and with
its crown of feathery green branches and foliage.
The bark is a foot or two thick. The trees are
evergreens, and conifers, or cone-bearers. Sequoia
cones are two or three inches long and full of small
seeds. The Douglas squirrel gets most of these
seeds, but there are still seedlings and saplings
or young trees enough to keep the race alive in most
of the groves.
These groves of wonderful and rare
trees are protected as National Parks in the Sequoia
and Grant groves, and Mariposa belongs to the state.
It is against the law to cut the trees in those groves.
Their worst enemy is fire, and a troop of cavalry
is sent every year to guard them, and to keep out
the sheep-herders, whose flocks would destroy the
underbrush and young trees. But, unfortunately,
lumbermen have put up mills near the Fresno and Kings
River groups, and, wasting more than they use, are
destroying magnificent trees thousands of years old
in order to make shingles. When nature has taken
such good care of this rare and wonderful tree, the
Sierra Giant, men should try to preserve the groves
unharmed in all their beauty.
Another sequoia grows in great
forests along the Coast Range from Santa Cruz to the
northern state-line, and beyond into Oregon. This
is the sequoia sempervirens, the Latin name
meaning always green. Redwood is its common name,
and the lumber for our frame or wooden houses is cut
from this tree. Millions of feet of this redwood
lumber are shipped from the northern counties of the
state every year, up to Alaska or down to Central
and South America. It is also sent far across
the Pacific to the Hawaiian and Philippine islands
and to China and Australia.
While the sequoia gigantea
delights in a clear sky and hot sunshine, its brother,
the sempervirens, prefers a cool sea-coast climate,
offering frequent baths of fog. There is also
a difference in the size of these trees; the redwood
is often three hundred feet high, but is less in girth
than its relative in the Sierras. There is not
much underbrush and little sunshine in the cool, green
redwood forests, each tree rising tall and stately
for a hundred feet without branches, while the green
tops seem almost to touch the sky as one looks up.
Through the woods one hears the blue jay scream and
chatter, and the tap, tap of the woodpecker as he
drills holes in the bark to fill with acorns for his
winter store.
When the lumberman looks at these
beautiful forests, he sees only many logs containing
many thousand feet of lumber, which he must get out
the easiest and cheapest way. He only chooses
the finest and largest trunks, and there is great
waste in cutting these. The men begin to saw
the tree some eight or ten feet from the ground, and
soon it trembles and falls with a mighty crash, often
snapping off other trees in its way to the ground.
After all the selected trees have fallen, fires are
started to burn off the branches and underbrush so
that the men can work easier. This fire only
chars the outside bark of the big, green logs, but
it kills all the young saplings, and leaves the once
beautiful forest a waste of blackened logs and gray
ashes. When the fire burns itself out, the logs
are usually sawed with a cross-cut saw into sixteen-foot
lengths, since in that form they are easy to handle.
Then oxen or horses haul them out; or sometimes a wire
cable is fastened to them by iron “dogs,”
or stakes, and a little stationary engine pulls them
away to the siding at the railroad track. Here
they are rolled on flat-cars, fastened with a big
iron chain around the four or six logs on the car,
and taken on the logging train to the mill-pond.
They lie soaking in the water until drawn up to the
keen saws of the sawmill that cut and slice the wood
like cheese. The bark and outside is carved off
as you would cut the crust off bread, and then sharp,
circular saws cut boards and planks till the log is
used up, and the log-carriage lifts another to its
place. As the shining steel bites into the wood
the noise almost deafens you and the mill shakes with
the thunder of log-carriage and feeders. Useless
ends, slabs, and refuse are burnt in the sawdust pit,
where the fires never go out. Very much of the
tree is wasted and all the limbs. The redwood
tree has so much life and strength, however, that it
sends up bright green sprouts around the burnt stump,
and standing trees charred outside to the tops will
have new branches the next season. In the older
forests tall young trees are often seen growing in
a ring round an empty spot, the long-dead stump having
rotted away.
Near Santa Cruz is a grove of large
and beautiful redwoods, many of the trees being over
three hundred feet high and from forty to sixty-five
feet around the base of the trunk. The Giant is
the largest, and three other immense ones are named
for Generals Grant, Sherman, and Fremont. In
1846 General Fremont found this grove, and camped,
on a rainy winter night, in the hollow trunk of the
tree bearing his name. Here is also seen a group
of eleven very tall trees growing in a circle around
an old stump.
In the Sierras, both in the sequoia
groves and forests above the Big-Tree region, are
very large sugar-pines, red firs, and yellow-pine
trees, all of which make excellent lumber. Great
forests of these trees, with cedars almost as large
as the redwoods, are in the northern counties also.
You may have seen sugar-pine cones which are over
a foot long, the largest of all found, while redwood
cones are the smallest. Another great tree is
the Douglas spruce, the king of spruce trees, growing
in both Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges.
The California laurel, or bay tree,
with its beautiful, shining green leaves, and the
madroño, the slender, red-barked tree on the hillsides
you must have noticed in your trips to the country,
as well as our fine valley and mountain oaks.
Try to learn the kinds of trees and study their leaves,
blossoms, and fruit, and you will find every one a
friend well worth knowing. Then you will wish
to save them from fire and the lumberman’s axe,
especially the rare and old séquoias.