"Among the scattered groups of pines," says Agnes L. Scott, 

 describing the venerable tree, "Whittier's tree stands compact, like 

 a silent patriarch, with a splendor all its own. Its chief characteristic 

 is its magnificent strength, enormous trunk and powerful boughs that 

 give it the appearance of a giant." Every day, it was the poet's 

 custom to walk to the great pine and watch the sunrise from beneath 

 its branches. 



"Here he saw to the East the Cardigan Mountains ; to the North, 

 the Sandwich Range; to the West, the Ossipie Range; and here he 

 saw the beautiful broad view of Squaw Lake with its green wooded 

 islands." 



The Kit Carson Tree 



The Native Sons of California have erected a monument mark- 

 ing the site of the pine on which Kit Carson carved his name, in 1844, 

 when acting as a guide to Colonel Fremont. It was on this trip that 

 the Colonel discovered Lake Tahoe. The pine, which stood in a pass 

 in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, was cut down in 1888. A full 

 account of its history has been placed in the monument. 



The McKinley Tree 

 The tall, spreading pine on the Hotel Champlain Golf Course 

 gained its fame as the favorite resting-place of the late President 

 William McKinley, during a summer visit to the hotel at Bluff Point, 

 when he made the Hotel Champlain the "summer capitol." A re- 

 markable coincidence, which further distinguished the tree, was that 

 on the very day on which the President was assassinated, the pine 

 was struck by lightning and its upper part broken off. 



The Sequoias, Big Trees and Redwoods 

 Once abundant over the whole of the northern hemisphere, in 

 Europe, Siberia, Alaska, Greenland and Canada, as well as in 

 America, the Sequoias are now represented by only two species, both 

 natives of California; S. gigantea, the Big Tree, and S. sempervirens, 

 the Redwood of the Coast Range. They are universally conceded to 

 be the oldest living things on earth, the age of those which have been 

 cut, averaging from eleven hundred to three thousand, two hundred 

 and fifty years, while the two known as the Grizzly Giant and the 

 General Sherman Tree are estimated to be of far greater age. In 

 height the Big Trees vary from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 

 and twenty-five feet, and naturalists have calculated, that, judging 

 from the tapering of the trunk, they would normally have reached 

 six hundred feet, if left unmolested by wind and fire. In circumfer- 

 ence they average from five to twenty-five feet at shoulder height 

 above ground. Many attain a much greater size, and the famous 

 General Sherman Tree measures one hundred and three feet around 

 the trunk. 



"How old the oldest trees may be is not yet certain," says Dr. 

 Ellsworth Huntington, of the Department of Geography, Yale Uni- 



78 



