THE REDWOOD IN THE OAKLAND HILLS. 165 
redwood, at this and neighboring points on these hills, served 
as a landmark to vessels at sea when about to enter the 
Golden Gate, before light houses or other artificial guides to 
mariners had been established along our coast. 
It is observable that around almost every redwood stump a 
great many suckers are developed. They are mainly to be 
seen within a foot or two of the ground. Partly by count and 
partly by estimate based thereon, the writer determined the 
number of shoots growing around the external periphery of a 
single stump to be upwards of five hundred. Such extreme 
tenacity of life and capability of propagation in a species 
would insure its perpetuity in this isolated locality, but that 
the settlers in the region are continually working up the 
huge roots for fuel. One of these vandals boastingly stated 
that he had unearthed and cut from one of these stumps 
seven cords of four-foot firewood. 
Besides the points indicated, several spurs of these higher 
hills had, within the memory of some now living, goodly 
forests of redwood, the whole area of which appears to have 
been, as I said at the outset, about five miles square. But at 
present a few young trees, occasionally the upright trunk of a 
dilapidated old one, and the still numerous stumps of very 
large trees that have otherwise no record, are almost the 
only relics of the now almost extinct redwoods of Alameda 
County. 
I shall conclude this paper with some account of the 
evidences that, in prehistoric ages, this whole range of hills 
—or mountains, as they then may well have been—were 
clothed with redwoods. 
Not many years ago, laborers were in the employ of the 
’ Alameda Water Company, while excavating ground for a 
reservoir well up the cafion at the head of Fruitvale, 
‘unearthed a large redwood tree twelve feet below the surface 
At about the same time, in the course of a botanical ramble 
up the Laundry Farm Caion, I discovered three large red- 
wood trees lying across the channel, the upper and the nether 
