CONIFERE, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 147 
isolated groves! at the north by the topography of the country and by the unexplained absence of 
seedlings and sapling plants, its existence at the south is assured by numerous seedlings and by young 
trees in every stage of development. 
The wood of Sequoia Wellingtonia is very light, soft, not strong, brittle, and coarse-grained, but 
very durable in contact with the soil It is bright clear red, turning darker on exposure, with thin 
nearly white sapwood, and contains thin dark-colored conspicuous bands of small summer-cells and 
The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.2882, a cubic foot 
weighing 17.96 pounds. Manufactured into lumber, it is used locally for fencing and in construction, 
and is made into shingles. | 
numerous thin medullary rays. 
More than one white man * has claimed the honor of discovering this tree ; but the first authentic 
account of it was obtained from William Lobb, who visited the Calaveras grove in 1854, and succeeded 
in introducing this Sequoia into English gardens. It is now one of the most universally cultivated 
coniferous trees in all the countries of central and southern Europe, but while it has grown rapidly, it is 
already beginning to show that the existing climates of Europe do not suit it, and that this glory of 
the Sierra forests need fear no rival among the emigrants of its race. It has been also occasionally 
cultivated in the eastern United States, where it does not flourish, although it has occasionally survived 
in a few sheltered or peculiarly favorable situations." In European nurseries a number of abnormal 
forms have been produced, the most distinct being one in which all the branches are pendulous and 
closely pressed against the stem.® 
1 Wherever the Big Trees now grow are long deep depressions 
in the ground, caused by the fall and subsequent disappearance 
through decay or through the action of fire, of giant trees of older 
generations. The fact that such trenches do not exist except in the 
Big Tree forests and near the Big Tree groves seems to show, as 
Muir has pointed out, that this tree has not been more widely dis- 
tributed since the glacial epoch than it now is ; and on this hypoth- 
esis he explains the isolation of the northern groves by the corre- 
spondence of the gaps between them with the beds of glaciers, 
which continued to fill the broad basins of streams long after the 
ice-sheet had melted from the intervening ridges. Upon these 
ridges the first post-glacial Sequoias must have found a foothold 
in the very places where their descendants are growing to-day, the 
greatest development of the Big-Tree forest occurring “just where 
the ground had been most perfectly protected from the main ice- 
rivers that continued to pour past from the summit fountains long 
after the smaller local glaciers had been melted.”” (See Muir, The 
Mountains of California, 195. See, also, Muir, Proc. Am. Assoc. Adv. 
Sci. xxv. 242 [Post Glacial History of Sequoia gigantea ].) 
2 The wonderful durability of the wood of Sequoia Wellingtonia 
is shown by the fact that it has remained perfectly sound in fallen 
logs, above which trees have grown for three or four hundred years, 
and which may have lain on the ground for centuries before the 
germination of the seeds from which these trees sprang. (See 
Muir, The Mountains of California, 179.) 
3 The first white man who saw one of these trees was probably 
John Bidwell, the proprietor of the well known Rancho Chico, near 
Chico, California, a pioneer in California fruit-farming, and in 1891 
the nominee of the Prohibition party for President of the United 
States. In 1841 Bidwell crossed the Sierra Nevada from the east ; 
descending the Stanislaus River, he became separated from his 
party while hunting, and in the evening of October 20th, when it 
was too dark to see distinctly, he came upon an enormous fallen 
tree, which many years afterward he recognized in the tree of the 
Bidwell 
entered the grove, and found a hiding-place for the night near its 
Calaveras grove known as “The Father of the Forest.” 
eastern side without, however, noticing the standing trees, being 
disturbed, as he supposes, by want of provisions and by the dread 
of Indians, signs of whom he had seen during the day, and because 
the trees of the Sierra forests were all new and wonderful to him 
(Bidwell in litt.). Mr. A. T. Dowd, a hunter of Murphy’s Camp 
in Calaveras County, stumbled into the Calaveras grove in the 
spring of 1852 ; and a few weeks later Dr. Albert Kellogg ex- 
hibited before a meeting of the California Academy of Sciences in 
San Francisco branches of the Big Tree, which he had received 
from Mr. J. M. Hutchins, who was living at that time in or near 
the Yosemite Valley. (See Shinn, Garden and Forest, ii. 614.) 
These specimens were shown by Dr. Kellogg to William Lobb, 
the English botanical collector, who immediately started for the 
Sierras, where he secured specimens and two living trees, which he 
carried to England on the first steamer leaving San Francisco. 
(See Kellogg, Trees of California, 21.) 
4 Several of these trees have lived for many years in the nursery 
of Messrs. Ellwanger & Barry, in Rochester, New York, where, how- 
ever, they have grown very slowly. There are small specimens in 
the Central Park and in other New York gardens, and a tree near 
West Chester, Chester County, Pennsylvania. This was probably 
the largest specimen in the eastern states until a few years ago, 
when a negro cut off the top for a Christmas-tree and ruined its 
symmetry. 
5 The weeping Sequoia Wellingtonia, which is common in Euro- 
pean collections, was raised in the nursery of Lalande jeune near 
Nantes, France, in 1863. (Ed. André in litt.) 
