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Updated: May 3, 2025
One stands in awe in the presence of these wonderful sequoias, the greatest of trees, and we converse in low tones, as if standing in the presence of spirits of bygone ages. Muir Woods was accepted by the United States government as a national monument in 1908, by special proclamation of President Theodore Roosevelt, and was named in honor of John Muir, the celebrated California naturalist.
There are some mighty fine ones in other places, you know; the Santa Cruz forest is splendid. But it's the Mariposa Big Trees, in the Yosemite, I mean. We'd drive from Wawona early in the morning, one day, and stay till the sunset. You can't think what sunset's like among the giant Sequoias, with the red light, like a rain of ruby stars, falling through the branches.
All of us regard the destruction of the Parthenon by the Turks as a great calamity; yet it would be possible, thanks to the laborious studies which have chiefly emanated from Germany, for modern architects to completely restore the Parthenon in its former grandeur; but it is far beyond the power of all the naturalists of the world to restore one of these Sequoias, which were large trees, over 100 feet in height, spreading their leaves to the sun, before the Parthenon was even conceived by the architects and sculptors of Greece.
"Why, then," it will be asked, "are Sequoias always found in greatest abundance in well-watered places where streams are exceptionally abundant?" Simply because a growth of Sequoias creates those streams.
The explanation of this is, that during the long summer drought the loose surface débris is so dried up that the roots of the seedling Sequoias perish before they can penetrate the earth beneath. They require to germinate on the soil itself, and this they are enabled to do when the earth is turned up by the fall of a tree, or where a fire has cleared off the débris.
The stage-road follows almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut out of the steep mountain side a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the river; through fine forests of sugar-pines and yellow pines many of which come almost up to the dimensions of the great sequoias.
How much more rational the suggestion of Professor Agassiz that these trees the entire family of sequoias were quite as numerous in individual varieties at first as now, and that the fruit of the one can never bear the fruit of the other. Again, take the still hardier and more numerous branches of the Quercus or oak family.
Sisley reproducing the old hypothesis in so bare a form as this: "I am prepared to maintain that varieties are individuals, and that as they are born they must die, like other individuals . . . We know that oaks, Sequoias, and other trees, live several centuries, but how many we do not exactly know. But that they must die, no one in his senses will dispute."
For, besides the surpassing grandeur of the scenery about the summit, the trail, in ascending the western flank of the range, conducts through a grove of the giant Sequoias, and through the magnificent Yosemite Valley of the south fork of King's River. This is, perhaps, the highest traveled pass on the North American continent.
It is a curious fact that all the very old sequoias had lost their heads by lightning strokes. "All things come to him who waits." But of all living things, sequoia is perhaps the only one able to wait long enough to make sure of being struck by lightning. So far as I am able to see at present only fire and the ax threaten the existence of these noblest of God's trees.
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