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Updated: May 3, 2025
Putting spurs to Bess, he galloped on at a rapid pace for a mile or more, when he became conscious that the sugar pines and cedars were giving place to strange trees which had loomed up before him so gradually that he was not aware the far-famed Sequoias, the giants of the forest, were all about him. A dim, strange light filled the place.
There was a scientist along with us the day we went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of big trees. Think what that means!
One of the first conceits excited by the giant Sequoias was to cut one of them down and dance on its stump. We have also seen dancing in the spray of Niagara; dancing in the famous Bower Cave above Coulterville; and nowhere have I seen so much dancing as in Yosemite. A dance on the inaccessible South Dome would likely follow the making of an easy way to the top of it.
Then, the real business of living begins it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines and sequoias, their decades of centuries.
Toward the south, however, where the Sequoia becomes more exuberant and numerous, the rival trees become less so; and where they mix with Sequoias, they mostly grow up beneath them, like slender grasses among stalks of Indian corn.
Then you will wish to save them from fire and the lumberman's axe, especially the rare and old sequoias. More than three hundred kinds of these dear feathered friends and visitors live in California. Along the sea-shore, in the great valleys and the mountain-forests and meadows, even in the dry, hot desert, the birds, our shy and merry neighbors, are at home.
They are excelled in size only by the mammoth redwood trees of northern California and the giant Sequoias of the southern Sierras. Differences of climate have largely influenced tree growth and types in this country. The distribution of tree families is changing all the time. It shifts just as the climate and other conditions change.
This soil bed is about seven years old, and has been seeded almost simultaneously by pines, firs, Libocedrus, and Sequoia, presenting a simple and instructive illustration of the struggle for life among the rival species; and it was interesting to note that the conditions thus far affecting them have enabled the young Sequoias to gain a marked advantage.
There is, however, nothing to compare with the majesty and grandeur of the Sequoias the giant redwoods of California the largest of which, still living, reach upward more than one hundred yards above the ground, and show, by the number of their rings, that their life began from three to five thousand years ago.
There are no less than twenty-eight varieties of this one species of oak, all of them conceded to be spontaneous in origin, and it has been on the earth quite as long as the more stately tribe of Sequoias. Besides, not more than one twenty-thousandth part of the earth's surface has been dug over to determine the extent to which any one of its varieties has flourished in the past.
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