WHAT THE BIG TREES MAY DO FOR CALIFORNIA. 99 



WHAT THE BIG TREES MAY DO FOR CALIFORNIA. 



BY WILLIAM R. DUDLEY. 



The California State Board of Trade estimates the lumber product 

 of California for 1900 at the enormous total of over 650,000,000 feet. 

 Personally, I know of a single mill in the Sierras which cut nearly 

 ,50,000,000 feet during that year, the major part of which was Sequoia 

 gigantea, the big tree, the largest forest tree in the world, very 

 limited in its geographical area, and in many respects the most won- 

 derful and most famous object in California. More than half of the 

 remaining 600,000,000 feet was from Sequoia sempervirens, the red- 

 wood, another big tree, which rivals its sister species in the Sierras 

 in size and fame, and exceeds it in height. Most of the balance was 

 unequally divided between three pines peculiar to the Pacific slope, 

 the yellow pine, the black pine, and the sugar pine, and in one of 

 these, the sugar pine, we have the largest, the most attractive, and 

 one of the most valuable of all the true pines of the world. 



Ask any traveler from the Atlantic seaboard or from Europe, "For 

 what is California most famous?" and probably the answer would be, 

 "Gold, the Yosemite Valley, the big trees of its coniferous forests, and 

 its useful fruits." In its annual yield of gold, California is already 

 surpassed by another state of the Union; in its fruit products it will 

 always be rivaled by other parts of the world; but it shares its big 

 trees with no other state or clime.* 



If a state or a nation possesses, as its crowning glory, some peculiar 

 manifestation of nature, or some noble work of art, its rank among 

 civilized communities is best measured by the ntanner in which it 

 treats such a priceless possession. Among philosophic historians and 

 men of science, there is no such convincing proof of the inherent weak- 

 ness of Spain as a nation, as her destruction, centuries since, of the 

 forests which in Moorish times clothed her Sierra Nevada and Sierra 

 Morena, the mother of the rivers, now shrunken, but formerly bring- 

 ing fertility and plenty to the plains below. What shall be the answer 

 of the future historians of California to a similar question as to her 

 forests? Possibly we are in danger of evoking a similar answer. 



The climatic conditions of Spain and California are strikingly 

 alike. In the northwest of Spain there is a region of abundant even 

 excessive rainfall, not restricted to a rainy season; the amount, from 

 forty to sixty-five inches, is similar to that recorded in Humboldt and 

 Del Norte Counties, California. In the middle and south, a region 



*The redwood and the sugar pine extend into Oregon, but only in outlying, in- 

 ferior bodies. 



