Sequoia

“ But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not [154] heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period, out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory of the "giants in those days." ”

“ Such a mind sees in its often humble beginnings the genesis of things far-reaching and mighty. Two thousand years ago one grain of the shower of pollen wafted upon the wind and falling upon a minute undeveloped cone, quickened a seed there into life, and this dropping into the soil pushed up a tiny thread of green, which, after the quiet process of the ages, you now behold in the giant Sequoia which tosses its branches aloft, swept by the four winds of heaven. ”

“ The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. These colossal trees are as wonderful in fineness of beauty and proportion as in stature—an assemblage of conifers surpassing all that have ever yet been discovered in the forests of the world. ”

“ 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 [Pg 112] 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. ”

“ These trees do not sway to the wind, their trunks are constructed to stand solid. Their branches do not bend and murmur, for they too are rigid in fiber. Their fine thread-like needles may catch the breeze's whisper, may draw together and apart for the exchange of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if so, you and I are too far below to distinguish it. All about, the other forest growths may be rustling and bowing and singing with the voices of the air; the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. ”

“ The sequoia, even if it had had the power, would not have been sorry no longer to breathe in the odours of the world, nor feel the sunlight, nor pump the sap up and down its weather-beaten trunk. At its hour of death it was desiring death, the great sleep in which lay repose, with all its strength, even with its finest stomata, its inmost grain, its remotest root; and if this was the issue of its seven thousand years, such should be the issue of a dog's corresponding fifteen years, of a man's seventy years, of a planet's millions.
In the midst of eternity an age is not so long. ”

“ The Sequoia gigantea differs in leaf, and size and shape of cone, from the great Sequoia semper virens on the coast near Santa Cruz; neither can be spared. The Mariposa trees, scattered along on a mountain ridge 6500 feet above the sea, do not easily obtain their victory, for they are a part of a magnificent forest of other growths, among which the noble sugar-pine is conspicuous for its enormous size and graceful vigor. The sequoias dominate among splendid rivals only by a magnitude that has no comparison elsewhere in the world. ”

“ Again, the great trunks of the sequoia last for centuries after they fall. I have a specimen block of sequoia wood, cut from a fallen tree, which is hardly distinguishable from a similar section cut from a living tree, although the one cut from the fallen trunk has certainly lain on the damp forest floor more than 380 years, probably thrice as long. ”

“ When the world was young she may have been the first tree to shelter our homeless, wandering race. To-day, when the wild folk of the outdoors are most beset with cold or storm, they go trustingly and confidingly to nestle in the hemlock's arms. And rightly the sequoia is the nobleman of all the forest world. ”

“ The sky, which at this elevation of six thousand feet is deep, pure blue and often cloudless, is seen through the tracery of boughs and tree-tops, which cast downward fine and filmy shadows across the glowing trunks. Altogether, it is a wonderful setting for the Sequoia. The two firs, judging by many of equal size whose age I have studied, were about three hundred years old; the pine, still hale and vigorous, not less than five hundred; and for the “King of the Mountains” we cannot assign a probable age of less than two thousand years. ”

“ The foliage of the saplings is dark bluish-green in color, while the older trees ripen to a warm brownish-yellow tint like Libocedrus. The bark is rich cinnamon-brown, purplish in young trees and in shady portions of the old, while the ground is covered with brown leaves and burs forming color-masses of extraordinary richness, not to mention the flowers and underbrush that rejoice about them in their seasons. Walk the Sequoia woods at any time of year and you will say they are the most beautiful and majestic on earth. ”

“ In the scenic heart of the Sequoia National Park, the only section of the magnificent 160,000-acre playground situated in California which is at the present time accessible to motor-driven and horse-drawn vehicles, stands a group of trees, the Sequoia washingtoniana, known as the Giant Forest, and in this forest grow the loftiest and most venerable living things that Nature has produced. ”

“ These shadows which we fear only have power upon us after we have irrevocably ceased to exist. It is not the darkness which destroys us; on the contrary, it is profoundly creative, doing its work, with that odd prudishness of creation, by choice out of sight.
It was in such a blank darkness underground that the sequoia seed germinated and burst open under the life-impulse. The cotyledons, rich in vivifying substances, gave a beginning of nourishment to the seedling until it was able itself to select the elements which would assist its growth. ”

“ Since their introduction into England about the middle of the nineteenth century, the two Californian species Sequoia sempervirens (the Redwood) and Sequoia gigantea (the Mammoth tree) have become familiar as cultivated trees. The name Sequoia, said to be taken from Sequoiah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, was instituted in 1847, while the name Wellingtonia, often used in horticulture though discarded by botanists in favour of the older designation Sequoia, was proposed in 1853. ”

“ Its soft graceful beauty in youth, and its leaves, cones, and outsweeping feathery branches constantly remind you of the sugar pine, to which it is closely allied. An admirable tree, growing nobler in form and size the colder and balder the mountains about it.
The giants of the main forest in the favored middle region are the sequoia, sugar pine, yellow pine, libocedrus, Douglas spruce, and the two silver firs. The park sequoias are restricted to two small groves, a few miles apart, on the Tuolumne and Merced divide, about seventeen miles from Yosemite Valley. ”

“ This grand tree, Sequoia sempervirens, is surpassed in size only by its near relative, Sequoia gigantea, or Big Tree, of the Sierra Nevada, if, indeed, it is surpassed. The sempervirens is certainly the taller of the two. The gigantea attains a greater girth, and is heavier, more noble in port, and more sublimely beautiful. These two Sequoia are all that are known to exist in the world, though in former geological times the genus was common and had many species. The redwood is restricted to the Coast Range, and the Big Tree to the Sierra.
As timber the redwood is too good to live. ”

“ So that if all the trees of any section of the main sequoia forest were ranged together according to age, a very promising curve would be presented, all the way up from last year’s seedlings to giants, and with the young and middle-aged portion of the curve many times longer than the old portion. Even as far north as the Fresno, I counted 536 saplings and seedlings, growing promisingly upon a landslip not exceeding two acres in area. ”

“ Fossil specimens of a similar, if not the same, species have been recently detected in the Rocky Mountains by Hayden, and determined by our eminent paleontological botanist, Lesquereux, and he assures me that he has the common redwood itself from Oregon, in a deposit of Tertiary age. Another Sequoia (Sequoia stembergii) , discovered in Miocene deposits in Greenland, is pronounced to be the representative of Sequoia gigantea, the big tree of Californian sierra. ”

“ It became one of a large family, including fourteen genera. The master genus—the Sequoia—alone includes thirty extinct species. It was distributed in past times through Canada, Alaska, Greenland, British Columbia, across Siberia, and down into southern Europe. The Ice Age, and perhaps competition with other trees more successful in seeding down, are responsible for the fact that there are now only two living species—the "red wood," or Sequoia sempervirens, and the giant, or Sequoia gigantea. ”

“ Along the south rim of the cañon of the south fork of Kings River there is a majestic sequoia forest about six miles long by two wide. This is the northernmost group that may fairly be called a forest. Descending the divide between the Kings and Kaweah Rivers you come to the grand forests that form the main continuous portion of the belt. Southward the giants become more and more irrepressibly exuberant, heaving their massive crowns into the sky from every ridge and slope, waving onward in graceful compliance with the complicated topography of the region. ”

“ And while searching the wide basin of the San Joaquin, and trying to account for the absence of sequoia where every condition seemed favorable for its growth, it occurred to me that this remarkable gap in the sequoia belt fifty miles wide is located exactly in the basin of the vast, ancient mer de glace of the San Joaquin and Kings River basins which poured its frozen floods to the plain through this gap as its channel. ”

“ No other tree in the world, as far as I know, has looked down on so many centuries as the sequoia or opens so many impressive and suggestive views into history. Under the most favorable conditions these giants probably live 5000 years or more though few of even the larger trees are half as old. The age of one that was felled in Calaveras grove, for the sake of having its stump for a dancing-floor, was about 1300 years, and its diameter measured across the stump twenty-four feet inside the bark. ”

“ In Sequoia, as in other members of the great class of cone-bearing trees, the wood is composed of comparatively narrow elements which serve to carry water from the roots to the branches and leaves. As spring succeeds winter the inactivity of the plant-machine is followed by a period of energetic life ”

“ They germinate readily, and it is probable that hundreds of thousands of the trees (millions it is said) are growing in different parts of the world from seed planted. They flourish with peculiar luxuriance in Great Britain, and grow with extraordinary rapidity.... The genus were named in honor of Sequoia or Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian of mixed blood, better known as George Guess, who is supposed to have been born about 1770, and who lived in Wills Valley, in the extreme northeastern part of Alabama, among the Cherokees. ”

“ Although no account and no photographic representation of either species of the far-famed Sequoia trees can give an adequate idea of their singular majesty—still less of their beauty—yet my interest in them did not culminate merely nor mainly in consideration of their size and age. Other trees in other parts of the world may claim to be older. ”

“ We have therefore in the Cretaceous quite an array of species, which fill up the gap between the S. sempervirens and gigantea, and show us that the genus Sequoia had already attained a great development in the Cretaceous. This was still greater in the Tertiary, in which it also reached its maximum of geographical distribution. Into the present world the two extremes of the genus have alone continued; the numerous species forming its main body have fallen out in the Tertiary. ”

“ Sequoia spent much of his time with his kindred who had already gone to the West, and a few years after the final removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, he was instrumental in establishing several newspapers in their new home.
This Indian remains today the only man, in the long history of the aborigines, who has done anything for the real and lasting benefit of the race. His Cherokee alphabet is in general use by every Indian tribe in America. ”

“ Though usually spoken of as the redwoods, these big trees are of two varieties. The redwood proper is the Sequoia sempervirens of the botanist, and the sister tree is the great Washington Sequoia, Wellington Sequoia, or Sequoia gigantea, being known by all three names, the last being the most correct. Another forest giant of a different nature to either, and yet commanding attention, on account of its giant size and age, is the Pinus lambertiana, the great sugar-pine of California. These three are the greatest trees on earth. ”

“ The preceding Cretaceous period has furnished to Carruthers in Europe a fossil fruit like that of the Sequoia gigantea of the famous groves, associated with pines of the same character as those that accompany the present tree; has furnished to Heer, from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical with a tertiary species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia Langsdorfii, which in turn is a probable ancestor of the common California redwood ”