78 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
greatly, and the Yosemite cascade becomes a mere trickling 
brooklet. 
There are a couple of honses for the accommodation of trav- 
ellers, but the fashionable way with those who visit the valley 
ig to go in parties on horseback, provided with pack animals, 
carrying tent, bedding, provisions, and cooking utensils along. 
Ladies dress in the Bloomer style. Wagons do not come 
within forty miles of the valley. There are some quail and 
hare, but no larger game. The dell was inhabited by a war- 
like tribe of red men eight years ago, but they undertook to 
fight with the whites and have all been cut off, and scarcely a 
sign of their existence remains, save here and there the dim 
vestige of a trail. 
The valley was first entered by white men in 1848, if rumor 
be true, and afterward in 1850 and 1852, but its wonders at- 
tracted no notice from the press, and were unknown to the 
public until 1854, and did not attract many visitors until 1856. 
§ 55. Mammoth Free Groves.—The next great natural 
wonder of California is the big-tree grove in Mariposa 
county. It is a grove of four hundred and twenty-seven 
mammoth trees, the largest of which are thirty feet in diame- 
ter and three hundred feet in height. This is the largest spe- 
cies of tree in the world, and this is the largest grove of them. 
The grove is about twenty miles from the Yosemite valley, 
and thirty miles southeast of the town of Mariposa, and about 
four thousand five hundred feet high on the western slope of 
the Sierra Nevada. When the traveller enters the grove he 
sees on all sides of him numerous giants of the forest, varying 
from twenty to thirty-four feet in diameter, and from two hun- 
dred and seventy-five to three hundred and twenty-five feet 
in height. Sublime sight! ‘Each tree fills him with wonder 
as he looks at it. A glance at one of these immense trunks 
conveys a new idea of the magnificence of nature; “glorious 
as the universe on creation’s morn” is this grove. The Titans 
and the gods fought with such tree-trunks as these for clubs, 
when the attempt was made to carry heaven by storm, as re- 
