EWAN: SAN FRANCISCO AS A MECCA FOR NINETEENTH CENTURY NATURALISTS 15 



of 1849 but he turned from the lure of the bonanza road to complete immediate 

 plans for the exploration of southern California! His first season included a trip 

 into the Santa Lucia Mountains, whence he was able to introduce the bristle-cone 

 fir successfully into England. During the spring of 1850 Lobb was joined by 

 Dr. C. C. Parry, then sojourning in Monterey, on a trip south at least as far as 

 Mission San Antonio de Padua. The 1851 season he spent north of San Francisco, 

 and in the following year he reached the Columbia River, collecting all the while. 

 Perhaps it was during the winter of 1852-1853 that he learned of the fabulous 

 "Big Tree" through the testimony of a hunter, Mr. Dowd by name. In any event, 

 Lobb set off directly for the Calaveras Grove early in 1853 and, finding the trees 

 and collecting the foliage, cones, and seeds, hastened back to England as the 

 scientific herald of the greatest tree on earth. The apogee of Lobb's career came 

 perhaps, not in California, where he was hardly known, but at Sydenham at the 

 exposition put on in 1857 in the Crystal Palace ! There a section of a Big Tree 

 was exhibited, standing 116 feet high — as high as the bark had been stripped from 

 a living tree — in all its majesty, bearing the name Wellingtonia which had been 

 given it in December, 1853, by England's excellent botanist, Professor John 

 Lindley. Some saw in it proof again that Britain was still the general in the 

 vanguard of discovery, with Wellingtonia her latest conquest! It was called the 

 "Mammoth Tree," and public interest ran high on both sides of the Atlantic, 

 although Americans were not a little piqued at the "scoop"! But history takes 

 some sharp and unexpected turns. A decade later William Lobb was lowered 

 into an unmarked grave in the Public Lot at Laurel Hill cemetery, deserted and 

 forgotten, a victim of paralysis at fifty-five.^ If we are to believe Parry's report, 

 Dr. Kellogg thought that Lobb took unwarranted license with the information 

 that he had wrested from Mr. Dowd. But though William Lobb did first make 

 known the Big Tree in a formal way, the American name. Sequoia, has found a 

 secure place in our literature and language.^ 



Julius Froebel and H. H. Behr were both "Forty-eighters," that is, members 

 of the "group of German idealists who fought to establish a liberal and unified 

 Germany and then came to the United States as refugees from the reaction." 

 Froebel had founded a radical opposition newspaper, the Siviss Republican, in 

 1839, and subsequently participated in the 1848 Revolution. He was arrested, 

 condemned to death, pardoned, and returned to Switzerland, but he left for 

 America and arrived in New York in 1849. In all, Froebel made four different 

 trips to Central America and the Southwest. It was toward the close of his third 

 trip that he visited San Francisco in the fall of 1854, arriving by coastwise boat 

 from San Pedro. He wrote : 



On the morning of October 3rd, we entered the Golden Gate. Much had I heard of 

 the grand scenery of the Bay of San Francisco, and I can only state that reality sur- 

 passed my expectations. . . . Whatever splendid sites of cities other parts of the world 

 may have to boast of, in North America the palm will never be disputed to San 

 Francisco. 



Froebel comments further: 



Every European, many Asiatic, and some American languages, meet the ear while 



2. Lobb's grave was moved and appropriately marked years later by San Fran- 

 ciscan garden lovers under the aegis of Miss Eastwood. 



3. Buchholz's segregate genus Sequoiadendron for the Sierran tree as distinct from 

 the coastal redwood happily carries on the historic connotation. 



