June 3, ipoS-] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
banks, and the decision to travel on was no sooner made 
than the ropes were cast off and away we went with the 
current. Our good-byes to the neighbors consisted of 
yells and waves of the hands. 
Judging from what I had seen on the previous night 
I had reason to congratulate myself for the company I 
was in. 
"We ain't no common river rats," the Medicine Man 
said boastfully as he watched the bank, being moved by 
the scene. "We're thoroughbreds. We're grafters, ain't 
we old boy?" 
His partner grinned and nodded acquiescence. As if to 
clinch the statement he took a small roll of bills from 
a money-belt and began to count out the money. "Ten- 
twenty-twenty-five-thirty — " he counted. At last he 
straightened up with a smile of conscious pride. "Ninety- 
four bucks !" he exclaimed, "and when we got to 
Hughey's we didn't have a bloody dollar." 
"Yes, an' we'd a had $150 if you hadn't went and got 
drunk Sunday night and lost pretty near a hundred," the 
Medicine Man exclaimed, sourly. 
"Is that any of your, business what I do with ray money 
—that's my money, do you understand that?" 
"I thought we was pardners," the Medicine Man ex- 
claimed. 
"If you had this money you'd buy whiskey — " 
"And you'd drink it !" broke in the Medicine Man. 
The Gambler opened his mouth to reply angrily, but 
something ripped against the side of the boat, a shadow 
darkened the craft. 
"Hustle !" the Medicine Man yelped, jumping for the 
sweeps. A moment later we' were pounding the long oars 
and working clear of the caving bank and mass of tree 
trunks and branches into which the current had carried 
us unnoticed. 
The little natural excitement toned the tempers down, 
and we got dinner harmoniously enough. 
Raymond S. Spears. 
The Big Trees of California. 
BY ALLEN KELLY. 
On the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, at alti- 
tudes between 5,500 and 7,000 feet above sea level, 
stand twelve groves or scattered groups of the oldest 
living things in the world — the Big Trees of California. 
Tbere are a few thousands of the trees, survivors of 
the Pacific Coast's preglacial period, and the giants of 
the groves probably are more than 4,000 ■ years old. 
The largest of them are more than 30 feet in diameter 
and 350 feet in height, and some fallen trees show even 
greater dimensions. A single tree contains more than 
half a million feet, board measure, of sound lumber. 
Because of the enormous quantity of valuable lumber 
contained in these groves, the finest of them are 
threatened with destruction, and others have been virtu- 
ally destroyed by ax and saw. Congress has been 
urged and pleaded with at every session during the 
past five years to preserve the largest of the groups 
of Big- Trees, but has failed to take action, and the 
vandal work of felling the Calaveras Grove may begin 
at any time. 
The big tree is the Sequoia gigantca, and is closely 
related to the California redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, 
which grows in the coast ranges from Oregon to 
Monterey Bay. The redwood grows in dense, homo- 
geneous forests, but the Big Tree exists only in small 
groups scattered among other conifers. S^Quoia belongs 
to the sub-tribe, Taxodince, in which there is only one 
other North American genus, Taxodium—th(t cypress — 
so that its nearest American relative is the cypress, 
although there is a genus of Tasmanian trees to which 
it appears to be more nearly related. 
Botanical authorities disagree as to the tribe to 
which the genus belongs, and also as to the proper 
scientific name. The English have presumed to ap- 
propriate the Big Trees under the name Wellingtonia, 
while the United States Forestry Bureau insists on 
Washingtonia as the only correct name. In California, 
Sequoia gigantea "goes," and as that means "Big Se- 
iquoia," and Sequoia is the name of a great American 
—the Cherokee chief — I do not see why it is not good 
'enough as it stands, maugre the hair-splitting of quar- 
Teling botanists. 
Disputing over the name will not, at any rate, deter 
the thrifty-minded lumberman from chopping down 
ttliese living monuments of ages long gone and sawing 
tthem into boards for the building of pig-pens. The eye 
of greed has been fixed upon the Big Tree, and has 
seen nothing, in its grand proportions but so many 
feet of merchantable lumber, and down comes the oldest 
living thing in the world, unless somebody comes to its 
rescue very soon. 
The Big Tree is not only of unique interest because 
of its age, its history and its rarity, but it is magnificent 
in its beauty. Standing among spruces, pines and firs 
that would seem gigantic elsewhere, the Big Tree's 
columnar trunk dwarfs its neighbors, and its feathery 
foliage towers far above the tallest of them. In color, 
the rich terra-cotta column is conspicuous amid the 
dark brown and gray trunks of the Sierra forest. The 
big tree is gigantic, but it is also wonderfully sym- 
metrical and beautiful to look upon. 
At first view the Big Tree is disappointing in re- 
spect of size, but that is because one does not instantly 
comprehend its proportions. For some hours before 
arriving at a grove, the visitor passes through forests 
of pines and spruces of great size, trees from eight, 
ten and twelve feet diameter and more than 200 feet 
in height being numerous, and becomes accustomed to 
bigness. Not until one has walked around ' the tre- 
mendous trunk of a Big Tree, estimated the distance 
from the ground to the first branch, which may be 150 
feet, compared the size with familiar objects, and per- 
haps ridden through a_ hollow log and out at z knot- 
hole, does the impression of magnitude soak into his 
mind. 
A remarkable quality of the Sequoia is its vitality 
— its resistance to disease and its power of recovery 
from injuries. Wounds made by ax or fire in the tn-irik 
of a tree heal and new bark grows over them and hides 
the scars. One standing tree in the Mariposa Grove 
lias been burned out from the base to a height of more 
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND PARTY IN BIG TREE GROVE. 
Governor Pardee, of California, on the President's right; and John Muir on his left. 
than 100 feet, and one may stand inside the trunk at 
the base and see the sky as through the tube of a 
telecope, and yet the top is green, the wood is sound 
and the tree seems vigorously healthy. Cutting an 
arch in the trunk, through which a Concord coach may 
be driven, does not fatally injure a tree forty years 
after the cutting, the wood on the inside of the_ arch 
remains perfectly sound. A very large specimen in the 
Calaveras Grove, that was denuded entirely of bark in 
1854, is still standing and apparently sound. 
John Muir says he never saw a Big Tree that died 
a natural death — that is, of ola age and decay — and 
that, barring accidents, they seem to be immortal. He 
has counted over 4,000 annual rings in the section of 
a tree that was killed by fire in the King's River 
forest. 
The first white man to see the Big Trees was John 
Bidwell, who discovered the Calaveras Grove in 1841. 
When the gold-seekers invaded California eight years 
later, Bidwell's discovery seems to have been unknown 
to the natives, for a hunter who stumbled into the 
grove on the trail of a bear in 1852 was credited by the 
forty miners with being the first to see a Big Tree. 
Letters written home at that time by my uncle, Lyman 
Sherwin, who was one of the first party guided in from 
Murphy's by the hunter Dowd, to be shown proof of 
his story of finding an enormous tree, indicate plainly 
that the existence of the grove had not been made 
known to the Argonauts by Bidwell. There is no 
question now, however, that Bidwell saw the Calaveras 
trees eleven years before Dowd. 
How easy it is for such a discovery to be forgotten 
was illustrated by the announcement in 1873 of the 
finding of a small grove of Big Trees near the middle 
fork of the American River in Placer county, seventy 
miles north of the Calaveras Grove. This grove, con- 
sisting of six trees standing and a few fallen — the largest 
28 feet in diameter — was discovered by Joe Matlock, 
a miner, in 1855, and the date "i860" is cut into the bark 
of an alder nearby. 
Some of the Big Tree groves are within the lines of 
forest reserves and national parks, and probably will 
be protected for all time. Others are private property 
and have been partly destroyed. The Fresno Grove, not 
far from the preserved Mariposa Grove, is already 
ruined, the State of California having refused to pur- 
chase the tract at a low price from the original lo- 
cator and allowed it to fall into the hands of lumber- 
men, who set up a sawmill in the middle of the grove 
and wasted more timber than they worked up. 
The Calaveras and Stanislaus Groves were preserved 
intact by James L. Sperry until 1900. The first 9c- 
cupies a tract 3,200 feet long by 700 wide, and contaias 
100 trees of large size. The second, about six miles 
distant, contains 1,380 Sequoias, and is the largest of 
all the groves. It was not Mr. Sperry's fault that these 
groves went into the hands of timber speculators. He 
held them for forty years or more, and did his best to 
induce the State of California to relieve him of their 
care when he foresaw his inability to provide for their 
preservation as private property. 
In my official report as State Forester of California, 
in 1S92, I placed all the facts concerning the Calaveras 
and Stanislaus Groves before the Governor and Legis- 
lature, stated that Mr. Sperry was willing to sell to the 
State at a figure far below the commercial value of the 
property, pointed out that he would be obliged to dis- 
pose of it to lumbermen very soon, and urged that 
steps be taken by the State to acquire and preserve the 
Big Trees. But it was impossible to interest the Philis- 
tine statesmen in anything so sentimental, and not until 
the Big Trees passed into the hands of speculators did 
Californians awaken to realization of what the loss of 
the two finest groups of these marvelous monuments of 
past ages would mean to the State and to the world. 
And then it was the women of California, not the 
"statesmen," who bestirred themselves to keep the ax 
from its vandal, sordid work. 
The pity of it is that the statesmen in Washington 
seem to be as stupidly indiflerent to everything that 
isn't "business" or buncombe as the leather-head legis- 
lators of California. 
It Will Interest Them. 
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