211 



SEQUOIA WATCH 

 J. R. Challacombe 

 6413 Knott Avenue 

 El Cerrito, CA 94530-1771 



Testimony prepared for the March 1 0, 1 994, hearings of the 

 House Subcommittee on Specialty Crops and Natural 

 Resources Concerning HR21 S3, The Giant Sequoia Preser- 

 vation Act of 1993. 



THE GREAT MIRROR 



My formative years were spent below Sequoia National Park in a village 

 named Three Rivers. I became fascinated in the early 1950's with the 

 ungathered, unwritten history of the Sequoias. In the foothills still lived a 

 few men and women who had been young on the Sierra-Sequoia frontier in the 

 1880's and 1890's. I asked them about those days when the Big "ftees were yet a fresh 

 discovery. Wonderful memories flooded back to them. They opened boxes of old pho- 

 tographs and helped me locate long-forgotten comrades. 



For a decade I zigzagged all over California, 

 tape-recording and making copy negatives, 

 trying to document that vanished frontier before 

 it shoiild slip away forever My first magazine 

 article, "Redwood Epic," was published in Holi- 

 day, August 1953. Others followed. Using hun- 

 dreds of the old photographs, I made a 

 25-minute motion picture about that forgotten 

 Sequoia frontier. It has been used extensively in 

 the California schools. Footage from it appeared 

 on BBC and on German Television. It is now 

 available as a video cassette. 



In my efforts to save an oral history and its 

 images, I had stumbled upon the lost origins of 

 the conservation ethic and how concerns for 

 wilderness in the 1880's became a significant 

 part of our ongoing culture. 



THE DESERTMAKER 



Historically, westward-moving man has been 

 the great desertmakei^ His monomania to 

 subvert lands which lay defenseless created the 

 saline deserts of Mesopotamia, turned cedared 

 Lebanon to a stony rubble, and left the north 

 coasts of Africa a sandy waste. 



As frontier man came upon the monster trees 

 of the Sierra one-hundred and fifty years ago, he 

 was at first stunned by their size. But in no time 



he was plotting how to fell these giants and put 

 their tonnage of wood to "good use." Our folk- 

 lore pictures the man with the rifle and the ax as 

 a sturdy hero, "opening" and "taming" the west 

 This mythical pioneei; howevei; was also a 

 peculiarly driven man. Unsure of his own worth, 

 often a loser in the cities, he feverishly sought 

 precious metals, virgin timbers, untouched 

 wildlife which he might dig, cut, and kill. The 

 frontier identic was such that it could be main- 

 tained only by finding more, more and still more 

 of the vulnerable world to exploit 



Wilderness, in the 19th-century scheme of 

 things, had no right to exist of itself The tree 

 and the beaver had significance only when man 

 turned them to 'profitable use." A man had to be 

 crazy, it was thought, to leave a forest un- 

 touched, a bear not shot, a snake untrampled, a 

 coyote unpoisoned. The good fixjntier was, in the 

 end, a dead frontier: 



Absolutely alien to the mind-set of the hon- 

 tiersman were the ideas of conservation and 

 wilderness preserves. Just how that irresistible 

 drive to dig, to cut, to kill, and to make deserts 

 was blunted by national outrage, and for a mo- 

 ment was turned, is the heart and soul of the 

 Sequoia legend. 



