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Sierra Club Bulletin 



I fancy, has heard the good news and is waving its branches 

 for joy. The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are 

 done in the darkness of ignorance and unbehef, for when Hght 

 comes the heart of the people is always right. Forty-seven 

 years ago one of these Calaveras King Sequoias was laborious- 

 ly cut down, that the stump might be had for a dancing-floor. 

 Another, one of the finest in the grove, more than three hun- 

 dred feet high, was skinned alive to a height of one hundred 

 and sixteen feet from the 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 Se- 

 quoia 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 



