sixteen feet from thV 'ground' "and the bark sent to London to 

 show how fine and big that Calaveras tree was as sensible 

 a scheme as skinning our great men would be to prove their 

 greatness. This grand tree is of course dead, a ghastly disfig- 

 ured ruin, but it still stands erect and holds forth its majestic 

 arms as if alive and saying, ' ' Forgive them ; they know not what 

 they do. ' ' Now some millmen want to cut all the Calaveras trees 

 into lumber and money. But we have found a better use for 

 them. No doubt these trees would make good lumber after 

 passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing 

 through 'the hands of a French cook would have made good food. 

 But both for Washington and the tree that bears his name higher 

 uses have been found. 



Could one of these Sequoia kings come to town in all its god- 

 like majesty so as to be strikingly seen and allowed to plead its 

 own cause, there would never again be any lack of defenders. 

 And the same may be said of all the other Sequoia groves and 

 forests of the Sierra with their companions and the noble Sequoia 

 sempervirens, or redwood, of the coast mountains. 



In a general view we find that the Sequoia gigantea, or Big 

 Tree, is distributed in a widely interrupted belt along the west 

 flank of the Sierra, from a small grove on the middle fork of the 

 American River to the head of Deer Creek, a distance of about 

 two hundred and sixty miles, at an elevation of about five 

 thousand to a little over eight thousand feet above the sea. 

 From the American River grove to the forest on Kings River 

 the species occurs only in comparatively small isolated patches 

 or groves so sparsely distributed along the belt that three of the 

 gaps in it are from forty to sixty miles wide. From Kings River 

 southward the Sequoia is not restricted to mere groves, but ex- 

 tends across the broad rugged basins of the Kaweah and Tule 

 rivers in majestic forests a distance of nearly seventy miles, the 

 continuity of this portion of the belt being but slightly broken 

 save by the deep canons. 



In these noble groves and forests to the southward of the 

 Calaveras Grove the axe and saw have long been busy, and 

 thousands of the finest Sequoias have been felled, blasted into 

 manageable dimensions, and sawed into lumber by methods de- 

 structive almost beyond belief, while fires have spread still wider 



