36 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



upward to assist in making a new crown, each speedily assuming 

 the special form of true summits. Even in the case of mere 

 stilmps, burned half through, some mere ornamental tuft will try 

 to go aloft and do its best as a leader in forming a new head. * * * 

 "I never saw a big tree that had died a natural death; barring 

 accidents, they seem to be immortal, being exempt from all the 

 diseases that afflict and kill other trees. Unless destroyed by man, 

 they live on indefinitely, until burned, smashed by lightning, or 

 cast down by storms or by the giving way of the ground on which 

 they stand. * * * The colossal scarred monument in the Kings 

 River forest is burned half way through, and I spent a day in 

 making an estimate of its age, clearing away the charred surface 

 with an axe, and carefully counting the annual rings by the aid 

 of a pocket lens. The wood rings in the section I laid bare were 

 so involved and contorted in some places that I was not able to 

 determine its age exactly, but I counted over four thousand rings, 

 which showed that this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra 

 winds when Christ walked the earth. No other tree in the world, 

 as far as I know, has looked down on so many centuries as the 

 Sequoia, or open such impressive and suggestive views into 

 history. ' ' 



And it is monarchs like these, who have seeji the sun rise on a million 

 crystalline Sierra mornings, who have fought their centuries of battle 

 against fire and winter snows and thunderbolts and winds, who must 

 now fall before tiny scrambling humans with ravenous axes and be 

 turned into posts and grapevine stakes. At the close of the same 

 chapter quoted above is Muir's prophecy that "unless protective meas- 

 ures ~be speedily invented and applied, in a few decades, at the farthest, 

 all that will be left of the Sequoia gig ant ea will ~be a feiv hacked and 

 scarred monuments." 



Yet all through the belt these wonderful monuments are being 

 destroyed. They are not felled to make pillars for temples. No unusual 

 or beautiful service is performed through their destruction. They are 

 first chopped down, then, with enormous waste, blown to pieces with 

 gunpowder, and then ironically split up into fence posts and grapevine 

 stakes. That is about as low a task a good wood could be put to only 

 a step higher than the splinters from old boxes which elderly ladies 

 stick into flowerpots to hold up geraniums. 



The only grove thoroughly safe from destruction is the Mariposa, 

 which is owned by the State of California. In the Sequoia and General 

 Grant National Parks, which, theoretically, are owned by the nation, 

 there are about 1,200 acres in private ownership. Captain Young 

 secured options on the Sequoia National Park holdings a few years ago, 



