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 PARK 
 
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Stage Coach in Fire-Hollowed Redwood. 
 
California Redwood Faik 
 
 Soni.-tim.-s Call.-.l 
 
 Sempervirens Park 
 
 An Appreciation 
 
 Frium) Wm. Rkhahdson. SuperintendExt oe State PKiNTixr. 
 
 SACRAMENTO. CALIFORNIA 
 19 12 
 
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 f \|^4^-^V>^' 
 
 / / 
 
.csrz 
 
 D. OF D. 
 APR 23 1913 
 
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 GRAY countries and grim empires pass away, 
 And all the pomp and glory of citied towers 
 Goes down to dust ; and youth itself shall age. 
 But, oh, the splendor of this autumn dawn, 
 This passes not away ! This dew-drenched range. 
 This infinite great width of open space, 
 This cool, keen wind that blows like God's own breath 
 On life's once drowsy coal, and thrills the blood. 
 This brooding sea of sun-washed solitude. 
 This virginal dome of open air — 
 These, these endure, and greater are than grief ! 
 Still there is strength ; and life, oh, life is good ! 
 Still the horizon calls, the morrow lures ; 
 Still hearts adventurous seek outward trails; 
 Still, still life holds its hope! 
 For here is air and God's good greenness spread I 
 
 — Arthur Stringer. 
 
As a recognition of her generous and timely 
 aid and inspiration in the acquisition and de- 
 velopment of this forest park, for the people, 
 this zi'ork is respectfully dedicated to 
 
 MRS. PHOEBE A. HEARST 
 
 Copyriglit JoiJ by Arthur A. 'I'aylnr. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 1. Fkuxtispikce. 
 
 Stage Coach in Fire-llollowed Rctlwood. 
 
 2. I'ATiiKK 01' TiiE Forest. 
 3.- AfoTnEu oi' THE Forest. 
 
 4. (".rowing Trees ox Uptukx\ei> Stump. 
 
 5. The Cloistered Aisee. 
 
 6. Scene on Sempervirens Creek. 
 
 7, a. MANZ.\i\iT.\ IN r>Eoo.\i. 
 
 Ceonothis or WiEi) Lilacs. 
 9. TovoN, OR Christmas Berrv. 
 
 10. Scene on Opal Creek. 
 
 11. Herrv Creek F.\les. 
 
 12. The Chiei-t.mn. 
 
 13. United 0.\k. 
 
 14. F'lNE .\XD 0.\K. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Pace 
 
 Genesis oe the Big Basin 3 
 
 Geologic Record Showing Remarkable Upheavals and Contor- 
 tions — The Lay of tlie I^and as It Was Ceft for X'egetable and 
 Aniinal Life. 
 
 In Primeval Times 6 
 
 Aboriginal Sequoias of Stupendous Size — Animals Which Occupied 
 the Wilderness. 
 
 Early History oe the Forest 9 
 
 When It Stretched from the Bay of Monterey to Verba Duena, 
 Ralph S. Smith Sought to Save a Remnant — Described by Ferdi- 
 nand Lee Clark — The Forest as Revealed to Early \"isitors. 
 
 "Save the Redwoods" 22 
 
 Years of Quiet Agitation — 1 he Organization and Work of the 
 Sempervirens Club. 
 
 Imkst Imtressioxs 2<S 
 
 Extracts from Articles Written by W. W. Richards, Mrs. Stephen 
 A. Jones, Edwin Sidney Williams, and Josephine Clifford Mc- 
 Cracken. 
 
 Father Kenna's Account M 
 
 A Patriotic Friend of the Park and Prime Mover for Its 
 Preservation. 
 
 PaRCHASE OF THE Park ,1S 
 
 The First Commission — Investigation and Negotiations — Timber 
 \'alue of the Tract — Governor's Camp. 
 
 '1'he Tract Acouikep 4.3 
 
 Three Thousand Eight Hundred Acres in Extent — Quarter of a 
 Million Dollars Paid — General Topography — Aspect and Eleva- 
 tions. 
 
 The Big Fire 47 
 
 A Twenty Days' War with Wild Fire — One Third the Area of the 
 Park Invaded by Flames — A Red.wood that Burned for Fourteen 
 Months. 
 
 Timber Cutting 52 
 
 Brief Account of the Infamous "Rape of the Redwoods. " 
 
 Following the Fire 54 
 
 Building of Fire Trails — Other Permanent Im)iri)vements on the 
 Property. 
 
C()XTF:XTS— Continufcl. 
 
 Page 
 (ioiNG In 56 
 
 Scenic Features' of the Highway from Boulder Creek — Changing 
 Seasons Reflected in Variegated Landscape. 
 
 Rocks and Streams 59 
 
 ililes of Running P.roolis — Numerous Cascades and Waterfalls - 
 Quaintly Chiseled and Wave Worn Rocks. 
 
 FivOKA 01- THE Park l)y Isabel McCnickcit 65 
 
 A Botanical Survey of the Trees, Shrubs, Plants, and Wild I'Min'.c r^ 
 in the Park. 
 
 The Cwe 82 
 
 Light anu Shadow ix the Park bj- I'irgiiiia Garland 84 
 
 Inlook of an Artistic Ivye — Nature's Half Plidden Secrets — Revela- 
 tions of Flowing, Falling Water — The Beauty that ^lust Be 
 Sensed as Well as Seen. 
 
 Al'Tumn Color by I'irgiiiia Garland 94 
 
 ^^'hen Leaves and Berries and Bark Are Tinted in Scarlets and 
 Crimsons, in Bright Yellows and Striking Blues. 
 
 Fungi Garden? by Virginia Garland 98 
 
 Another World of Beautj' L'nder Cover of Fallen Foliage — In the 
 Mushroom Kingdom. 
 
 Bn<D Life ix the Park by Virginia Garland 102 
 
 Its Presence Easily Discovered by Those with Eyes to See and 
 ]''ars to Hear — Practical Pointers for Those Desiring to Form 
 Their Acquaintance. 
 
 The Green Peopee b\- Virginia Garland 110 
 
 Our Relations to the Race that Dwelt in These Regions Before (_)ur 
 Time. 
 
 The Redwood 117 
 
 Character of Tree — Its Ancient Lineage — Life History — Non- 
 Inflammable Nature — As Pictured by Delmas. 
 
 Sentiment and Shingles ^^ 125 
 
 Tributes bv Famous Poets 8, 33, 42, 93, 101, 115 
 
 Toaquin Miller — Charles Keeler — Dr. C. W. Doyle — A. D. Nord- 
 hoff — Charles Elmer Teuny — Bret Harte. 
 
A FOREWORD. f " 
 
 California's Redwood Park Commissioners put forth 
 this booklet, for the double purpose of conveying to the 
 people of the State a better knowledge and a keener 
 appreciation of the State's forest reservation, and also to 
 impress upon the people the importance of securing for 
 State ownership the entire area of the Big Basin. 
 
 This task was entrusted to the Secretary, to whom it 
 has been a literal labor of love, and the same can be said 
 of the others whose writings are embodied herein. A too 
 common idea of a forest is of sombrous silence. There 
 is silence in this place, but it is a silence in which the 
 voices of creation can be heard. There is majesty and 
 sublimity in these time-defying trees, but as we have tried 
 to show, there is also in this wood beauty and color, and 
 woodland life in many manifestations. This forest is an 
 aggregation of arboreal wonders. It is moreover a 
 cathedral, a university, a sanatorium, a source of solace 
 to the soul, an inspiration to the intellect, a tonic to the 
 body. 
 
 California is munificent with her penal institutions, 
 with her national guard and asylums. Will the reader 
 help us to secure as liberal consideration for Sempervirens 
 Park? 
 
 Arthur A. Taylor, 
 
 Secretary. 
 California Redwood Park Commission. 
 
 September, 19 12. 
 
HE ever green bowl of the Big Basin brims 
 over with secrets. Half whispered lures 
 beckon down the trails, elusive meanings lie 
 in the dreamy hollows, fleeting significance 
 brushes past our ears in the flutter of bird wings, and the 
 great trees shed upon us an atmosphere of living light 
 and shadow that tests and tries, while it heals our world- 
 troubled spirits. We do not know why we are alternately 
 comforted and made restless, why in rare, . flashing- 
 moments, our hearts ache with the ecstacy of a piercing- 
 truth ; for we live mostly in a world of perverted mean- 
 ings, and the vague insight of life so diametrically 
 opposed to our general existence, stirs, disturbs, before it 
 can soothe. 
 
 If the iron is not too heavy in our souls, we know that 
 we need Nature, but w^e go to the fields and the forests 
 in hordes, we cling together in crowds, we travel far to 
 hear the voice of a mountain stream ; but we secure to 
 ourselves the chatter of our own kind within call. 
 
 Then the half-told stories of the Open are not always 
 happy lures. Sometimes the riddles hurt, are too hard to 
 even dream of solving; yet if we only hear the faint, far 
 echo of the everlasting question, not knowing that it is a 
 question, hearing only the unintelligible, eternal murmur, 
 we are not in the forest in vain. 
 
 Virginia Garland. 
 
Genesis of Sempervirens Park. 
 
 \ the beginning there was chaos, then the 
 v;isty deep, then a convulsion that upheaved 
 the bottom of the sea and it became dry land, 
 followed by those incomprehensible aeons of 
 lime which we call geological periods, during which the 
 forces of Nature were working with a zeal and a 
 patience infinite in their scope to prepare for the presence 
 of man on this planet. 
 
 In this region creative power was manifested in a pecu- 
 liar manner. The magnitude and the intensity of the 
 titanic throes of the Earth Mother here are beyond the 
 reach of the imagination, beyond the grasp of scientific 
 certainty. 
 
 Geologic stratas were uplifted by earthquakes, burned 
 through, fused, intermixed by volcanic action, purged by 
 torrential downpours, scoured by floods, seared by heat 
 in a way and to a degree quite out of the ordinary 
 method of world making. 
 
 The chalybeates and the sulphurs and the salts found 
 elsewhere in deposits, are here diffused and dispersed, 
 impregnating the springs and forming a widely dis- 
 tributed distillate for tree nutrition. 
 
 The mutation theory has been worked out with soils 
 and sandstones, as man has demonstrated it with flowers 
 
and plants. Thus it is that the geologist of to-day 
 traverses this territory hammer in hand, knocks at every 
 rock and boulder and looks and listens only to be 
 amazed and dumbfounded. He tries to classify and 
 describe, but he ends in uncertainty and doubt. 
 
 Dr. J. C. Branner, head of the department of geology 
 in the Stanford University, who with assistants procured 
 the data for the government geologic atlas of this region, 
 states therein : 
 
 Above the basement complex of acidic plutonic rocks and 
 metamorphic schists and limestones, the age of which is uncer- 
 tain, there are represented within the Santa Cruz quadrangle 
 alone fourteen recognizable formations. Nine distinct and far- 
 reaching disturbances, as recorded by profound inconformities, 
 not to mention many local readjustments, took place in the 
 region during the deposition of these formations. Volcanism 
 was active during several epochs, and at least one of them lasted 
 for a considerable time. 
 
 The structure is complex. In many places the strata are 
 intensely folded, faulted and crushed. Faulting, folding and 
 crushing have doubtless been going on in this area since early 
 geologic times. The rock surface exposed is too small and the 
 geology too complex to afford any clear conception of the 
 physical geography of the past. The rocks occur in such con- 
 fusion, so faulted, altered, decomposed, that their sequence 
 has not been clearly made out. 
 
 ^ .je J* 
 
 Doubtless Nature "had her mind on doing some dis- 
 tinctive, transcendent thing in this territory. 
 
 What we know is that when the caldron was allowed to 
 cool, there was left a more or less broken and detached 
 
range of niountains, ten to fifteen miles from the ocean, 
 with elevations of from 2,000 to 3,500 feet. Living 
 waters flowed from their sides and their interception of 
 the rain clouds traveling inland from the ocean gave a 
 heavy precipitation to all the region. Thus came run- 
 ning streams in profusion, plowing their swift courses 
 to the sea, eroding V-shaped valleys. 
 
 In one instance this seaward flow was intercepted by 
 spurs from the mountain range, and three streams and 
 their tributaries converged into one before finding an 
 outlet through a cleft in tiie granite-ribbed buttress that 
 bounds the tract on the south. 
 
 This peculiar conformation enclosed an area of approx- 
 imately 14,000 acres, and when the California pioneer 
 came upon the scene he called this the Big Basin to 
 distinguish it from the narrower basins or valleys of 
 other streams. 
 
In Primeval Times. 
 
 IFE, cataclysmal life, which manifested itself 
 here with such fervor and intensity in the 
 geological formation and topographical con- 
 tour of this territory, imparted an equally 
 phenomenal vitality to the animal and vegetable creation. 
 Fossilized and entombed in the rocks, evidences of the 
 marine life of this region are abundant. 
 
 Its ever-virile character is shown in the survival of that 
 peculiar tree of the past we call the Sequoia, which not 
 only awes us into silence and adoration as we stand before 
 its living presence, but which by the visible tokens of 
 prior generations takes our thought and our imagination 
 back into the abysmal depths of time, before history was 
 written, before tradition preserved the records of the 
 human race. 
 
 The Sequoia scmpcri'ii'cns (Redwood) propagates itself 
 more generally from stump shoots than from seed. 
 Sometimes we find the offspring circled around the parent 
 tree for two and three generations. In instances, oft- 
 repeated in a redwood forest, the parent tree grew, lived, 
 ripened, decayed and died, and wdth a speed incompre- 
 hensible for its slowness, passed back to earth and air, 
 leaving a crater-like cavity where once its trunk was 
 reared. 
 
 There were giants in those days. 
 
 The primeval redwood, not content with a circular 
 expansion of forty, or fifty, or sixty, or seventy-five feet, 
 
often stretched its mighty bole over an area ninety feet 
 in ciroumference. 
 
 These stupendous craters are found here up to altitudes 
 of 2,000 feet, mute monuments to the continuity of life, 
 surpassing sworn statements in the integrity of their testi- 
 mony to the vivifying- and revivifying influences of the 
 soil and climate. 
 
 When modern man appeared upon this scene (only 
 sixty years ago) he found the tract, which he called the 
 Big Basin, as viewed from its rim, a sea of tree tops, 
 difficult to penetrate by reason of its redundant under- 
 growth, occupied by a population apparently able to hold 
 its own against intruders. 
 
 Grizzly bears were numerous and not bashful, cougars 
 abounded, wild cats were plentiful as were lesser animals 
 of the predatory class. 
 
 But then, as now, the lure of the forest was irresistible. 
 Hunters came seeking game, campers came seeking health 
 and recuperation, woodmen came spying out the tall, 
 straight trunks of redwood that would split easy — "shake 
 trees." as they were called, which could be cleft with the 
 ax into long, broad shingles : from stump to branch, a 
 hundred feet or more of "clear stuff" to be packed out on 
 nndeback to market. 
 
 Later, homesteaders invaded its semi-sacred precincts, 
 mighty men with the ax and the rifle, who for reasons of 
 
 "vr^^- 
 
c 
 
 their own sought the solitude. There were only few of 
 these intruders, but enough to eradicate in process of time 
 the grizzlies and the cougars, and to make wild cats 
 scarce. Provided as the other animals were with admir- 
 able cover and, delivered from the mountain lion, their 
 arch-enemy, the deer and small game became permanent 
 joint tenants with man. 
 
 Crude trails were cut to the coast and to the San 
 Lorenzo Valley, and tanbark to some extent was donkey- 
 backed over the ridge to Santa Cruz tanneries. 
 
 Thus it is that while we write of this as a virgin forest 
 we do not mean that it has not known man, but that it 
 has not surrendered or been sold to the ravishing, 
 exterminating saw, and retains its woodland integrity. 
 
 THE REDWOOD. 
 
 By Dr. C. W. Doyle. 
 
 Hail, Monarch of the Woods! A thousand years 
 
 Have sped since first you reached forth to the sky, 
 
 .\nd still your trunk its giant frame uprears, 
 
 As though it mocked at time and would not die. 
 
 Your roots defy the earthquake's shock, your crest 
 
 Denies the puissance of the winter blast ; 
 
 Year after year your lordly branches dressed 
 
 Their phalanxes in green, and still you cast 
 
 A mighty shadow 'thwart the tangled glen. 
 
 Rooted in majesty for aye you'd stand. 
 
 But now your doom is told — lo ! pigmy men 
 
 Will mar your kingly state with ruthless hand ; 
 
 The widowed hills and woods will mourn their cliief, 
 ,-\nd tears distil from every blade and leaf. 
 
 — Surf, August 25, i8g4. 
 
' Early History of This Forest. 
 
 RIGINALLY, the redwood forest ran from 
 the Pajaro River to the sand dunes of San 
 Francisco, in an unbroken embankment of 
 evergreen against the westerly slope of the 
 Santa Cruz Mountains. In the middle eighties, the 
 inroads of the lumbermen had become so extensive that 
 the idea of conserving a portion of this forest for 
 posterity found expression through Mr. Ralph S. Smith 
 of Redwood City, editor of the Times and Gazette. 
 
 It has been said that Mr. Smith's zeal in behalf of a 
 forest reserve was stimulated by the desire of the Spring- 
 Valley Water Company to secure a permanent cover for 
 their Pescadero watershed ; but be that as it may, Mr. 
 Smith is entitled to the credit of first propagating the idea 
 in print of saving a share of the redwoods for the future. 
 Editor Smith not only advocated it in his own paper, 
 but he obtained a hearing through the San Francisco 
 Chronicle, which, under the caption of "A Redwood 
 Park," published the following: 
 
 Among the most beautiful of all coniferous trees is the red- 
 wood of California, the Sequoia scinpervirens, as the botanists 
 call it. It is purely indigenous, and with the mammoth Sequoias 
 form the distinctive feature of the forests of this State. For 
 many years it has been the chief source of the lumber supply of 
 the State, and in consequence the redwood forests have been 
 enormously depleted. It is known to comparatively few that 
 
10 
 
 within fifty miles of this city, iu a southerly direction, there is 
 a redwood forest of one hundred and eighty square miles, or 
 over one hundred and twenty thousand acres. The northern 
 two thirds of this tract is almost virgin, there having been but 
 slight inroads made upon it. This tract begins on Pescadero 
 Creek, forty-six miles from San Francisco. Its western edge 
 reaches to within about four miles of the Pacific Ocean, on an 
 average, and it crosses the summits and covers the slopes of the 
 Coast Range lying between the bay and the ocean. 
 
 The forest of which we are speaking is owned by private 
 persons, but it is understood that a portion of it ample for a 
 redwood park, say twenty thousand acres, can be bought at the 
 present time for fifteen dollars an acre, or three hulidred 
 thousand dollars for the tract. It is, however, becoming the 
 object of speculation, as redwood lumber is yearly becoming 
 scarcer and more valuable, and if any action is to be taken for 
 its purchase it should be done at once. 
 
 It is believed that if the State of California would appropriate 
 a portion of the purchase money, the rest could be raised by 
 subscription from public-spirited men who know and appreciate 
 the value of such a preserve to the State. Its proximity to this 
 cit}' makes it more available and desirable for the purposes of a 
 great forest park than an}^ other body of redwood in the State. 
 
 Ralph S. Smith of Redwood City, to whom we are indebted 
 for much of this information, has taken a deep interest in this 
 scheme, and will undertake, if the State- will appropriate a 
 reasonably generous sum for the purchase of this tract, to be 
 placed at the disposal of the Forestry Commission, to raise an 
 equal amount by subscription for the same purpose. He has 
 studied the subject carefully and intelligently, and while he is 
 certainly an enthusiast upon it, his enthusiasm should commend 
 itself to all who care for the future of the State. 
 
 We can see no good reason why the legislature should not 
 make an appropriation toward the purchase of this tract, pro- 
 
11 
 
 vided the Forestry Commission shall indorse it. They are com- 
 petent to judge of the desirability of the location for the purpose 
 of a redwoocl park, and if their report should be favorable, and 
 a perfect title can be secured to the State, we know of no way 
 in which the public money could be better invested, or which 
 would return a better income for all future time. We must not 
 be construed as meaning that the park would pay an annual 
 interest on the investment into the state treasury ; but there are 
 other kinds of income besides interest. Golden Gate Park is not 
 a paying institution in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but 
 it would be hard to convince a San Franciscan that the city has 
 ever invested any money to better purpose than there. Yosemite, 
 Yellowstone Park, Niagara — none of them pay money dividends, 
 yet each is worth untold wealth to the nation. 
 
 We cannot measure everything by the decimal notation, nor 
 figure a percentage of money gain upon every investment of 
 wealth. When redwood lumber becomes scarce and valuable, 
 the esthetic point of view will not commend itself to those who 
 have or can obtain control of this body of redwood, and the 
 dollars will weigh heavier with them than the beauty or pride 
 of the State. They will not care to preserve timber having 
 an actual cash value, in order that future generations may enjoy 
 a redwood forest. It would be too much to ask of private indi- 
 viduals to sacrifice material interests for an abstract proposition. 
 
 The Chronicle article, viewed in the light of siibseqtient 
 events, was both prophetic and pathetic. 
 
 Needless to say, the State did not acquire twenty thou- 
 sand acres at fifteen dollars per acre. Fifteen years later, 
 the State bought a bargain when it obtained solid redwood 
 timber land at one hundred dollars per acre. 
 
 The reserve in the mind of Mr. Smith extended over 
 the Pescadero and the Butano, instead of the Big- Basin. 
 
A Redwood Park was not heard from again until 1889. 
 In the mean time, Ralph Smith and his plans had both 
 passed away. At this time, a portion of the lands now 
 included in the State Redwood Park, a tract of 1,300 
 acres, was projected as a game preserve. 
 
 Ferdinand Lee Clark, who had an eventful and distin- 
 guished career in military and civil life, was in Santa 
 Cruz at that time, and sought solace and escape from the 
 world in camp life in this spot. Mr. Clark wrote for the 
 Santa Cruz Surf an article describing the operations then 
 instituted, in which he said : 
 
 The region in and about the Big Basin is the wildest and 
 roughest that can be conceived, the slopes being rugged and the 
 level plateau covered so densely with underbrush as to be almost 
 impenetrable. 
 
 The operations then in progress he describes as an 
 intent to fence the tract of 1,300 acres, for which purpose 
 2,500 pickets were to be split. A space twenty feet in 
 width was to be cleared along the line of the fence. 
 
 All the underbrush on the plateau of Waddell Creek of 300 or 
 400 acres will be cleared away and a great redwood park will be 
 opened. Fourteen men are now clearing for a road. It is 
 expected the place will be swarming with hunters and fishers. 
 
 Owing to some manipulation of land titles, this work 
 fortunately was soon suspended. (Some of the pickets 
 then split lie on the floor of the park, still sound, in 191 2.) 
 
 Mr. Clark also wrote of "an immense redwood tree of 
 great height and 28 feet in diameter." (Now called the 
 Father of the Forest.) 
 
13 
 
 I'liiito by StiiMtnr. 
 
 Father of the Forest. 
 
 ^& 
 
14 
 
 His personal letters were so enthusiastic that the writer 
 determined to take the trip. It required three times as 
 man}' hours to reach the edge of the Basin from Santa 
 Cruz as it does now to "run down" in an auto from San 
 Francisco to the Governor's Camp in the heart of the 
 park. The twilight was deepening when the writer and 
 a companion prepared to tarry for the night at an aban- 
 doned tanbark camp, utilizing the donkey mangers for 
 mattresses. 
 
 The writer slept that night — nay, he slept not but lay 
 looking upward, following the faint lines of light that 
 traced the trunks of the redwoods, until they touched the 
 stars. An optical illusion, perhaps, but not a delusion. 
 Jacob's ladder was no more a myth or a miracle, for verily 
 the redwood tips were in contact with the heavens. 
 
 The things heard in the stupendous silence of that 
 night, the things seen in its impenetrable darkness, were 
 unutterable, but the slogan "Save the Redwoods" was 
 seared into his soul. 
 
 Primal Appearance. 
 
 In the morning we followed the bark haulers' trail to 
 Captain Clark's camp, where two days were given to 
 genuine exploration. During these days we often shared 
 with Captain Clark the joys of discovery, looking for the 
 first time upon curious creations, marvelous growths, and 
 exquisite manifestations of woodland beauty hitherto 
 unseen by mortal eyes. 
 
 Sight-seeing was a constant battle with the underbrush, 
 
15 
 
 fighting our way step by step, often crawling on hands 
 and knees, and sometimes compelled to adopt a more 
 prostrate position, as was the serpent of Eden. 
 
 But the rewards ! One by one we traced out the big 
 trees since become famous for their size, for their height, 
 some for their symmetry and timber-producing capacities, 
 some for their wonderful triumphs over fire, some for 
 quaint growths of burl, some for their strange contortions, 
 but all challenging admiration and giving forth an impres- 
 sion of life and power beyond transmission in speech 
 — beyond conception by careless beholders. We stood 
 dumb before a mammoth redwood stump fifty feet high, 
 the basic terminal of a tree, which some time had been 
 riven by an unknown force. Its sundered halves lay 
 stretched prone on the earth for more than two hundred 
 feet, embalmed in moss, through time so long measured 
 that on the top of the stump, out of the air had been 
 gathered soil and sustenance sufficient to support a thrifty 
 young fir tree several feet in height. 
 
 We felt a strange thrill when standing in the presence, 
 and in the interior, of that phenomenal redwood which has 
 come to be called the Mother Tree. Resisting alike the 
 stern hand of Time and the deep fires of affliction, she 
 still abides serenely, green at the top, while succeeding 
 generations of other trees have sprouted, grown, matured, 
 decayed about her. 
 
 Not in the depths of the Grand Canyon, nor from the 
 summit of any mountain, did we ever experience such a 
 sense of sublime awe, as when through the thicket, we 
 
16 
 
 i 
 
 Mother of the Forest. 
 
17) 
 
 came into the presence of those four redwoods, now 
 known as the Calendar group. Four trees, straight as 
 arrows, symmetrically seamed, rising more than two 
 hundred feet into the heavens, of exactly equal size, stand- 
 ing an equi-distance apart, directly upon the points of the 
 compass, north, east, south and west. To this day there 
 is a mystery about these trees that refuses to resolve itself 
 into the commonplace. 
 
 But the mornings — and the same mornings dawn here 
 forever, past, present and future. Oh, the dawning of the 
 mornings ! When the light so softly, gently, so sweetly 
 persuasive, so tenderly penetrates the night, stealing upon 
 the sleeper in the open like a fairy's touch upon the eyelids. 
 You must awake, for you are about to witness a miracle 
 as old as creation, as fresh as the morning dew. 
 
 Soon you can see "trees as men walking," and witness 
 a movement in the forest which has stirred all animal life 
 and set millions of leaves a quiver. 
 
 Oh! the melody (if we may use the word) of this 
 filtered light which comes down through the tree tops, 
 dififused, rarefied light, the Divine light that made the 
 morning stars sing for joy on creation's dawn. 
 
 In was our leaving day, but before breakfast there was 
 to be a visit to a fallen tree in the bosom of Opal Creek, 
 from whose upturned stump three lusty redwoods had 
 grown, standing in exact line with each other, with their 
 foothold embanked in moss and ferns. It was a "fierce" 
 brush fight to reach the spot, but then the wonder and the 
 beauty, the suggestiveness and the sublimity of the scene, 
 
18 
 
 Growing Trees on Upturned Stump. 
 
 rhoto liy Applyby. 
 
19 
 
 absorbed every sense. Tiger lilies, taller than any man, 
 with blooms of flaring fire stood by the side of the 
 prostrate body of this past potentate of the forest ; sway- 
 ing, overhanging incense-breathing azaleas hid the stream, 
 and jnst as the first rays of the sun touched the upper 
 branches of the surrounding trees, a thrush, perched high 
 on an oak, poured into the arboreal silence a libation of 
 praise that vocalized the very soul of the forest. 
 
 These trees have since become known as the Crucifixion 
 group. 
 
 When we went forth into the world again, no man 
 believed our report, and as for preserving redwoods, the 
 timber-cutting population of that period looked at us with 
 the same contemptuous pity that they would if we had 
 proposed to conserve the waters of the Bay of Monterey. 
 
 Nevertheless, within twelve years, the State invested a 
 quarter of a million dollars in this forest, to the honor 
 and credit of its legislators, and the ultimate blessing of 
 mankind. 
 
 Early Explorers. 
 
 During that year several articles were published in the 
 San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury and other 
 State papers, emanating from Captain Clark and others, 
 all giving favorable consideration to the project of pre- 
 serving a "Redwood Park of the Pacific." Editorially 
 the Chronicle gave emphatic endorsement to the plan, and 
 of the work of publicity carried on at that time said : 
 
 F. L. Clark, whose interesting accounts of the Santa Cruz Big 
 
20 
 
 Trees have lately been published in the Chronicle, has been 
 exploring the recesses of the Big Basin, a grand area of mountain 
 land lying in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, taking the 
 elevation of the prominent ridges and mapping out the intricate 
 system of streams that have their rise in that region. Mr. Clark 
 has entered the basin from different directions, obtaining infor- 
 mation by actual observation of value to those interested in the 
 topography of the country, and aiding materially in the correction 
 or confirmation of surveys made. This work is in the line of 
 that undertaken by the late Ralph Smith, who, as editor of the 
 Redwood City Gazette, was untiring in his efforts to secure as a 
 national park some portion of the great groves of redwood that 
 are now rapidly disappearing before tlie ax of the woodcutter. 
 
 Captain Clark traced the headwaters of the Pescadero. 
 the Butano, the Waddeh, the Gazos, Boulder Creek, and 
 the San Lorenzo, and the elevations and directions he gave 
 have been confirmed by the Government surveys since 
 made. His last article ended with these words : 
 
 All this great triangle is one vast forest of noble redwoods 
 interspersed with groves of oak and many kinds of pines, with a 
 dense undergrowth of smaller trees and shrubs. 
 
 He was solicited to prepare a paper on the Sequoia 
 scmpcrvirens to be read before the State Horticultural 
 Society at its meeting- in Santa Cruz in 1891. This paper 
 was afterward published in Wood and Iron, and portions 
 of it obtained a well-merited circulation in the State press. 
 
 His appreciation of the redwood is attested by the 
 following extract : 
 
 Nowhere throughout the world can be found trees more 
 majestic — inspiring ! There is a grand symmetry in their growth 
 
(^f 
 
 quite distinct t'rom the sturdy habit of the ancient oaks of Europe, 
 the towering grace of Australia's eucalyti, the pillared shade of 
 the banyan trees of India, or the dome-like, sepulchral forms of 
 the great African baobabs, all of which have excited the admira- 
 tion — yes, the w-orship — of man from remote ages. 
 
 Involuntarily we associate the Sequoias in antiquity with the 
 Pyramids ; and while wandering amidst their massive growths 
 one half expects to find there the ruins of fanes and temples as 
 ancient as those on the banks of the Nile, or the quaintly 
 sculptured monuments of the Toltec and Aztec races, lying half 
 buried in the dense forests of Chiapas and Yucatan. 
 
 When these great trees were seedlings — the Egyptian Pyramids 
 were fresh from the builders' hands — the foundation stones of 
 tliose of South America were not yet laid. 
 
 In those dim, distant days the very i,.\ni) from which they 
 -•sprang was — geologists affirm — yet newly upheaved from the 
 ocean depths. The rugged range of the Sierras, on whose 
 western slopes the Sequoia gigantea is only found, looked down 
 upon the broad, shallow lake covering the valleys of the San 
 Joaquin and Sacramento ; while on the Coast Range hills the 
 delicate foliage of the scnipervircns — our own "redwoods" — began 
 to tinge with ever-living green the otherwise bare elevations. 
 
 In the growth of these great trees one feels there is a tremen- 
 dous vitality that time cannot weaken — that the passing centuries 
 seem but to renew. They are prostrated by violent storms, by 
 earthquakes, by the ax of the woodman ; here and there they are 
 undermined by floods or eaten out by oft-recurring fires, but 
 though, in the latter case, they may be reduced to mere shells, 
 tliough we may stand within the lofty shaft and gaze upward 
 through the hollow column's blackened heart two hundred feet 
 and see the nearby clouds drift by, yet the trunk sends out a 
 vigorous growth of branch and leaf and fruit ; the shell is still 
 "sempervirens." 
 
 21 
 
 
22 
 
 "Save the Redwoods." 
 
 LTIIOUGH much sentiment was aroused at 
 
 this time for the salvation of "some redwoods 
 
 somewhere," yet the movement lacked political 
 
 or commercial leadership, and lapsed into a 
 
 waiting mood. 
 
 The decade that followed was one of education and 
 evolution along lines of forestry and conservation. The 
 hope of a redwood reserve in the Big Basin was never 
 abandoned, and its advocates often secured a hearing in 
 the public prints. The value of such a reservation had 
 been presented to the late Senator Stanford in so con- 
 vincing a light that he had determined to secure several 
 thousand acres in this region and annex it to the university 
 he had founded, his death preventing the consummation 
 of his plans. Meantime, Dr. W. R. Dudley, head of the 
 botanical department of Stanford University, made dili- 
 gent research into the vegetable life here manifest, finding 
 a variety of trees, plants and shrubs, indicating this as a 
 transitional zone for northern and southern trees of the 
 Pacific coast. 
 
 On March 17, 1900, a double-column, double-leaded 
 editorial appeared in the Santa Cruz Surf, in which, 
 among other things, was stated : 
 
 All lovers of Nature, every person who appreciates the majesty 
 of a tree, every individual whose hopes and aspirations extend 
 into the future, must rejoice in the action of Congress designed 
 to avert the destruction of the famous Big Trees of Calaveras. 
 
23 
 
 The Cloistered Aisle. 
 
24 
 
 John Muir says : "Every Sequoia, I fancy, has heard the good 
 news and is waving its branches for joy." 
 
 And if these inanimate personalities, so to speak, are waving 
 for joy, it must be not only because the ax is stayed from the 
 gigantea, but that there is an assurance that somewhere a remnant 
 of the sempervirens will also be spared from the assaults of the 
 lumberman. 
 
 With the impending revival of the lumber business, and the 
 prospective demands for export, the forests will become extinct, 
 long before California celebrates the centennial of American 
 occupation. 
 
 The present appears an opportune time for the revival of the 
 agitation instigated some years ago in behalf of a redwood 
 preserve. 
 
 Indeed, it is a case of now or never with the Big Basin, the 
 last possible reservation of redwoods which shall, not only include 
 big trees, but the varied growth of a typical California forest. 
 
 Its peculiar topography and distance from transportation 
 preserved the tract in question from the early onslaughts upon 
 the redwoods, and here within forty miles of San Francisco, as 
 the bird flies, is a bit of forest as pristine as "the perfect world 
 by Adam trod," and whose trees cast broad shadows before Rome 
 was built. 
 
 A pamphlet could easily be written descriptive of Nature's 
 manifestations in this peculiarly favored spot. This article can 
 only hint, and suggest, and it must suffice to say that altogether 
 there are over fifty varieties of tree growth within an area of six 
 miles square, including many noble specimens of the redwood, 
 fir, madrone, oak, pine, maple, etc. 
 
 Its wealth of fauna and flora is distributed in a way lliat would 
 delight the soul of a landscape gardener, for within the confines 
 of the "Basin" is constant variation of aspect and altitude. 
 
 As it stands to-day the preservation of the Big Basin appears 
 to be "Nobodv's business." The timber cutters commenced 
 
25 
 
 encroaching on its limits last year. This summer they will do 
 more mischief, and in two years, the region instead of possessing 
 Edenic aspects, will be worse than a Sahara. 
 
 It was easy to stay the hand of the destroyer in the Calaveras 
 Grove, when the women of the California Club took up the 
 matter. 
 
 Perhaps there is work here and now for women to do. 
 
 Certainly the value of the Big Basin undisturbed to Cali- 
 fornians and the world, now and in the future, as compared with 
 the Calaveras Grove is as 16 to 1. 
 
 Strangely enough, in a way unperceived, these latter 
 words were prophetic. Within two months an organiza- 
 tion had been formed, largely through the efforts of 
 women, and including in its membership some of the most 
 lirilliant and energetic women of the State, who aroused, 
 stimulated and rewarded, by their approbation, the men 
 who made the ultimate fight to "Save the Redwoods." 
 The list included Mrs. Josephine Clift'ord McCracken, 
 Mrs. Carrie Stevens Walter, A^lrs. Stephen A. Jones, Mrs. 
 A. T. Hermann, Mrs. Lovell White, and many others. 
 
 During the interval extending over two years before 
 the final acquisition by the State of the lands embraced in 
 the present bounds of the redwood park, the necessary 
 expenses of the crusade, amounting to several thousand 
 dollars, were furnished by a woman, a woman whose name 
 will ever be written high in the annals of California — 
 Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst ! 
 
 Mr. Andrew P. Hill, of San Jose, an artist of high 
 repute in this State, had ever been an admirer of the 
 redwoods, and as early as 1877 had i)ainted the group that 
 
26 
 
 stands near the Hotel de Redwood in the Santa Cruz 
 Mountains. 
 
 At the time of which we write, Air. Hill had been 
 commissioned by a London magazine to secure some 
 photographs of the Santa Cruz redwoods. He came to 
 the Fremont Big Tree Grove near Santa Cruz, but the 
 owners of the property forbade him to photograph the 
 trees. 
 
 Much incensed by their action, the artist began to think, 
 and the more he thought the more the conviction came to 
 him that these trees, being natural wonders, ought to 
 belong to the people. Going home on the train that day 
 he wrote to Josephine Clifford McCracken of his opinions 
 and conclusions. He wrote other letters, among them 
 one to the Santa Cruz Board of Trade, imploring that 
 body to "pass a resolution recommending that Congress 
 be petitioned to make the purchase of the Fremont 
 Grove." 
 
 The Secretary replied to Mr. Hill, calling his attention 
 to the Big Basin forest and adding : 
 
 As your enthusiasm is for the smaller proposition, so in ratio 
 will it increase for the larger. 
 
 And so it did. 
 
 Mr. Hill in writing to the San Jose Mercury of this 
 time said : 
 
 The Chamber of Commerce of San Jose quickly followed. A 
 large meeting was arranged to be held at Stanford University 
 and it was found that Dr. Dudley had already examined the Big 
 Basin with Professor Wing, had mapped it, wanted it preserved, 
 
 ^-wateitM---,-:^ 
 
27 
 
 and was just waiting for the lively, go-ahead enthusiasm of some 
 of the members of the Sempcrvirens Club. Subsequently a 
 splendid meeting was held and it was arranged to make a trip to 
 the Big Basin to examine the new wonderland. 
 
 On the 1 6th of Alay, 1900, J\Ir. Hill's party reached the 
 town of Boulder Creek. Of this date Carrie Stevens 
 Walter of the committee from San Jose, wrote as follows : 
 
 Our party from San Jose were received at Boulder Creek last 
 evening by the Santa Cruz committee and entertained most 
 hospitably. We leave early this morning for the mysterious goal 
 of our ambition — the Big Basin. 
 
 The Motnitain Echo of May 26, 1900, contained this 
 item : 
 
 THE SEMPERVIRENS club. 
 
 The visiting party in the Big Basin last week held an enthusi- 
 astic meeting the night before breaking camp and formed an 
 organization to be known as the Sempervirens Club. The object 
 of the club is to work for the preservation of the Big Basin and 
 adjacent region as a public park. After viewing and exploring 
 in every direction for several days the members of the party 
 were so impressed with the beauties of the country and the 
 necessity for the preservation of the remaining Sequoias that they 
 felt no time and place could be more appropriate to organize for 
 the effort than right in the heart of the Basin itself, there and 
 then. Thus was the Sempervirens Club of California organized 
 at the foot of Slippery Rock, just across the stream now called 
 Sempervirens Creek, and the place was named Sempervirens 
 Camp. 
 
 The zeal and enthusiasm of this club knew no bounds, 
 and it compelled the attention of the State. In a few- 
 months it attained a large membership. 
 
28 
 
 First Impressions. 
 
 X THE summer of 1901 a large party of Sem- 
 pervirens people camped in the basin within 
 the present limits of the park. Of their ex- 
 periences W. W. Richards wrote : 
 
 For five days we made trips throughout that portion of the 
 Big- Basin which was accessible by trails, kept open by the deer 
 and other animals. The size and grandeur of the thousands of 
 immense trees that were seen will become world wonders in the 
 future. Their immense height — 300 to 350 feet — diminishes their 
 huge bulk to look at, yet there were hundreds of these forest 
 giants, each of which, a score of people surrounding, could 
 barely compass. One stalwart redwood has a partly burned-out 
 opening in its trunk, about twelve feet in diameter and running 
 up to a roof, twenty-five feet from the ground, in which could be 
 seated a large party of people. Four immense trees standing as 
 on four corners, were of ponderous growth, their graceful tops 
 seemingly piercing into the very sky. Beneath their shade the 
 ground is fairly ablaze with beautifully-hued forest flowers, 
 creeping violets, wild sweet peas, wood buttercups, and evening 
 primroses. The glades were garlanded with delicate harebells 
 and tiger lilies and carpeted with tiny ferns, interlaced with 
 sweet-smelling verbena vines. Inviting patches of wild straw- 
 berries furnished a feast. This sight of nature's bounty, spread 
 broadcast, might well gladden the hearts of millions of human 
 beings in times to come, who, escaping from the clash and 
 turmoil of a greater San Francisco, seek the enjoyment, the 
 invigoration, the elevation and refinement of this glorious 
 heritage handed down to us through the centuries. 
 
 ^A^!^fe^jiif-ii.i^-t 
 
29 
 
 I\Irs. Stephen A. Jones, of San Jose, was another of 
 the appreciative campers at this time, as the followinn" 
 will show : 
 
 I like to think tliat this trail has been made, not for utility but 
 for beauty ; that the few people who walk over it come to worship 
 amid the cathedral aisles, to bare their heads and bow their 
 hearts before the sacred influences of the primeval forest. All 
 around you giant redwoods rear their stately columns, mingled 
 with firs "tit for the mast of some great admiral." The wind 
 sighs softly through their lofty branches, but lower down not a 
 zephyr is stirring. A solemn stillness pervades the place, broken 
 only now and then by the far-off note of a bird. The sunshine 
 falls in filtered brightness, and flecks with gold the green gloom 
 of the place. 
 
 Into this sanctuary the common thoughts and petty cares of 
 daily life dare not intrude ; here is peace, serene and perfect rest. 
 
 In this vast laboratory nature distills a balm for our hurts, a 
 subtle essence that heals and soothes ; and as we breathe the 
 freshness and fragrance of the air we receive also strength and 
 hope from some divine and hidden source. The things of time 
 and sense lose their power over us ; spiritual influences are 
 supreme in these hallowed precincts. The fetters of custom and 
 conventionality fall away ; we taste soul freedom and feel intima- 
 tions of immortality. 
 
 In every natural forest there broods something of this magic 
 spell, this power to elevate the soul and nourish it with holy 
 thoughts, but, perhaps, none others possess it to quite the same 
 extent as the redwoods. A sense of their hoary antiquity 
 impresses the beholder and makes him realize the brief span of 
 liis earthly existence. 
 
 The winds of untold centuries have sighed through their lofty 
 crowns ; all of modern and much of ancient history has transpired 
 since they first reared their heads above the mold. Nations have 
 
30 
 
 risen, flourished and passed away ; dynasties of kings have gone 
 down into the dust ; the sands of deserts have blown over for- 
 gotten cities ; conquerors and conquered have been whehned in 
 one common obHvion. Vast changes have taken place in the 
 natural world ; rivers have left their old, and worn for themselves 
 new. beds ; the sea has made more islands, cutting off promon- 
 tories from the mainland ; harbors have been filled up with sand 
 by the tides, so that what were once seaports are now inland 
 cities ; volcanoes have built up fresh cones or washed away 
 ancient ramparts in a molten flood. 
 
 But under perfect condition of soil and climate our Sequoia 
 scuipervirens have lived and flourished. Succeeding centuries 
 have seen them more deeply rooted in the ground, and with 
 loftier heads. Storms have not harmed them ; strongly buttressed 
 as they are, they defy the fiercest wind that blows. Decay nor 
 age does not blight them ; they seem to have no life limit. Even 
 the fires, caused by lightning or some other agency, which ran 
 through the forest centuries ago, only hollowed their trunks or 
 blackened their bark, leaving them still green and vigorous. 
 
 Edwin Sidney Williams, of Saratoga.' another ever- 
 faithful friend, wrote at this time: 
 
 But the chief reason for my growing interest in Sempervirens 
 Park is its beneficial effect on the people of the State, particularly 
 the working people of the bay cities. 
 
 There are labor's hosts, "chained to the oar of labor." for 
 whom a costly vacation is an impossibility. It goes to my 
 heart's depth as a patriot and a Californian that even a wild boy 
 from San Francisco's Barbary Coast may come down afoot with 
 his blankets on his back, and if only he obeys the directions of 
 the firm and kind warden, he may be as secure in his nest in or 
 under a great tree as is the Governor himself in "the governor's 
 camp." The captain of "the boys' brigade" may bring his whole 
 
31 
 
 company down and find abundant room. "Campers keep out" 
 may greet him on the road, but when the warden takes him in, 
 the czar of all the Russias cannot put him and his squad out so 
 long as they obey rules. 
 
 It's the true democracy of the park which charms me, and in 
 working for it, though the least of the workers, I am working 
 for the better California. No street arab will go back from the 
 grandeur and the beauty^ of these primeval forests untouched. 
 The higher influences of American life will have a better chance 
 at him if he senses what the State has done in appointing him 
 one of the guardians of God's great trees. And the poor sewing- 
 girls can come at slight expense and need no other chaperon 
 than the gracious matron in the park. 
 
 In those days the pen of Josephine Clifford McCracken 
 was busy and found expression through the daily news- 
 papers, in Out IVcst, Western Field and the Overland 
 Monthly, in articles largely argumentative and appealing 
 to public interest. Her own impressions of the great 
 forest in its primal period were expounded in an article 
 in the Western Field, on the occasion of a visit when 
 Hugo de Vreis, the Dutch savant, was a guest of honor. 
 
 It is a remarkable truth that the beauty of "the way" 
 has intensified with the passing years, and the language 
 of the trees, grown more and more intelligible to human 
 ears. A part of Mrs. McCracken's account of the visit 
 deserves to become historical. From it we quote : 
 
 Even those among us who were far-traveled and world 
 wanderers, found something to admire and marvel at here, for 
 far as the ej^e could reach there was grandeur and sublimity. To 
 the right, the crumbling walls of the castellated cliffs, crowned at 
 
32 
 
 the pinnacle with the decayed glory of broken turrets, yawning 
 casements and half-fallen colonnades, with the dark green trees 
 above, and the brighter green of the brush growing out of the 
 clefts below might well have been the remnants of castle park. 
 
 In swinging trot the horses passed through miles of this pic- 
 turesque country; then the ascent grew steeper. An abyss, it 
 seemed to me, opened below us ; the chasm was a wide, broken 
 valley, bounded by a chain of mountains, bold, green clad and 
 topped with redwood trees, single and in masses. When these 
 receded and left an opening toward the sea, the sunny haze made 
 filmy veils to waver and wane in the uncertain distance. 
 
 Then we reached the summit ; and if the dizzy heights and 
 green depths of the past mile or two had been greeted with 
 che'ers and exclamations, the level stretch before us now was no 
 less fervidly admired. 
 
 And now we have come to the line of the park. The red- 
 woods stand thicker here ; the lower growth and underbrush is 
 heavier and when the road comes nearer to the winding stream, 
 we see enormous shrubs of white blooming azaleas, clusters of 
 fiery lilies and still closer in the densest shade of rock and bush, 
 great clumps of the five-finger fern. The horses' feet fall noise- 
 less on the smooth road ; the tinkle of the swift running stream, 
 the subdued rush of the water where it falls over rocks and 
 ledges, the song of the breeze in the tall trees above, cadences 
 forever swelling and forever falling, the endless lullaby that 
 Nature sings to weary heart Jind fretted spirit — how like a breath 
 from heaven all this falls upon us, the peace be still that is spoken 
 to all who come to rest beneath the canopy of these everlasting 
 trees. 
 
 We pass Sempervirens Camp and Slippery Rock, that spot 
 dear to my heart. A slowly-rising amphitheater is this rock floor, 
 with stiff, straight redwoods at the back, and side-screens of firs 
 and madrone, chestnut oaks and young black oaks, with willows 
 swaying here and there. At last we are in the heart of the Big 
 
 •^. 
 
33 
 
 Basin, where the giant redwoods are awe-inspiring and over- 
 whelming. Tape measure and camera are in constant demand ; 
 discoveries of strange plant growth, of flower and shrub, of 
 beautiful forest vistas, were so frequently made that time and 
 distance seemed annihilated. 
 
 THE SEQUOIA. ! 
 
 By Dr. C. W. Doyle. < 
 
 I 
 See where it stands in undiminished splendor, 
 
 The giant sentinel of Pan's retreat ; . i 
 
 Man doffs before it humbly, fain to render 
 
 Homage, and lay due reverence at its feet. , 
 
 No airy spire, no soaring dome tremendous, 
 Declares God's glory like this tree stupendous. 
 
 Man's labors vanish ; temple, palace tumble ; 
 
 And bronze, and marble tarnish and decay ; 
 
 The greatest monuments e'er reared shall crumble, ' 
 
 Ere this proud tree shall bend before Time's sway. I 
 
 The rosy morn its royal crest can greet. 
 
 While darkness spreads her couch about its feet. ' | 
 
 The fairy myths of Greece that figured Naiad, | 
 
 Housed airy Echo, gave the stars a name, •' 
 
 Apportioned to each Oak its proper Dryad, * 
 
 Could find for this no genius of like fame ; ' 
 
 God's angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, and their kin, i 
 
 Alone might dwell such noble fanes within. j 
 
34 
 
 Father Kenna's Account. 
 
 HE honored president of Santa Clara College, 
 Rev. Father Robert E. Kenna, S. J., was one 
 of the original members of the Sempervirens 
 Club, and a member of the first park commis- 
 sion, appointed by Governor Gage, and also a member of 
 the commission appointed by Governor Johnson. 
 
 Father Kenna, for the Bee of Sacramento, wrote a 
 history of the movement to acquire this park. It is in 
 the words of one having authority to speak in the matter, 
 and clearly and accurately bridges the space between 
 agitation and acquirement of this transcendent forest as 
 the people's playground. Somewhat abridged it here 
 follows : 
 
 The happy inspiration of an editor to save the redwoods of the 
 Big Basin from the ax of the woodchopper and the saw of the 
 himberman became, when published, a mighty, living force 
 through the Sempervirens Club of San Jose, and resulted in 
 securing to the State, and it is hoped, to posterity, a great park 
 of primeval redwood trees. 
 
 t^* 5^* ^* 
 
 No sooner was the chib formed than an enthusiastic army of 
 supporters was at its back, ready to come to its aid, as it did 
 come, in the moment of danger and threatened defeat. The 
 brigades of this little army were drawn from Native Sons and 
 Native Daughters of California, from the Pioneers and other 
 organized bodies and besides many patriotic ladies and gentlemen 
 
35 
 
 throughout the State, and tlic majority of the press freely advo- 
 cated the noble cause. But the real, living force working with 
 and through the club came from the universities of Stanford and 
 California and the college of Santa Clara. 
 
 The club's first move was to send an energetic delegation of 
 ladies and gentlemen to Sacramento in 1901 to interview the 
 Governor, and to interest the legislators in passing a bill to save 
 the trees in this basin from destruction. The result of this first 
 move was very encouraging to the club, and a bill was drafted 
 and presented to the Assembly, empowering the State to spend 
 two hundred fifty thousand dollars to purchase two thousand five 
 hundred acres in the Big Basin, and to appoint four commission- 
 ers, who, with the Governor as ex officio chairman, were to 
 purchase, control and govern the lands thus secured to the 
 State and the California Redwood Park. 
 
 ^* (j?* f^^ 
 
 The task of securing the passage of this bill was left with 
 A. P. Hill, who was the right man for the difficult and delicate 
 work. One of the very first movers in the glorious work, full of 
 honest enthusiasm, true as steel, loyal and honest, unselfish and 
 self-sacrificing, his one object was to secure an honest, effective 
 measure to save and to protect those magnificent redwoods. The 
 dear, noble fellow with his wonderful enthusiasm and incor- 
 ruptible honesty, and open, above-board talk, was an enigma to 
 many old political lobbyists who tried to block his work. Nothing- 
 disheartened him, nothing made him retreat until the object of 
 his heart was secured in the passage of that bill to save the 
 redwood trees. 
 
 The politicians smiled at his simple candor. He was advised 
 to go home, for there was no hope for the passage of his pet bill. 
 Several times in the heat of the fight he called the writer to aid 
 him, when what seemed impossibilities were demanded. 
 
 Two speeches were made in support of the bill, the first a 
 
36 
 
 magnificent oration by Mr. Dehuas, worthy both of the subject 
 and of the matchless orator. At the request of the club, I asked 
 Mr. Delmas to speak for the preservation of the redwoods. He 
 consented very graciously. The second speech, if I may so 
 characterize the remarks made by the writer, was given in answer 
 to an earnest appeal of Mr. Hill in one of the dark moments of 
 his work for the bill. 
 
 My remarks, though very simple, were given with an earnest- 
 ness that made the Senators accept them as the sentiments of my 
 heart. I said in part : Senators, I do not come to speak to you 
 as a priest, nor as the president of a great college, nor in the 
 language of such, but as a "forty-niner," and in the language of 
 one who loves the great land of the West, and her magnificent 
 forests which so often charmed my boyhood days and thrilled 
 my young heart with high and noble aspirations. They spoke to 
 me of Liberty, and they filled the mind with great thoughts and 
 the soul with lofty aspirations. These redwoods are pre- 
 eminently Californian, unique in their species and situation, and 
 as a forty-niner I beg you to stay the hand that would harm those 
 that still remain to recall the glories of those vast virgin forests 
 now no more. 
 
 I alluded quietly to the efforts, hidden and ignoble and unjust, 
 to defeat the work of the Sempervirens Club. The Senate 
 received my homely remarks graciously, and believed me, and 
 when the bill came up finally there were only three votes against 
 it. It was a great triumph ; the passage of this bill was indeed 
 an honor to the legislature of 1901. 
 
 The great object of the club and the men and women behind 
 the club was threefold : 
 
 1. To save the trees for posterity. 
 
 2. To save the trees for scientific study and also the many 
 species of fauna in the basin. 
 
 3. Last and by no means the least important was to save the 
 basin and its trees to form a great park for the people for holiday 
 
outings ; to prepare a place whither our cl\ildrcn and workmen, 
 factory girls and others breathing all the week impure air, might, 
 amidst the great trees and along rippling brooks, breathe pure 
 air and rest amidst those great forests,' where their minds and 
 hearts are lifted to higher, purer, nobler things. 
 
 37 
 
 Men and Trees. 
 
 T has been calculated that a single tree is able 
 
 through its leaves to purify the air from the 
 
 carbonic acid arising from the perspiration 
 
 of a considerable number of men, perhaps a 
 
 dozen or even more. 
 
 The volume of carbonic acid exhaled by a human being 
 in the course of twenty-four hours is put at about loo 
 gallons ; but by Boussingault's estimate, a single square 
 yard of leaf-surface, counting both the upper and the 
 under sides of the leaves, can, under favorable circum- 
 stances, decompose at least a gallon of carbonic acid in 
 a day. One hundred square yards of leaf-surface then < 
 would suffice to keep the air pure for one man, but the 
 leaves of a tree of moderate size present a surface of 
 many hundred square yards. 
 
 (i/T^SD 
 
38 
 
 Purchase of the Park. 
 
 AS SAGE of an enabling act, and the securing 
 of an appropriation, did not "save the red 
 woods" or establish a permanent forest park — 
 at once. Governor Gage appointed as mem- 
 bers of the California Redwood Park Commission, Wm. 
 H. Mills, the land agent of the Southern Pacific Railroad 
 Company; A. W. Foster, the president of the North- 
 western Railway and a regent of the State University ; 
 Father Robert E. Kenna, S. J., president of Santa Clara 
 Collega, and Dr. Wm. R. Dudley, head of the Department 
 of Botany in Stanford University. The Governor himself 
 was an ex officio member. 
 
 It became their duty to investigate, bargain for and 
 buy the best and most for the money, two hundred fifty 
 thousand dollars. They made haste slowly in their task, 
 and when it became generally known that the heavily 
 timbered lands in the Basin were held at one hundred 
 dollars per acre, there was much opposition manifested. 
 It seemed so short a time before when the entire area of 
 the Basin might have been purchased for a less price, 
 that the lumbermen's figures were denounced as a 
 hold-up. 
 
 But finally three things were demonstrated. 
 
 First, that the amount of standing timber was much 
 larger than had been realized. 
 
39 
 
 Second, that increased accessibility and improvements 
 in milling operations had enhanced their value. 
 
 Third, that the lands in question were really cheap at 
 the prices offered. 
 
 Mr. I. T. Bloom, owner of three hundred twenty acres 
 within the edge of the Big Basin, had bonded his 
 holdings for the State at one hundred dollars per acre, 
 but when the option expired, he refused to renew it and 
 proceeded to cut the timber. 
 
 After the felling operations were over and before 
 milling began, a representative of the Santa Cruz Surf, 
 with an expert lumberman, went over this tract, selecting 
 here an acre and there an acre, counted and measured 
 and scaled the fallen logs, and proved beyond question 
 that the Bloom lands would yield in lumber far more 
 than the figures at which similar lands were offered to 
 the State. 
 
 Other investigations were made by expert cruisers of 
 the standing timber in the present park area. Perhaps 
 the most convincing of these was by Mr. J. W. Peery of 
 Boulder Creek, a lumberman of long experience, and a 
 man of a reputation that commanded confidence. 
 
 We append a part of Mr. Peery's report, as it deserves 
 a place in park history : 
 
 We selected five acres out of the northwest quarter of the 
 northwest quarter of section 8 of township 9 south and 3 west as 
 a comparative S-acre lot as an average of the main body of the 
 whole, and estimated the timber on said 5-acre lot. We found 
 that it contained 168 trees of various dimensions aggregating 
 
40 
 
 712,863 feet, board measure computation, making 142,572 feet per 
 acre. We also selected S acres as a compared, 5 acres of the 
 poorest 40-acre lot in the southeast quarter of section 7 of 
 township 9 south of 3 west. We found on this 5-acre lot 103 
 trees ; we estimated these 103 trees to contain 316,272 feet of 
 lumber, board measure, or 63,254 feet per acre. These two 5-acre 
 lots we had surveyed by County Surveyor Ed Perry, the lines 
 brushed out so as to be plainly defined. Now adding these two 
 S-acre lots together, we find 1,029,135 feet, board measure, on the 
 two 5-acre lots. This 1,029,135 divided by 10, as it was 10 acres, 
 make 102,913 feet board measure timber per acre. 
 
 We deducted 250 acres, 10 per cent of 2,500 acres from the 
 whole as waste land, leaving 2,250 acres containing an average 
 of 102,913 feet per acre, aggregating the amount of 231,563,250 
 feet of timber board measure. We also estimated 5 acres on 
 what is known as the Tom Maddock place. This place was 
 selected by Mr. Maddock and others, and at their request we 
 estimated the amount of timber it contained. This 5-acre lot 
 contained, as per our estimate. 1,124,419 feet of timber. This 
 exceeded our best selected 5 acres 411,556, and I am convinced 
 that ours is a low estimate. 
 
 It may be added, in parentheses, that an acre lying" 
 easterly across the roadway from the Governor's Camp is 
 estimated to contain half a million feet of standing- 
 redwood. These estimates relate solely to milling lumber 
 and do not include the oak, madrone, fir, pine, alder, 
 maple and other woods. 
 
 To many readers these mere figures will be meaning- 
 less. To partially translate them, it may be stated that 
 the amount of lumber mentioned would much more than 
 
41 
 
 suffice to build a city the size of San Jose, and that it 
 would require to transport it to market 19,280 cars. 
 
 Governor's Camp. 
 
 During the progress of these negotiations, it was 
 deemed advisable to bring Governor Gage and other 
 members of the Commission, with some lumber experts, 
 into the forest for a few days of personal examination. 
 
 To provide accommodations, lumber for a five-room 
 cabin and a cook house was packed on muleback over a 
 trail two and one half miles beyond the terminus of team 
 travel at that time. 
 
 This was the last year of the administration of 
 Governor Gage. The following year, after the purchase 
 of the park lands had been completed, and J. H. B. Pil- 
 kington appointed warden, Governor George C. Pardee 
 and family occupied this camp for several weeks. In the 
 mean time, after the real estate transfer was completed. 
 Father Kenna resigned from the Commission and Henry 
 F. Kron of Santa Cruz was appointed in his stead. 
 
 It was while Governor Pardee and family were at the 
 camp that a notable "surprise party" was planned. 
 Governor West of Utah, then visiting in Santa Cruz, 
 being the guest of honor. Thus it was that three gov- 
 ernors were entertained at this camp prior to the opening 
 of the park to the public, and the name of Governor's 
 Camp became attached to the principal stopping place in 
 the confines of the forest. 
 
42 
 
 A majority of the mammoth trees are clustered within 
 easy walking distance of this camp. There is an open 
 glade that gives a space of clear sunshine and green 
 grass, and it borders Opal Creek at a very picturesque 
 portion of the stream. 
 
 Distances and directions in and about the park have 
 the Governor's Camp as the focal point. 
 
 IN THE REDWOODS. 
 
 By A. D. NoRDHOFF. 
 
 As in some vast cathedral, one looks up 
 
 Through columns, carved and tinted deep by time. 
 
 Up, up to where the light grows faint ; and where 
 
 Through windows, made by dust of ages dim 
 
 A few pale sunbeams strive to force their way ; 
 
 So in the redwoods. Midst the columns vast 
 
 Of nature's great cathedral, gazing up 
 
 One finds the same dim distance and the same 
 
 Pale sunbeam and the sam-; dim, far-off light ; 
 
 But in the place of windows, filmed by time, 
 
 Great interlacing branches, tier on tier, 
 
 Set in a frame-work of the fern-like leaf ; 
 
 And in between, faint glimpses of deep blue, 
 
 As if some master-hand, with earnest touch. 
 
 Had painted every space, 'twixt leaf and branch, 
 
 With tender color, like heaven's own. 
 
 From the very beginning both the Sequoia glgantea and the 
 Sequoia sempervirens grow very slowly and yet very steadily 
 upward. The Cedar of Lebanon, though it may reach a very 
 great age, has however in its youth a growth so rapid as to fit it in 
 a few years for many purposes of cabinet or ornamental work. 
 The glory of the Sequoia is in its stately trunk, but the glory of 
 the cedar is in its magnificent foliage. 
 
43 
 
 The Tract Acquired. 
 
 ARGAINING, and some bickering, came to an 
 end in the transfer of 3,800 acres to the State 
 for the consideration of $250,000. The way 
 the himber companies who owned the land 
 figured it was that they had sold 2,500 acres of timber at 
 $100 per acre and "thrown in" the other 1,300 acres, 
 about 800 acres of which was chaparral, and about 500 
 acres cut over, or burned over, but capable of reforesting. 
 
 This tract, which by purchase became Sempervirens 
 Park, officially known as California Redwood Park, 
 embraces the heart of the Big Basin. 
 
 It was regarded at the time not as containing the 
 ultimate extent of the Redwood Forest Park of Cali- 
 fornia, but merely as the nucleus of the park of the future. 
 
 The holding of these lands checked the progress of 
 the sawmill, pending the time when an educated and 
 enlightened public opinion would reach the point where 
 it could grasp the importance of acquiring the entire 
 Big Basin area for a permanent wildwood for posterity. 
 
 Present park limits cover the source and course of 
 the several small streams that converge to form Waddell 
 Creek, emptying into the ocean midway between Pesca- 
 dero and Santa Cruz. The line extends on the north 
 to the ridge that marks the boundary between Santa Cruz 
 and San Mateo counties, at an altitude of 2,390 feet. 
 The main plateau which lies along Opal Creek, from the 
 
44 
 
 Governor's Camp, has an elevation of i,ooo feet. At 
 the southerly line of the park wher? Berry Creek has its 
 confluence with the west fork of the Waddell, the eleva- 
 tion is 500 feet. These figures make clear the statement 
 that the park is angular — and these angles will often 
 reach 45 degrees. 
 
 To this diversity of elevation and aspect is due the 
 varied forest growths here found, which constitute much 
 of the charm of the forest to the visitor. The changing 
 scene is a constant stimulus to take a tramp, and a con- 
 tinuous reward for so doing. 
 
 On the lower levels we find dense shade at midday, 
 a soft, deliciously damp atmosphere in which ferns and 
 mosses thrive perennially, covering the nakedness of the 
 rocks, throwing a pall of living green over the prostrate 
 forms of the fallen forest monarchs. 
 
 Trees tower for two hundred feet — and more — their 
 roots rejoicing in the percolation from living waters, 
 their topmost twigs catching the sunshine above the 
 canyon depths. 
 
 Out and up lie the sandstone slopes, semi-arid, scantily 
 covered with chaparral, swathed in sunshine, swept by 
 the winds, beaten by the storms of winter. 
 
 Although not originally included in the scheme to 
 "save the redwoods" these chaparral lands are by no 
 means the least attractive portions of this wonderful 
 reserve. Following a trail one scarcely perceives when 
 the giant redwood forest begins to recede until he is far 
 among stunted growths surrounded by a new low vegeta- 
 
45 
 
 tion, in an cltin wood, feeling the invisible presence of 
 other tree spirits ; a different race from those who abide 
 under the shadow of the Scqitoias. As you look about 
 you observe that the pines and the oaks have lost their 
 majesty and are struggling for a livelihood, putting on 
 thicker leaves and a tighter, stronger bark. The tan oaks 
 have disappeared altogether, and only small live oaks 
 and the most persistent scrub oaks are seen. The pines 
 lower until they are not more than ten feet tall. The ma- 
 drone gradually gives way to the manzanita, and unless 
 the trail is well cleared, the buckthorn, greasewood and 
 yerba santa w'ill dispute the path. 
 
 Californians affect to despise the chaparral, but to tlie 
 Easterner it is a new curious wonder. The name was 
 given to us by our Spanish-Mexican afffliations, and 
 signifies diminutive evergreen forest, which is neither 
 timberland nor woodland, nor yet brushland, simply 
 chaparral. 
 
 The most interesting growths in this miniature of a 
 forest are the manzanita, the mountain mahogany, and 
 the toyon or Christmas berry. In each of these there is 
 such a combination of strength and beauty as to attract 
 tiie attention of the casual stroller, while to the true stu- 
 dent they are a never-ending impulse to observation and 
 investigation, a continuous delight in their seasonal mani- 
 festations of blossom and berry. In the burned-over 
 portions of the park a mock chaparral abounds, which is 
 at once a blessing and a hazard. This is composed of the 
 Ccanothus (wild lilac). It forms an admirable cover 
 
46 
 
 against wash and erosion, bestows a wealth of color and 
 fragrance during its long blooming period — but forms 
 such a persistent thicket, and is so highly inflammable as 
 to make it a pest to the forester. 
 
 TO A REDWOOD TREE. 
 
 From a forest poem by Charles KeelER. 
 
 O tree of trees, 
 
 O monarch of the grove, 
 
 The mountains sound thy praises. 
 
 The birds declare thy glory. 
 
 The brooks proclaim thy wonder, — 
 
 And all day long the sweet springs sing 
 
 To thee their liquid lays, 
 
 Thou watcher over birds, 
 
 Thou guardian of flowers, 
 
 Praise be to thee 
 
 For all thy tender care ! 
 
 The white fog steals amid thy shade. 
 
 The sun streams dimly through, 
 
 The darkness falls about thy boughs ; 
 
 The solemn night is near, 
 
 But through its slumbering calm is heard 
 
 Thy hymning strain on high. 
 
 aZ7\:v) 
 
47 
 
 The Big Fire. 
 
 EPTEMBER the ytli, 1904, was one of those 
 sultry clays that occur in this climate only at 
 intervals of years, when the heat bears clown 
 from above like a weight, and radiates from 
 the earth with intensified fervor, and the atmosphere is 
 suffused with latent fire, waiting- — watching — for some 
 opportunity to manifest itself in flame. And the oppor- 
 tunity came from a sawdust pile at the lumber mill on 
 Waterman Creek. 
 
 Warden Pilkington and his co-workers in the park that 
 afternoon discovered a film of smoke above the northern 
 horizon. Presently it was a curling cloud — presto, a 
 denser mass surging against the sky. There was a wild 
 fire, on the hottest day of the year, with the wind driving 
 it parkward with a fiendish velocity. No military call to 
 arms receives the rapid response that follows the cry of 
 "fire." No other fire alarm strikes such terror to the 
 heart or puts such superhuman energy into mortal men, 
 as the signal that announces a fire on the prairie or in 
 the forest. Many men were immediately busy, but on 
 and on came the flames, higher and higher up the 
 mountainside, swifter and swifter, as the superheated air 
 made vacuums, abhorred by the driving flames. 
 
 That afternoon of anxiety and spontaneous and speedy 
 eft'ort w-as the beginning of a battle which lasted for 
 twenty days. There were three ridges and canyons with 
 
48 
 
 creeks for the fire to cross before it could reach the park, 
 but that fire laughed at distance and obstacles, natural and 
 artificial. In the succeeding days, Warden Pilkington 
 had as many as a hundred men fighting the fire and mill 
 men and farmers from all the countryside and nearby 
 towns were engaged in the futile fight. 
 
 For weeks the midday sun was a ball of fire in a bank 
 of smoke. The starry heavens no more marked the 
 night, but lurid flashes of flame accentuated the appalling 
 darkness and stifling atmosphere. Although the fire was 
 at times diverted and turned from its course, it was never 
 subdued until rain fell on the 27th of the month. 
 Brands and sparks were scattered over the surrounding 
 country and new forest fires sprang up, until the fire zone 
 extended to the ocean shore, and covered a belt from one 
 to three miles in width. 
 
 For nine days Warden Pilkington did not remove his 
 clothing or sit down to eat a meal. Hard work, desper- 
 ate work, and the favor of Providence saved the central 
 and westerly portions of the park forest, but the scathing 
 fire sucked up hundreds of acres of chaparral and 
 scourged and seared a strip of the finest redwood timber 
 along its easterly border. 
 
 In the midst of the fire period the writer rode on horse- 
 back over the burned district. Loss of bridges left only 
 three miles of distance from the town of Boulder Creek 
 to be traversed by vehicles. Then the horses swapped 
 harness for saddles. A trackless, trailless area of ashes 
 covered both slopes of Boulder Creek. Fires were burn- 
 
49 
 
 ing at the base of hundreds of magnificent redwoods and 
 flames darted from the tops of tall firs. The igneous 
 atmosphere scorched our faces and the hot ashes singed 
 the fetlocks of the horses as we made our way up on the 
 Cowell tract to Bull Springs, to the summit of the ridge 
 overlooking the devastated domain of the Fire King. 
 Then down into the park. Often compelled to dismount 
 to let the animals clamber down some steep or cross a 
 stream as best they could. Sad scenes there were where 
 once the "Trail Beautiful" had led through redwoods 
 standing "breast-high" to the rider 150 feet above the 
 valley below. Hot tears fell on saddles at the sight of 
 these hundreds of coal black shafts, once the glory of the 
 forest. 
 
 ^9* ^^ t^* 
 
 It was alongside this trail that the tree stood that 
 carried fire in its bosom for fourteen months. It was a 
 superb specimen of the Sequoia sempcrvirens. Not a 
 "big" tree, but a perfect one to outside appearance. One 
 could not pass it on the trail without praise for its stately 
 beauty. It was about twelve feet in diameter at the butt, 
 and its crown of evergreen swayed in the breeze close to 
 three hundred feet above. As the fire swept over the 
 crest of the hill, it caught in its topmost branches and 
 instead of swirling up the trunk and through the foliage, 
 it burned down, gradually dropping ofif limb after limb. 
 
 As it proved, this tree, like many others of the larger 
 redwoods, was "ripe." The fire found it "dosey" at the 
 
50 
 
 heart, and the flames that had hcked up the limbs subsided 
 when they undertook the task of consuming the trunks. 
 
 When the rain came it appeared to appease the fire in 
 this tree as it did in others. Contrariwise, the dampness 
 only swelled the punky interior wood and smothered but 
 did not extinguish the fire. It smoldered silently for 
 weeks and then when it reached a knot hole left by a 
 destroyed branch and got vent, it burst out in flame, burn- 
 ing upward, and consuming the portion of the tree left 
 above. It was now the rainy season, and the flames were 
 again quenched as before. Again the fire smoldered for 
 weeks, and again it burst forth at the faint contact with 
 a ventilating wound in trunk. Rain would repeat the 
 douching process, with similar results to follow, ten, 
 fifteen or twenty feet perhaps being burned ofif at each 
 eruption. The last outbreak occurred in November, 
 1905, fourteen months after the initial fire, when the 
 height of the trunk had been reduced to about one 
 hundred feet. 
 
 This remaining portion still stands, a monument to 
 the noncombustible character of living redwood, a sad 
 memorial of the awful days when the besom of destruc- 
 tion reigned in its wrath over field and forest. 
 
 (^W ^* ^* 
 
 How terrible are the destructive forces of Nature, how 
 beneficent she is when her mood is one of favor! 
 
 Following the fury of the fire came copious rains and 
 a long season of growth. Vegetation sprang from the 
 
51 
 
 earth with more than Phaniix-hke vitahty, and within a 
 year the landscape was reverdured. 
 
 The young madrones grew so fast they could not 
 support themselves erect, and their tops swayed like 
 grasses in the breeze. Now. after eight years, the 
 visitor finds little in the general aspect to suggest a 
 conflagration. All the redwoods left standing by the 
 vandals are putting forth fresh branches, and in time 
 their blackened boles will be bronzed by new bark 
 seaming through the blackness. Perhaps but for this 
 catastrophe we would never have known how ever-virile 
 this forest was. 
 
52 
 
 Timber Cutting. 
 
 HE LEGISLATURE of 1905 conceived the 
 notion that it would be wise to aboHsh the 
 park commission and place the forest in 
 charge of the State Board of Forestry, an ex 
 officio body, consisting of the Governor, the Secretary 
 of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the State 
 Board of Examiners, and the State Forester. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that politics, like the serpent of 
 old, entered this garden of the gods, bringing indifference, 
 neglect and "graft" in its trail. 
 
 With the administration that came into power in 1907, 
 Mr. J. H. B. Pilkington, the efficient warden, was 
 removed and S. H. Rambo was placed in the position. 
 
 The big fire had left in its wake the dead and charred 
 trunks of the Douglas fir? and pines and of many hard- 
 wood trees, which were an offense to the eye, a continuous 
 fire hazard and a hindrance to the renewing of the forest. 
 The redwoods, although stripped of leaf and branch, and 
 left with blackened bark, were sonperinrcns, still holding 
 on to life and ready to renew the struggle for existence. 
 
 Notwithstanding this well known fact, repeatedly 
 verified in the history of fires in redwood forests, Mr. 
 G. B. Lull, the State Forester at that time, decided that 
 these trees were all dead and should be removed. 
 
 L^rtder his authority a private contract was made for 
 the cutting of the "dead timber," and in the winter of 
 
53 
 
 1908 occurred the infamous rajie of the redwoods, when 
 scores of redwood trees, some of them among- the finest 
 in the forest, were slaughtered and converted into posts, 
 pickets, shakes, grape stakes, etc., before the pubHc was 
 aware of the depredations. No words can express the 
 atrocity of this crime against Nature, against the State. 
 against Posterity. 
 
 It was supposed that only dead trees were to be 
 removed, not live ones, and it was weeks before the 
 fact became known that the redwoods were being 
 sacrificed. 
 
 The Sempervirens Club sent spies into the park, and 
 the Native Sons of Watsonville. under the inspiration 
 of Mr. George G. Radcliff, editor of the Pajaronian, 
 always an ardent friend of the forest, did likewise. 
 Their reports confirmed the rumors of the vandalism. 
 
 Two days later, the Santa Cruz Stirf had a timber 
 cruiser, a photographer and a lumber expert on the 
 ground, and within the week the wanton destruction in 
 progress in the park was before the public in all its bald 
 criminality. 
 
 The grand jury of Santa Cruz County, . of which 
 J. B. Holohan (afterward State Senator) was chair- 
 man, took immediate action ; George Wharton James, 
 the noted California author, greatly aided the agitation ; 
 indignation meetings were held in Santa Cruz, San Jose, 
 Palo Alto and other places, and abetted by the press of 
 the State, a protest was made that could not be ignored 
 by those in power, and the cutting was stopped, although 
 
54 
 
 the contractor was permitted to remove from the park 
 thousands of dollars' worth of split stuff, every stick of 
 which was rank with robbery. 
 
 It is gratifying to state that every official who was 
 concerned in, or connived at, this outrage, has been 
 retired to private life, and also that every redwood tree 
 which escaped the ax has sustained its ever-virile fame 
 by sending out living limbs, increasing in length and 
 foliaee everv vear. 
 
 Following the Fire. 
 
 ITH characteristic human foresight and sagac- 
 ity, after fire had scarified the fairest portion 
 of the park, active measures for fire protection 
 were taken. A system of fire trails girdling 
 the park, with laterals along the ridges, was projected and 
 has been carried out, until to-day there are twenty-two 
 miles of fire trails from thirty to sixty feet in width, in 
 and about the reserve. 
 
 There is a difference of opinion as to the efficiency 
 of these trails in time of stress, but at all events, they 
 will, when properly improved, provide a splendid system 
 of bridle paths, and afford to the "man on horseback" 
 an admirable opportunity for adventure in the forest. 
 
 Since the State acquired the property, an excellent 
 driveway has been constructed from the entrance of the 
 
55 
 
 park to the Governor's Camp, a little more than three 
 miles in length. 
 
 From the Governor's Camp radiate trails for pedes- 
 trians (most of them horsebackable) which bisect the 
 park in dififerent directions. 
 
 t(?* (^* s^* 
 
 Permanent improvements, man-made, in the park 
 consist of a system of waterworks and a sewer system 
 for the Governor's Camp, designed to supply the needs 
 of a population of 500; a building constructed of red- 
 wood logs on the margin of Opal Creek, used as a club 
 house, a rustic redwood dining-room with kitchen 
 attached ; a log barn, a rustic cottage, called the Lodge, 
 at the entrance of the park ; and a system of tanks, 
 pipes and pumps for road sprinkling. 
 
56 
 
 Going In. 
 
 XTRAKCE to the California Redwood Park- 
 is now via the town of Doulder Creek. Later 
 there will be an open approach from the coast 
 and possibly one from the Santa Clara \^alley 
 side, but the seasonal scenic effects will not greatly vary. 
 
 It is now two hours by auto from vSanta Cruz, one 
 hour from Uoulder Creek. The scenic dividends on 
 slower locomotion are great, and the hikers are to be 
 envied above all others. 
 
 One of the chief assets of this region is its kaleido- 
 scopic character. There are new scenic combinations 
 and aspects every month. In April the landscape is one 
 continuous unfolding screen of living green. 
 
 In May the blue dominates. It is the blooming time 
 of the wild lilac, and the heavens al)ove, the bay beyond 
 and the region round about is all one undulating mass 
 of blue, varying in shade from the faintest azure to the 
 deepest indigo. Following the lilac, the chestnut (tan- 
 bark) oaks have their time for blooming, and their 
 peculiar, distinctive shade of green stands out con- 
 spicuously amid the general verdure. A little later the 
 azaleas make brilliant and fragrant all the brooksides 
 and byways. 
 
 In July the tilled fields have turned dun brown, and 
 the pastures are void of color, but the madronas (the 
 strawberry trees), the real red Indians of the California 
 
57 
 
 forest, are at their best. These trees are ever eharmiii^-, 
 in form, and fohage, and flower, and berry, bnt most 
 of all in their bark. No, it is not a bark, it is a skin, 
 delicate in textnre, smooth, and soft to the touch as the 
 shoulders of an infant. In the strong- sunlight of the 
 summer these trees glisten with the rich color of polished 
 cinnamon. Lender certain conditions of light in the late 
 afternoon, the red brown changes to such a brilliant 
 vermilion that seen through intervening foliage it has 
 suggested the red tongue of fire. 
 
 There is a human pose to the trunk. Seen through 
 the tangle of the thicket, it looks like the brown, lithe 
 body of an Indian, and in the moonlight the graceful 
 upsweep of its branches is like the careless lifting of a 
 dusky maiden's arms. Every feature of the r.iadrona 
 is feminine. 
 
 At this season the glistening lacquer of the new 
 leaves, shifting and changing in the slightest breeze, is 
 ofTset or contrasted with the leaves of yester-year which 
 have turned yellow, and red, and brown, and still adhere 
 to the tree alongside of the new glossy green leaves, 
 giving the effect of a foliage half yellow, half green. 
 The old bark is peeling off in flakes leaving the new 
 as soft and smooth and shiny as satin. The old leaves 
 as they fall will fade and leave a carpet of pale yellow. 
 
 If you enter the park in August, the sere time in 
 California, what? More and more blooms. These 
 lusty bushes by the roadside and others interspersed 
 with other growths along and over the hillsides, which 
 
58 
 
 are so heavy laden with bloom are toyoii bushes, and 
 their blooms are the promise of California Christmas 
 berries, those brilliant red berries that vie with the holly 
 and the mountain ash of other countries. 
 
 In October it is red route parkward. The vineyards 
 and orchards will contribute a little to this effect, but 
 the protruding presence of the poison oak vine tinges 
 the traveler's vision. Crimson, scarlet or fire-red as it 
 may be, growing in bushy clump, or climbing the trunks 
 of trees and trespassing often on the upper branches, its 
 color penetrates the autumn atmosphere from every 
 angle. 
 
 By December travel will be light, but beauteous red 
 berries will be pendant from madrone, manzanita and 
 toyon, and the general landscape will have resumed its 
 April verdancy. 
 
59 
 
 Rocks and Streams. 
 
 DISCERNING man discovered in far away 
 times that there were sermons in stones and 
 books in running brooks. The streams in 
 Sempervirens Park are as ever-Hving and as 
 everlasting as the trees and the rocks. Amid summer's 
 (h'outh they abate not their flow, and their merry music 
 can be heard amid the aisles of columnar redwoods, day 
 imto day. night unto night, while the silent voices of the 
 rocks give knowledge to whomsoever heeds. 
 
 Everything that geology wrought here was turned 
 topsy-turvy by the elements, and so we find to-day huge 
 boulders of buff sandstone, "big as a meeting-house," 
 wave-worn, water-carved into castellated form by ancient 
 oceans, lying on the ver\- crest of the ridge bounding 
 the basin, more than two thousand feet above the present 
 sea level. 
 
 Downward, souther!}-, from the ridge road, the rocks 
 have been sea-washed and weather-worn into hundreds 
 of picturesque shapes, many of them suggestions of idols 
 or images, and there is a half acre well worth visiting 
 that is suggestive of some ancient cemetery, the out- 
 standing rocks not unlike memorial stones. In other 
 places, the waters cleft the ridges, forming cliffs from 
 fifty to two hundred feet in height, in every instance 
 tapestried with moss and ferns and foliage plants. 
 
60 
 
 I'lioto li.v Applpby. 
 
 Scene on Sempeiviiens Creek. 
 
 iJ*x 
 
61 
 
 veritable hanging gardens of a beauty which altogether 
 eludes words of description. 
 
 All of the streams in the park are rock-bottomed, the 
 soft sandstone of the hillsides solidifying under water 
 until it is ''hard as a rock." Boulders and cobbles of 
 conglomerate rock, lifted out of the bed of the streams 
 by the current long ago. have left curious "pot-holes" 
 in the bed of the creeks in many places, causing diminu- 
 tive cataracts and rapids, which add much to the 
 ])icturesque beauty of park streams. 
 
 Because of the varied altitudes in the park tract, it is 
 manifest that rapids, cascades and waterfalls must be 
 numerous. Not all of them are yet accessible, but those 
 who spend a day in the park usually make the trip to 
 Berry Creek falls, the reward for the walk being divided 
 between admiration for the wonderful verdure on the 
 way and the joy of beholding the brook pour over a 
 declivit}^ of about seventy feet in a sparkling chain of 
 mingled light and water. Sempervirens Falls can be 
 seen — and heard — from the driveway, and there are 
 several other accessible cascades on the same stream. 
 
 Josephine Clifford McCraken in one of her visits to 
 the park, wrote of the beautiful glimpses of Semper- 
 virens Creek, and the short space of Opal Creek which 
 was visible, and adds : "We could not visit other streams 
 in their solitary beauty of cascade and deep pool hidden 
 in monster fern and tangled wildwood." 
 
 Nature left to her own devices for ages, eroding the 
 rocks, plowing enormous furrows through the hills. 
 
62 
 
 rearing mammoth trees and then topphng them to earth, 
 has filled up the channels of the creeks in many places 
 with a mighty mass of debris, which it is man's work to 
 remove and render the flowing waters companionable. 
 
 Something of this work was done in the season of 
 191 1, and it will be continued through the aid of the 
 private benevolence of Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst, until 
 sufficient State aid is secured. 
 
 In a report on this work, the Commissioner in charge 
 wrote : 
 
 In a distance of a quarter of a mile, we found five log dams 
 or jams of driftwood, sufficient to obstruct the flow of the stream 
 in high water. We found over twenty fallen logs in the creek 
 bed or across it. Seven of them we converted into rustic 
 bridges, five of them with a substantial guard rail. Most of the 
 others yielded themselves to some sort of useful or picturesque 
 treatment. One enormous fir lying directly across the stream 
 has accumulated a mass of moss on its upper surface, which with 
 the decaying wood has formed a soil sufficient to support a mass 
 of huckleberry foliage and there is also growing on this log, 
 wax myrtle, azalea, fir and oak shrubbery, together with a pro- 
 fusion of ferns. Fortunately, lying nearly alongside this log is 
 another which we were able to convert into a bridge and from 
 which this log-garden can be viewed its entire length. 
 
 Not a rod on either bank did we find free from verdure, 
 although this was late August. No words can describe the 
 refreshing beauty of this brook as it was revealed day after day 
 by the removal of the dead rubbish that had encumbered it. 
 Most of the wa}' it is overhung by tree branches far overhead, 
 then a veil of azaleas and huckleberry, near the edge of the 
 banks, while down by the waterside are tiger lilies, many 
 varieties of fern and other wild plants. As a test of your 
 credulity, we might mention that we measured the stalk of one 
 
63 
 
 tiger lily eight and one half feet, and another we found flourish- 
 ing and blooming from a redwood log, the bulb having evidently 
 been driven into a split in the wood at a time of high water. 
 
 In several places huge blocks of sandstone have fallen from 
 the cliff on the southerly side of tlic stream and rolled to the 
 bottom or lodged along the bank. No sooner are these at rest 
 than they become coated with moss and are attacked, so to speak, 
 I)y profuse growths of Saxifrage (the rock splitter). Into the 
 tiny, almost imperceptible crevasses made by this plant, seeds 
 fall and larger growth begins. In one instance here, we have a 
 lir tree three feet in diameter which started in a rift in the 
 rock and has split it wide apart. A yoimg madrone is attempting 
 the same feat on another rock near by. 
 
 Details of curious growths, of majestic trees, of the many 
 freaks of nature exposed would weary you. I cannot conclude, 
 however, without mention of the spot where a log jam at some 
 point in the past had backed up the stream until the banks 
 became water soaked, causing sound oak trees of considerable 
 size to topple over. In falling they struck the top of the log- 
 jam, and have remained in a horizontal position since that time 
 without slackening their growth. In the mean time, the creek 
 forced its way to the side and wore out the land underneath, 
 until now these oaks form a living evergreen canopy about eight 
 feet above the creek bed. We constructed several side paths 
 from the trail to the stream, and made it accessible, so far as we 
 went, for hsher-folk and brook lovers. 
 
 Every mile of waterway here is a rare and valuable asset, 
 which, with sufficient funds, might be made not only a joy to the 
 trout seeker, but a delight and solace to those who find in 
 communion with Nature, their most helpful uplift in life. 
 
 The temperature of the water in the park streams 
 rarely rises above fifty degrees, and consequently a mess 
 of trout taken in midsummer are fine-fleshed, affording 
 fine .sport and fine food. 
 
64 
 
65 
 
 Flora of California Redwood Park. 
 
 By Dr. Isabel McCracken of Stanford University. 
 
 ANY people make the mistake of trying to 
 see the Park in an automobile. A flying trip 
 from Boulder, an overnight stay at Redwood 
 Inn and away in the morning leaves the 
 delightful memory of a magnificent drive, a grand old 
 redwood forest through which the light shimmers to 
 the huckleberry vmdergrowth, pretty streams tumbling in 
 cascades over rocky ledges or flowing" leisurely beneath a 
 canopy of delightfully fragrant azaleas. But the traveler 
 who leaves the main road to follow the trail, to push into 
 the woods with blazing hatchet, discovers picturesqueness 
 and grandeur only hinted at on the open road, and a flora 
 abundant and remarkably various. 
 
 The species of shrubs and flowers of the park run well 
 into the hundreds, and a day's tramp from the Inn up the 
 China Grade trail to Butano Ridge and out on the "fire 
 trail" skirting the eastern rim of the Basin, within which 
 lies the park, or down the Waddell to Woodwardia Falls 
 and thence to Pine Mountain, well repays the observer in 
 the richness and variety of verdure that will meet him on 
 the way. 
 
 The deep woods, the brookside, the trail, the sunny 
 ridges, the mountain peaks, each furnishes its character- 
 istic foliage and flowers, its quota of lichens or mosses, 
 liverworts or ferns. 
 
66 
 
 The redwoods (Sequoia sempervircns) of the forest, 
 with their tall columnar shafts, longitudinally fissured, 
 towering into the upper air from the floor of the basin 
 or marching in procession up the numerous glens, inter- 
 lock their lofty branches with those of the Douglas spruce 
 (Pseudotsuga taxifolia) and form a canopy over the 
 various undergrowths through which the light shifts 
 sparingly. The oaks and madrones reach up spindlingly 
 in an effort to penetrate this upper thicket of green. The 
 huckleberry, the principal undergrowth of these woods, 
 catches the shafts of sunlight and screens the shiny-leaved 
 salal, the oxalis, the dainty starflower (Trientalis), the 
 whipplea, yerba buena, and yellow violet. 
 
 There are but two living species of redwood or Sequoia 
 (named from the Cherokee chief Sequoiah), the coast 
 redwood (Sequoia sempervircns) and the Sierra big tree 
 (Sequoia gigantea). In the one, the leaves are elongated, 
 borne on short stems and extend forward and outward 
 from the main stem in a flat spray. The cones of the 
 coast redwood or scrnpervirens are about the size of a 
 thimble, ripening in one season but persisting on the 
 branches after the seeds have been discharged. In the 
 sierra redwood the leaves are awl-shaped, sessile (stem- 
 less), and extend around the main stem. The cones 
 are as large as a hen's tgg, and mature the second autumn 
 after formation. It is curious to note the tendency of the 
 sempervircns to form a leafage like that of the gigantea 
 in its upper branches, thus bearing testimony to their 
 relationsiiip. The park is a sempervircns forest. 
 
 y;--v^ -witv iv^ifs^;;^ 
 
 ^£^, 
 
67 
 
 The pine family is represented in the park by two 
 species, the Douglas spruce and the knob-cone pine. The 
 former, already alluded to, shares the floor of the basin 
 with the redw^oods, the latter shares the heights wnth the 
 manzanita and other chaparral. 
 
 Douglas spruce is commonly referred to as the Douglas 
 fir, and in the Oregon woods as the Oregon pine. It is. 
 properly speaking, neither a pine (Piinis), a fir (Abies), 
 nor a spruce (Picea), but a member of the genus Pseudot- 
 suga (Pseudotsuga taxifolia). As its name indicates it 
 is a near relative of the hemlock (Tsuga) hashing also 
 many spruce-like characters. It may be identified by the 
 conspicuous deeply notched bracts with their spear-like 
 points applied to and extending beyond the scales in the 
 cones. The cones are found in abundance on the ground 
 under the trees. The bark of the tree is deeply and 
 irregularly fissured. The cones of Pseudotsuga, like 
 those of the spruces and hemlocks are pendent, while 
 those of the firs are erect. 
 
 The kriob-cone pine (Piiiiis tiibcrculata) is character- 
 ized by rather thin foliage with needles in groups of three. 
 The cones are in whorls, strongly bent inward toward the 
 tree, and persisting along the trunk of the tree throughout 
 life. 
 
 The oak family is represented by several species. Most 
 abundant of these is the tanbark oak (Pasania densiflora). 
 This tree may be identified by its grayish bark and its 
 oblong acute leaves, strongly parallel-veined on the under 
 side. The staminate flowers are borne in clusters of long 
 
68 
 
 catkins of disagreeable odor, like that of the true chestnut. 
 The roundish acorns are supported by cups bearing fringe- 
 like appendages. This tree is said to form a link between 
 the oaks and chestnuts. The little scrub oak {Quercus 
 dmnosa) is found commonly on the fire trails and exposed 
 places, sharing these with the abundant poison oak, a 
 shrub, belonging to the family Anacardiacece, which 
 could well be dispensed with in the California woods, 
 though alluringly beautiful in the fall when the leaves 
 turn to shades of scarlet and bronze. 
 
 There is a most beautiful grove of oaks (Quercus 
 chrysolepisf) on the fire trail on the eastern side of the 
 Basin not far north of where it crosses the park road at 
 the "summit." This grove is a favorite sporting place 
 for the birds. Flocks of bluebirds, yellow warblers and 
 black-headed juncoes flutter about in the sunshine, and 
 nuthatches run up the trees like woodpeckers, pecking 
 into the cracks of the bark for their noonday meal. 
 
 Another grove of oaks, delighting the eye of the trav- 
 eler, stands in the park on the main drive, where it crosses 
 Flee Potrero, more appropriately called Deer Potrero or 
 Deer Glade, for to this quiet, grassy spot the antlered 
 buck, the doe, the young fawn come each day at sunset to 
 nip their evening meal. 
 
 The Yew family (Taxacece) is represented by one 
 species, the so-called California nutmeg or Tumion ( Tor- 
 reya calif ornica). The leaves on this tree, like those of 
 the redwood and pseudotsuga are arranged in a flat spray. 
 The bright, glossy, green leaves, tipped with sharp, rigid 
 
69 
 
 points and their nutmeg-like fruit, make the identification 
 of the tree unmistakable. This species occurs as indi- 
 vidual trees, never in groups. 
 
 The California buckeye (fam. Sapindacece) , while not 
 found in the depths of the forest, is abundant on the 
 sunny slopes of the ridges, on the fire trails, and occasion- 
 ally along the giilches. Here, however, it does not grow 
 into the robust tree as in the foothills. The foliage is 
 less abundant, but the flowers no less showy and sweet 
 scented, attractive to the bees and butterflies who seek its 
 store of sweets. The tree may be known when in flower 
 (May, June and July) by the large showy clusters of 
 white flowers tinged with bufif, with rose and pea-green. 
 The leaves are spread from the end of the stem like 
 fingers from the palm of the hand, with five to seven 
 leaflets. In the Fall the leafless tree may be identified by 
 its burden of pear-shaped fruit conspicuously pendent 
 from the ends of the branches. 
 
 The toyon or California holly {Heteromeles arhuti- 
 folia) has secured a footing here also. It is found in 
 company with the buckeye, but it also fails to reach the 
 handsome proportions of its relatives in the foothills. 
 
 The buckthorn family is represented by the coffee berry 
 (Rhamnus) and several species, blue and white, of the 
 California lilac. 
 
 The coffee berry, with its olive-like leaves and incon- 
 spicuous yellowish flowers, is a veritable picnic ground 
 for all flower-loving insects, and when one hears an 
 
70 
 
 unusually busy hum of bees, he may know he is in the 
 neighborhood of a coffee berry bush. 
 
 The mountain lilac forms an impenetrable thicket on 
 logged hillsides. It fills the air with a delicious, peachy 
 odor and harbors flocks of mountain chicadees and 
 juncoes. The beauty of a hillside of purple or blue or 
 white is unsurpassed, and the bush would have many 
 friends were it not for the fact that it harbors the wood- 
 tick. 
 
 Perhaps the choicest shrub of our mountain woods is 
 the beautiful and fragrant azalea (Rhododendron occi- 
 dentalis), with its fine, large clusters of handsome white 
 blossoms, blotched with yellow and sometimes shaded 
 with pink. In the park we find it at its very best. It 
 follows the numerous brooks and creeks that find their 
 way through the Basin, gracefully throwing its branches 
 out over the quiet pools, where the fishes dart, and over 
 the tumbling rapids where the water ousels sport. Its 
 charming clusters of blossoms and leaves of a rare, fresh 
 green may be seen on all sides throughout the early 
 summer months, but nowhere in greater profusion than 
 out on Trail Beautiful, well on toward the China Grade 
 turn-off. 
 
 The shrub most characteristic of the park, with its 
 rich shining green and graceful branches, is the huckle- 
 berry. It forms the main forest undergrowth. Its small 
 pink and white waxen bells, its no less beautiful foliage 
 and delicious fruit, delight the woods lover peculiarly. 
 
 In company with the tall redwoods, the pseudotsuga. 
 
71 
 
 the oaks, the huckleberry, wherever an opennig affords, 
 one sees a thickly branched everp^reen with thick, dark 
 green, glossy, elongate leaves. This is the wax myrtle 
 ( Myrica californica) . adding its peculiarly delightful spicy 
 fragrance to that of the azalea blooms. 
 
 Beside the huckleberry, the family Bricaccce, or heath 
 family, furnishes several other species differing much in 
 appearance and habit, the madrone, manzanita, salal, 
 pyrola and the saprophytic pleuricospora. 
 
 No tree of the woods can surpass in beauty the madrone 
 or Arbute tree (Arbutus mensiesii), with its beautifully 
 polished terra cotta bark assuming a rich hue, where the 
 sun plays upon it continuously. In peeling the bark 
 becomes fissured into small flakes. Its rich, glossy, 
 leathery leaves and red branches and dainty white bells in 
 the spring, its brilliant display of red gold and green in 
 the summer, the old leaves turning a burnished red before 
 falling, its globular, scarlet berries in the fall, make it a 
 very attractive tree all the year round. 
 
 Isolated madrones stand here and there in the woods 
 contending with the oaks and wax myrtle for a share of 
 the sifted sunlight. Many superb madrones are to be 
 found on the Maccabee mule trail and a lovely grove on 
 the Hollow-tree camp trail a half mile or so beyond Mad- 
 dox cabin. 
 
 Leaving the woods on any of the trails by means of 
 which one reaches the ridges, one finds, sharing the moun- 
 tain slopes with pickeringia, chamise, scrub oaks and knob- 
 cone pines, the shrubby manzanitas (Arctosfaphylos) 
 
72 
 
 Manzanita in Bloom. 
 
 with their bushy tops, smooth mahogany red Hmbs and 
 white urn-shaped flowers, or small apples kissed on the 
 sunny side to old rose or red. 
 
 The Pyrola is a beautiful little leafless parasite belong- 
 ing to this family. It is found not uncommonly springing 
 in the trail almost under foot of the traveler. Its red 
 stalks, a foot or less high, carry upward the delicate, deep 
 rose-colored flowers, hanging like fairy bells upon their 
 short stems. In the deeper woods these flowers are white, 
 barely tinged with pink. 
 
 Another plant in this family here met with is the dull 
 whitish saprophyte Pleuricospora. It is interesting from 
 its relationship to the red snow plant of the Sierra. Its 
 thick white leafless stalk grows from two to eight inches 
 
73 
 
 Ceonotluis or Wild Lilac. 
 
 above ground in the denser part of the woods, and fre- 
 quently upon the trail, and terminates in a compact mass 
 of flowers, persisting and withering with the stalk. 
 
 Much of the beauty of the trails through the woods is 
 due to the lovely prostrate shrub, the salal {Gaiiltheria 
 shallon). The bright green leaves of this spicy ever- 
 green are beautifully contrasted with the dark leathery 
 older leaves. The pinkish white bells dangling beneath 
 the leaves are veritable fairy bells. The blackish berries 
 are aromatic and edible, though rather tasteless, and are 
 said to have formed an important diet among the Indians. 
 
74 
 
 
 ^^wC^V^ ^H^S^L jJL ^J^Mi^^ '^il^ 
 
 
 ^^«^P^' 
 
 '^ 
 
 Pit ^ijj'iijmIR *^Mi^^3mm ^^^n^Er!!r?h%. 
 
 M 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^^1^ 
 
 #*5 
 
 
 '^1 
 
 ^^ 
 
 
 C! 
 
 [J 
 
 ^ 
 
 Toyon or Cliristmas Berry. 
 
 The most unfriendly shrub of the locahty is the pea 
 chaparral (Pickeringia montana). Ascending the Pine 
 Mountain or China Grade trail one meets with this 
 densely-branched, spiny evergreen, with gray-green 
 leaves, spreading out over the slopes and mountain sides. 
 Its magenta-colored pea blossoms cover the bushes with a 
 
75 
 
 mass of color during- the early summer. Its long thorns 
 warn the explorer not to be too ambitious in penetrating 
 its thickets. 
 
 One of the most interesting of all the shrubs of the 
 region, peculiarly so on account of its localization, is the 
 golden-blossomed slippery elm {Fremontia calif ornica). 
 Its large hibiscus-like blooms are very handsome in the 
 shrubbery of green. It grows only on the mountain 
 slope over which winds the China Grade trail, and is first 
 met with a half mile or so on the trail after it leaves the 
 Opal Creek for its sunny ascent. This bush reaches a 
 height of ten to fifteen feet or more, and may be recog- 
 nized when out of bloom by the dense whitish felt cloth- 
 ing the under surface of the dark green ivy-like leaves 
 and the tough leathery bark. 
 
 The iris family is represented by two species, represent- 
 ing a succession of blooms. The cream-colored irises 
 {Iris douglasiaiia) greet the April visitor in the deeper 
 woods and the blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium helium) 
 welcomes the summer visitor to the fire-trail and clear- 
 ings. The blue-eyed grass appears more like a familiar 
 friend whom we have taken with us from the valley below 
 than as a natural inhabitant of the place. 
 
 Three orchids are characteristic of the park flora. One. 
 the reddish-brown leafless coral root {Corrallorhisa mul- 
 tiflora), not detected by the casual observer because 
 of its nice blending of red-brown stem and flowers with 
 the dead leaves and needles upon the ground, is, like 
 Pyrola. fairlv common and to be found in similar situa- 
 
76 
 
 tions. Another orchid, a species of Cephalanthera,* pure 
 white and leafless, is rare. The third species, a rein 
 orchid (Habenaria), is quite abundant. Its long ribbon- 
 like leaves appear above ground in the early spring. 
 Later the long slender stem shoots up, carrying its deli- 
 cate array of greenish buds. The buds unfold slowly, 
 and its blooming season is long. When summer wanes 
 the greenish-white flowers may still be found in shaded 
 corners. 
 
 There is no more refreshing sight in the park anywhere 
 than that of a cluster of tiger lilies, standing erect in the 
 shadow of a great boulder or under an overhanging 
 bough, and nodding their spotted orange petals over the 
 rippling or rushing streams or reflected from a quiet 
 mirror-like pool. In one of the most enchanting spots 
 along the East Waddell a group of these peer over a 
 great moss-covered log, like guardians of the spirit of the 
 stream. 
 
 The one who has a real affection for the brookside has 
 a grudge against the usual fisherman. Not because he 
 beguiles the unwary fishes with his tempting fly — there 
 are plenty of fish in these streams to spare a few for his 
 pleasure — but for the reckless way in which he crashes 
 through the magnificent stalks of these stately flowers as 
 they bend their graceful heads over the pool, leaving ruin 
 in his trail. 
 
 Early in the spring the large rich leaves of polished 
 
 *Found in this locality for the first time by Mrs. Tuanita Gerlach, June, 
 1912, on Trail Beautiful, not far from park boundary, and determined by 
 Professor Abrams. 
 
 m 
 
77 
 
 silky green of the beautiful lily, Clintonia (Clint onia 
 andrezi'siana), appear above the ground. The blossom 
 stalk soon appearing, carries high above the leaves a 
 cluster of lovely blossoms — deep cerise in the more open 
 woods, delicately pink in the shaded nooks. During the 
 sunny July days the flowers give place to the green berry- 
 like fruit which quickly ripens into a rich indigo blue. 
 The leaves, the flower, the fruit, all combine in a richness 
 and uniqueness of feature which makes the Clintonia one 
 of the most distinguished of the woods plants. 
 
 The lily family is further represented by the wake-robin 
 (Trillium oratum) coming early with its pure white blos- 
 soms in its setting of three large green leaves, white in 
 youth, pink in age, false Solomon's-seal (Smilacina am- 
 ple xicanlis) , star zygadene, the soap-plant (Chlorogaliim 
 pomeridianum) , whose bulb is useful to the camper who 
 has left his soap dish in town, several brodiaeas, blue and 
 yellow, with a rare pink specimen, two species of Mariposa 
 lily, one, the beautiful and dainty whitish globe tulip or 
 fairy lantern bell (Calochortus albus), and the other the 
 little star tulip. 
 
 Covering all the ground, like a carpet of green is the 
 sorrel (Oxalis oregana), its delicate white blossom pink- 
 ish in age, amidst bunches of trifoliate, heart-shaped, 
 spotted or green leaves. The "good luck" leaf of four 
 leaflets occasionally rewards the observant. 
 
 The long graceful sprays of Yerba buena (Micromera 
 chamissonis) trail and interlace over the carpet and yield 
 a delicious aromatic fragrance that delights and charms 
 
78 
 
 the passer-by. The flowers are small and white and 
 appear in the axils of the leaves. 
 
 The pretty trailing underbrush, the whipplea {W'hipplca 
 modesta), keeps company with the yerba buena with its 
 exquisite little clusters of white blossoms and delicate 
 fragrance. 
 
 The very dainty little pink star-flower {Triciitalis 
 cnropoea) on delicate thread-like stem, in clusters of 
 irregularly shaped leaves, lends itself most attractively to 
 the patterning of the woods carpet. The yellow wood 
 violet (Viola sarmentosa) and the little western hearts- 
 ease {Viola ocelata), white within, purplish without, add 
 their color and charm. 
 
 Of all the flowers that fringe the stream none are more 
 at home than the western Boykinia (Boykinia clata). 
 The long" slender stems clothed with rusty glandular hairs 
 carrying their sweet-scented sprays of small whitish 
 flowers dashed with a purplish brown tinge, become, with 
 the other saxifrages that neighbor with it, the mitre-wort 
 and alum-root, and with the ferns and reeds a part of the 
 personality of the brook itself. 
 
 These three saxifrages may be easily distinguished 
 though somewhat similar in leafage and habit. The 
 fragrance of Boykinia sets it apart. In the alum-root 
 (Heuchera) the flowers, though smaller, grow in a loose 
 panicle as in Boykinia, the leaves are, however, more 
 deeply lobed, of a mottled green and veined, particularly 
 late in the season or in exposed situations, in dark red or 
 brown. In the seed pods of the alum-root the two valves 
 
79 
 
 are equal in length. In the mitre-wort (Triarella uni- 
 foliata) the small white flowers are arranged along the 
 stem, the seed pods are formed of two valves, one of 
 which is conspicuously elongated. 
 
 In these woods the saxifrage-like mist-maiden (Roiiian- 
 zoffia sitchensis) is present, but rare. 
 
 Upon almost any walk one finds the lovely plant of our 
 coast woods, the American barrenwort ( Vancouveria 
 parvi flora) with its sprays of white flowers. It is particu- 
 larly noticeable from the likeness of its leafage to the 
 fronds of the maiden-hair. 
 
 Among the most attractive blooms of the chaparraled 
 hillside, above the redwood line, are the golden flowers of 
 the tree poppy {Dendromccon rigida). Its rigid pale 
 green leaves and whitish branches form a great contrast to 
 the darker green of the chamise, the manzanita and scrub 
 oaks with which it keeps company. It has a long bloom- 
 ing season, coming early and remaining late into the 
 summer. 
 
 With their flowering season almost parallel with that of 
 tree-poppy and growing in somewhat similar situations, 
 particularly around the rim of the Basin on the north and 
 east, on fire-trails and sunny hillsides one sees grand dis- 
 plays of the mountain balm {Eriodictyon calif orniciun) 
 with its pale colored lavender flowers and aromatic 
 gummy leaves, the pitcher sage {Sphacelc calcina) with 
 its large white flowers aptly called "pitchers," and the 
 bushy monkey flowers (Diplaciis glutinosns) with their 
 saucy orange faces. 
 
80 
 
 Hosts of other flowers greet the wayfarer who leaves 
 the woods for a day's tramp on a trail that takes him out 
 into the sunshine, patches of glowing Indian paint brush 
 (Castilleia) with their brilliant dashes of color, or masses 
 of the rose-pink godetia with its splotched satiny cups, or 
 now and then, its fairer sister Innocence (Collinsia) or 
 sheets of the lavender mint {Monardella) with its clean, 
 spicy, refreshing odor, in favorable situations the red and 
 blue larkspurs, the pedicularis or Indian warrior, the 
 hedge nettle, wild cucumber vine (Chilicothe), vetch, 
 sweet pea, the salmon-colored starry pimpernel (Aiiagallis 
 arvensis) with its rich purple center, the charming pink 
 flowers of the Canchalagua {Brythraca venusta), "fresh, 
 wide-awake in appearance, reminding one of a rosy-faced 
 country wench," morning-glories, forget-me-nots, Cali- 
 fornia milkwort {Poly gala calif ornica), the fragile blue- 
 bell flowers {Campanula) , the wild strawberry, the black- 
 berry and hazel, spiraea, euonymus, bed straw with its 
 fishhook bristles, the thieving broom-rape sending its 
 rootlets into the fibres of its self-supporting neighbors, 
 and many others. 
 
 No account has been taken of the various grasses grow- 
 ing everywhere outside of the denser parts of the forest, 
 the beautiful ferns and horsetail {equisetum) growing so 
 luxuriantly along the watercourses, nor the more lowly 
 plant life of liverworts and lichens. 
 
 Woodwardia Glen, a mile or so above Woodwardia 
 Falls on the Pine Mountain trail, where the luxuriant 
 fronds cover an acre or more and grow as tall as a man. 
 
81 
 
 or the numerous i^ulches where the eqnisctimi spreads its 
 airy mass of sprint;- green, a fallen monster lying across a 
 brook, having become with age and moisture a veritable 
 garden of mosses, lichens, liverworts — and supi)orting in 
 its decaying tissues, young forests of huckleberry, tan- 
 bark oak, seedling spruces and other growths — the 
 "cave" with its ceiling tapestried with a rich coating of 
 pale green, olive and pink lichens, these, too. are worthy 
 of a place in a chapter on the flora of the park. 
 
82 
 
 The Cave. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 HE cave is a grey green grotto, scooped out of 
 a sandstone slope set high over a small crater 
 canyon. The path of approach climbs the 
 brushy, tree-pillared hollow on to the floor of 
 the alcove hanging over the leafy depths. The dun green 
 tinting is of mould or lichen ; and some mineral tincture 
 has left here a shadowy washing of soft green. 
 
 The walls and roof are grotesquely carved. The long 
 head of a hound shows faintly, the galloping flanks of a 
 horse whose front you must imagine, disappearing in the 
 stone. Satyr faces bulge from the ceiling. Fragmen- 
 tary moldings, disconnected reliefs, whose origin and 
 meaning are probably as hard to fathom as the hiero- 
 glyphics in an Egyptian catacomb. 
 
 On the floury sand of the floor, the footprints of pass- 
 ing wood creatures, heavy hop of a toad, mad whirl of a 
 merry cotton-tail, and the cranium-dotted trail of big 
 black beetles, whose habit is to pause often and stand on 
 their heads. 
 
 Under the ledges in far corners, the bedding form of 
 some larger creature. Perhaps the bobcat or the fox 
 dozes here. 
 
 Curved and hollowed like a shell poised over the windy 
 canyon, the cave holds a peculiar phonetic quality, alter- 
 nately hushed and filled with sound. A pleasant eerie 
 
83 
 
 sensation to stand in the momentary stillness and hear 
 the oncoming pattering murmur. Swept from high 
 ridges, gathered up from grassy hollows, trailed ground 
 from the hillside, from the ground, from the sky sound on 
 the wind is sucked up through the drafty crater and 
 flung under the eaves of the cave to echo in pulsing con- 
 finement. Listening here you are literally an eaves- 
 dropper, but unless you have been false indeed to the 
 Open, you will hear nothing against yourself. 
 
 Sometimes the wind shifts, pulls away from the pit 
 below, draws all the music and the whispering murmurs 
 out of the cave. Then there is a strange quiet in the 
 place. The carvings come out more distinctly ; the little 
 grotto seems to recall some silent, ceremonious happening, 
 some pagan procedure, and if your fancy sees a hushed 
 Druidic rite performing, your fancy may be as near the 
 truth as if it played with an exact science. 
 
84 
 
 Light and Shadow in the Park. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 T IS perhaps thrice, or twice, it may be but 
 once, in a hfetime that we come mind to 
 mind, heart to heart with poetry. The wide 
 surge of the ocean, the mighty psean of a 
 storm, the great epic, the world masterpiece, may leave 
 us cold, and in some open, mobile moment, a shadow on 
 a wall, a child's smile, the surprise of another hand laid 
 on ours, and the great exaltation throbs in our soul. 
 
 Year after year we may be insensate to the trooping 
 marvels of beauty that pass and repass with the dawn 
 and the dark, and some small, oft-overlooked thing will 
 suddenly fuse our imagination into the white light of 
 understanding. 
 
 And when by peculiar training, by burning sorrow, 
 by love, by misfortune, by innate, inherited tendencies, 
 nurtured and guarded in grief and in joy, we come at 
 last to be tempered to a state that often rings true to 
 absolute beauty, yet it is here, too, that the lowly sight, 
 the little, common thing may unexpectedly lift us to the 
 greatest heights. 
 
 (,?• &?* t^^ 
 
 So it was that one morning in Sempervirens Park I 
 did not for the time being note the magnitude of the 
 
85 
 
 Sequoias, the vastness of the sky, the mighty folded and 
 outflung- geology of the hills ; I only saw the fall of light 
 on little vines and mosses, the luminous tinted shade 
 upthrovvn beneath the tiny tangled leaves, the beamy 
 labyrinths of sunshine that underthread the lowly 
 grasses. 
 
 Minute ferns unfold and east their seed beneath a 
 thatched roof of larger ferns ; small vines creep and 
 strive, wreathing over their allotted bit of shadowed 
 soil ; a delicate forest peeps out here and there under- 
 neath a higher, stronger luxuriance. 
 
 Much of this winding, tender jungle does noi perceive 
 a solar center ; for these hidden herbs the sun does not 
 rise and set in a round blaze of glory. Their subdued 
 sun is the reflected light from a pool of sunshme on a big 
 leaf near by, the dispersed glow from the quivering spot 
 of fire, on the flowing brook, or the refracted lustre 
 turned aside from a sunblazed rock and filtered into their 
 screened concealment. From the one source a thousand 
 springs of light caught and held in intricate variety ; 
 from these shining wells a million sifted sunrays darting, 
 piercing, curving into the smallest retreat, finding and 
 feeding the tender plants that sheer unblended sunshine 
 would wither and blight. Worlds within worlds along 
 the forest trail, little realms of greenery revolving around 
 each sun filled spathe, every leaf placed in dainty relation 
 to every other leaf, the shadow of sprig and spray cast at 
 the appointed moment over the gilded delicacy of an over- 
 heated tendril ; and the vision is startled and upheld in 
 
86 
 
 as great heights as if one had been carried into eternal 
 space and watched the planers revolving at his feet. 
 
 Hearing the little leaves singing in the sifted sunshine, 
 you hear the song that the stars sing together. 
 
 ^* ^?* 5(9* 
 
 I had watched the moonlight merge slowly into the 
 light of day ; so slowly I could not fix the moment when 
 the dense patches of white lifted from the floor of the 
 forest became transparent over the faintly showing ferns 
 and lichens ; when the ivory and black that wrapped the 
 trees about, blurred and broke in gauzy rifts, letting the 
 first pale glimmer of green shine through the dissolving 
 moonlight. 
 
 Drawn across the dawning a scale wren's tremolo 
 whistle, eager with morning joy, yet so pervaded by the 
 mystery of the transformation, I knew the bird had been 
 awake in the white moonlight waiting for the break of 
 day. 
 
 Little candles of sunlight began to twinkle on the tip 
 of the tan oak leaves; kindling sparks dropped from the 
 sunrise fires on the horizon-watching redwoods. 
 
 Then the incandescent points spread in diffused fire 
 over the leaves. Heaped layers of sunshine seemed to 
 press the branches down with a burden of gold, that 
 lowered from spire to bough, from bough to the forest 
 floor, traveling down the trees as an hour before the light 
 of the moon had shifted and moved upward. 
 
 The sun was in the skv. 
 
87 
 
 Phr.td liy Apiilcl 
 
 Creek Falls. 
 
88 
 
 Birds, leaves, brooks, winds were singing the svmrise 
 song, that matin hymn a darkened humanity has forgot 
 and left to the dwellers of the wild. 
 
 The sun fathomed with a shimmering plummet a deep 
 canyon of the basin. Through a gap in the walls, the 
 following shadows underlined, upheld further vistas, 
 curving about, hollowing distance, drawing bright pictures 
 nearer, down a telescope of velvet shade. 
 
 A silver redwood shaft rubbed midway with a russet 
 stain, where a falling tree had scraped aside the weath- 
 ered bark, bringing a shreddy blur of cinnamon to the 
 surface. On the warm red background, a shadow spray 
 of madrono leaves, moving softly, swinging up against 
 the russet tone, dipping its lower outlines into the sil- 
 vered bark, curveting and flickering as if the wind surely 
 touched its unsubstantial contour. I looked in vain for 
 the actual breeze-fingered madrono spray, then back to 
 the phantom picture, whose etherial composition seemed 
 more real than the growing leaves hidden, lost among 
 green hosts. 
 
 Along the stream the light shining through the leaves 
 is green and golden. The foliage has become transpar- 
 ent. Woodwardias, burned and thin, radiate an amber 
 tint. Rosetted branches of azalea leaves, suspended by 
 frail stems, float airily over the water, transmitting a 
 topaz glow. They seem no longer leaves, rather are they 
 spattered patterns of sunshine. Side by side with the 
 real marquetry of light, yellow leaf and yellow sun 
 patches can hardly be distinguished apart; and when the 
 
 M 
 
 Z^ 
 
 %. 
 
8D 
 
 gloaming" conies down the can\on tlie green dusk is 
 lighted for an hour by these leaf-shaped bits of concen- 
 trated sunshine. 
 
 There is the keenest value in autunui sunshine. In the 
 days of golden light that come between the unrestrained 
 glow of summer* and the wan sunshine of winter, there is, 
 if it may be so described, an experienced, mature play of 
 light. No exuberance wasted, every touch with telling 
 efifect, and the warmth and color and thrill of this late, 
 passionate sunshine is like the smile of a sweet, wise 
 woman learned in the power to charm, yet unworn and 
 vital in emotion. 
 
 (j9* (,?• (,?• 
 
 Water is glazed over to most eyes ; its depths covered 
 by the veneer of its main color. The surface observer 
 sees little else but a grey or green or blue expanse, quiet 
 or disturbed, as the case may be. But once get a glance 
 into the green lift of a curHng wave through whose 
 incredibly delicate walls the sunrise or the afterglow pene- 
 trates ; follow a shaft of light down deep in a mountain 
 pool, or seek the oblique sight of oily colors mingling on 
 a calm lake, and forever after the light and shadow will 
 show you a world of magic in water. The earth's aspect 
 is frank, open, simple compared to the mystery that lies 
 in aqueous depths. There is nothing under heaven which 
 can so persuade one of merry sorcery, of the spell of 
 incantations, up-called dripping sprites, unseen singing. 
 
90 
 
 the chucklings of pixies and all wood fantasies and all 
 river mysteries, like the long water falling into a hidden 
 green pool sunk in a mossy mountain cleft. Drive Pan 
 from other fastnesses of the hills and you will still find 
 him fingering his reeds, his hoofed limbs crossed, com- 
 fortably settled somewhere about the rim of the mala- 
 chite colored bowl. 
 
 I came to watch the light play into the green pool, but 
 would hear laughter, laughter shaking in the ripples. In 
 the white cascades falling, with an upward rise of foam 
 and a glee so ascendant, they seemed to be climbing up, as 
 well as down the rocky rifts, I saw water babies turning 
 over and over. Every splash was the dive of an elf. Do 
 the beryl depths not call to you ? If there is anything 
 akin to river spirits in your blood, your heart pounds and 
 dances with the falls ; you want to sink down, down in the 
 gold flecked pool and the tingling cold will be a delirium, 
 a fire in your veins ; you will rise dripping, renewed, 
 remade. For half a minute, a fluid purer and nearer the 
 source than your own tepid human blood throbs in your 
 veins. 
 
 One strand of the glassy fall swerved, struck a project- 
 ing rock, shattered to a million drops, denting the pool 
 with sparkling points. The main stream dropped straight 
 into the green water, forming an embossed mii!^ white 
 circle of froth, that rose from the green chalice cease- 
 lessly opening, constantly blossoming, springing from the 
 emerald level, a white wonder of whirling flower foam. 
 
 Out of this marvel is born another — air bubbles. But 
 
91 
 
 have you seen them when for a few fleeting moments in 
 the light that comes up through the virescent Hquid, they 
 become live jewels, skimming, darting irridescent miracles 
 of mixed water, color and air ? 
 
 The effervescent, formless ether, caught in the pulsing 
 beat of the cascade, carried down into the mountain tarn, 
 mysteriously moulded under the water, floated upward, 
 swimming over the surface, cast into prismatic globules 
 that quivering, hold all the colors of heaven and earth. 
 You must have eyes to see ; your attention must not 
 waver. One glance will not give you their beauty. Only 
 the long, penetrating gaze will melt your own clouded 
 perceptions and the glaze that closes all water over. If 
 your pursuant faculties have not caught just the right 
 illumined moment of the passing sun-touch, on the little 
 round spheres, they are but dancing air bubbles, colorless 
 and commonplace. 
 
 These evanescent glimpses of beauty that we may dis- 
 cover at any hour in the round day of sunshine and shade, 
 are creative through the awakened consciousness as well 
 as revealing. 
 
 In a sense, their beauty is not there until we see it ; our 
 perception of the irridescent bubbles forms, paints and 
 imbues them with life; for Nature is guided by, while 
 guiding the vision of man. The soul of the earth and the 
 soul of humanity forever touch and mingle. Out of 
 supreme generic forces our conception of beauty brings 
 forth to the eye especial forms, specific expressions of 
 loveliness and life unseen before. 
 
92 
 
 Poetry is not poetry until human hearts beat with its 
 rhythm, until the blood in us sings with its melody, until 
 the mind reaches upward, finding in every song a move- 
 ment toward God. 
 
 What matter if it is a shadow, a smile, a floating air 
 bubble that brings the soul for one moment in perfect 
 harmonv with the Universal Pulse? 
 
93 
 
 THE MADRONO. 
 
 Captain of the western wood, 
 Thou that apest Robin Hood ! 
 Green above thy scarlet hose, 
 How thy velvet mantle shows : 
 Never tree like thee arrayed, 
 O thou gallant of the glade. 
 
 When the fervid August sun 
 Scorches all it looks upon, 
 And the balsam of the pine 
 Drips from stem to needle fine, 
 Round thy compact shade arranged, 
 Not a leaf of thee is changed ! 
 
 When the yellow Autumn sun 
 Saddens all it looks upon, 
 Spreads its sackcloth on the hills. 
 Strews its ashes in the rills. 
 Thou thy scarlet hose dost doff. 
 And in limbs in purest buff 
 Challengest the somber glade 
 For a sylvan masquerade. 
 
 Where, oh where, shall we begin 
 Who would paint thee. Harlequin? 
 With thy waxen burnished leaf. 
 With thy branches red relief. 
 With thy poly-tinted fruit. 
 In thy spring or autumn suit. — 
 Where begin, and oh, where end. — 
 Thou whose charms all art transcend? 
 
 —Bret Harfc. 
 
94 
 
 Autumn Color. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 N these Autumn canyons, red is subordinate to 
 green and yellow. You must search for the 
 touch of scarlet and crimson and when you 
 find it, the bright surprise is more charming 
 for its rarity. 
 
 Long sprays of honeysuckle festoon the brush, tipped 
 with clustering scarlet drops. The Red huckleberry 
 bushes are hung with coral beads. The false Solomon's 
 Seal is heavy with large berries. You wonder how the 
 tiny, white flowers that formed its feathery summer plume 
 could so develop in fruiting size. You are always won- 
 dering in the woods. If you have lost yourself in the 
 shadowy spell of the forest, you come to the ways of men 
 again with the clear, wide gaze of a child, the crow's feet 
 and the fretting concern washed from your eyes. But if 
 you care more for the personal effect than you do for the 
 deep delight of the woods, the wrinkles and the worry 
 will still be there. Lose yourself. 
 
 Along the streams, the thin, yellow leaves of Burning 
 Bush shade its pretty, pendant fruit. The outer pink 
 encasing rayed open, from the four sections, attached by 
 frail threads, hang the scarlet swinging seeds. The vir- 
 ulence of poison oak is all forgotten in the delight of its 
 high flaunted red ; a running flame in the cool green 
 
95 
 
 canyons, a girding fire about the lavender grey spruce 
 trunlvs and the rufous boles of the Sequoias. When the 
 sunHght strikes the encircled shafts, an effect of fire glow 
 is given in more than color. The tree appears to smoul- 
 der in heat. The wreaths flicker in the wind, moving 
 jets of red play over the bark, and the moted sunshine is a 
 smoky yellow haze that wavers between the red, lapping 
 vines. Near to the tree you smell the pungent odor of 
 warm bark and hot red leaf. 
 
 On the open ridges toyon berries are washed in early 
 scarlet. In a month they will be deepest crimson. Here' 
 in the park, there will be no plundering hands to take 
 them from their best appointed place. 
 
 The madroiio's granular berries swing in all shades of 
 red and orange. The curled up funnels of colorful bark 
 are cast down with prodigal carelessness, returned each 
 year to the source from which they came. 
 
 The upper limbs twist and iwine in young, naked toning. 
 Out of the sunlight and wind and rain the tree will recall 
 its discarded color, recloak itself again in all its burnished 
 beauty. Forever casting off its painted sheathing, fling- 
 ing itself to the winds, weaving ruddy suggestions into 
 fixed and fiery copper, only to roll up the incomparable 
 hues, to throw them broadcast, starting the color shuttle 
 again upon the first woof of its pale tan texture. 
 
 The madroiio gives lavishly — it might appear waste- 
 fully. Ah, no, it gives wastelessly ; it has the secret of 
 giving and taking without stint or limit ; putting out 
 measureless expression to profit, that old secret whose 
 
i6 
 
 warrant is written in an Ancient Book, ''To him thai 
 hath shall be given." 
 
 A gleam of blue above the moss and fern where clin- 
 tonia leaves droop upon the earth ; their wet smoothness 
 melting into the soil. On the tall stem where once pink 
 lilies hung, a rare fall of lapis lazuli beads. Birds are 
 fond of the blue berries ; they are seldom left in ample 
 numbers. Water dogs and snails eat them, too, I believe, 
 for we find the long stems pulled down, laced back and 
 forth to the earth with glutenous threads where the slimy 
 ones have crawled. 
 
 e^ 5^ (^* 
 
 And over all, the gentian blue of the Santa Cruz sky, 
 not a distant background in the park. It comes forward 
 here through the forest aisles, outlines the leaves, upholds 
 the flying motif of a bird's wings, circles and sweeps 
 between and around the mosaic designs of meadow, glade, 
 stream and rock, like the azure enamel of a Cloisanne 
 vase. The sight wavers from the receding imagery to 
 the device of the bright circling background. 
 
 In the forest, the eye can not always keep the contour 
 of the outlined picture clear, the blue persistent sky is so 
 prominently defined. 
 
 If there were no color anywhere in California save in 
 the green of its ever verdant woods, the gold of its sun- 
 light, the blue of its skies, these three vivid hues alone 
 would make it a land of brilliant color. Without the 
 
97 
 
 green and the g^old, how intense and wonderful still the 
 peculiar blue shadowed atmosphere, distinctive to the 
 coast. In the East, duller skies and scarlet, orange, pur- 
 ple, crimsort autunmal foliage. Throughout the Pacific 
 States, a painted air immersing, changing, glorifying local 
 color — brown to bronze, yellow to gold, leaden to violet, 
 dense to diaphanous, pallid to prismatic, seeping down 
 from the cobalt heavens, an illumined atmosphere that 
 bathes the country in floating, rarified gorgeous dyes. 
 
98 
 
 Fungi Gardens. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 NDER the fallen foliage is a hidden garden. 
 Brilliant fungi flowers bud, bloom, ripen 
 unseen to most eyes. Stir the matted leaves 
 aside ; scarlet and yellow and wine-red Rus- 
 sulas stud the soil, indigo blue Leptonias brighten the 
 mould. 
 
 Some of these toadstools are poisonous, some are edible, 
 but their thatched over color is always a wholesome lure 
 to follow, leading one along a trail of ambushed enchant- 
 ment. Hunt for a blue or red or golden knob under the 
 thick leaf layers, turn it around and a door opens to happy 
 secret chambers of beauty underground. 
 
 Here is a tiny closed pink parasol tinted in palest rose ; 
 through the chiffon fabriced folds, the dehcate ribs show, 
 pressed down about the stem. Tliis little fungi plant is 
 as fresh and lovely as a wild rose. 
 
 There is a small cream colored waxy agaric with the 
 fragrance of some tropical flower. In the temperate 
 dampness of these woods, you catch the odor of a breeze 
 that might be wafting from citrus groves — so heavy and 
 bitter-sweet the perfume. 
 
 Along a rotted trunk, hundreds of slanted receptacles 
 filled with a black liquid looking substance, the tip tilted 
 cups, however, never spilling their brimming contents 
 
99 
 
 over. The black watery appearing stuff is as solid as the 
 dull black bowls that hold it. 
 
 Infinite shapes, carved spikes, spatulate clubs, queer 
 little spirals, rising- from buried spruce cones, red snaky 
 staff's uprearing. 
 
 An Armillaria brushed with stringy dabs of orange and 
 red, laid on so thick they look like drying paint strokes. 
 
 Sometime the color is placed on the cap of fungi plants, 
 sometimes a dull pileus conceals the brilliant hued plates 
 beneath. 
 
 Here is a smoky colored cap, a Cortinarius ; turn it 
 over, the moist gills are so red they look soaked in blood. 
 
 Beds of tg^ yellow Chanterelles, toothsome to man and 
 the big grey squirrel and the tawny fox and the fat skunk 
 and coon, growing in abundance for all. Alabaster shells 
 of the oyster mushroom, succulent flutings, tier upon tier, 
 on an alder trunk spanning the stream. Sulphur and 
 orange scallops of Polyporus bracketing the spruce 
 trunks, for all their lurid color, dainty mouthfulls when 
 fresh. They are more than a hundred different varieties 
 of edible toadstools in the park ; a full harvest for those 
 who know how to gather and eat ; another harvest for 
 those who know how to garner and assimilate color. 
 Sometimes we seem to be w^andering on the floor of the 
 ocean. Over the trail sprawl dark leathery starfish forms, 
 — Geasters or earth-stars. White, pink and yellow corals, 
 branch through the cracked wet earth ; dainty shells are 
 arrayed under branches. Big Bolcli, like folded sponges, 
 mussel-shaped black clusters, tendril-rimmed cup fungi. 
 
ICO 
 
 mimicking ocean anemones; grasses for seaweeds, jewel- 
 eyed salamanders, like slow loitering fish, snails crawling 
 about, a salty tang in the air from the disintregating toad- 
 stools and the sound of waves in the pines — one might 
 fancy the earth had become freakish, 
 
 "Working a sea change 
 
 Into something weird and strange." 
 
 All these forms, this hidden color is not found in a day. 
 Many walk over the hoarded reserves, scenting only the 
 mould, seeing only some rotting ugly plant, that has 
 pushed high above the leaves out of the cover where its 
 beautiful prime is spent. 
 
 Nor is the decay ugly. Under the microscope, curious 
 and pretty spore shapes swim in the dissolving substance. 
 The rich humus of the park is replenished each year by 
 rotting fungi. The waning mushroom is performing a 
 wonderful, beautiful decline — that earth embraced return, 
 which is in reality — restoration, new life. 
 
101 
 
 THE SEQUOIAS. \ 
 
 By Charles Elmer Jenny. | 
 
 God set seven signs upon this land of ours I 
 
 To teach, by awe, mankind his wondrous powers ; \ 
 
 A river sweeping broadly to the sea ; | 
 
 A cataract that thunders ceaselessly ; j 
 
 A mountain peak that towers in heaven's face ; 
 
 A chasm deep-sunk toward the nether place ; I 
 
 A lake that all the wide horizon fills ; ! 
 
 A pleasant vale set gem-like in the hills ; 
 And, worthy younger brother of all these, 
 The great Sequoia, king of all the trees ! 
 
 A cradle, song, and bed the waters meant ; 
 
 The others, playground, grave and monument : 
 
 All wonderful, but cold and hard and dead ; 
 
 The trees alone, like man, with life are fed. 
 
 Like him have felt the stir to rise from earth. 
 
 To toil, to strive to heights of greater worth, : 
 
 To breast the storms and know the north wind's rage, ■ 
 
 And pass traditions down from age to age. ■, 
 
 O'er four score spans of human life they see, | 
 
 And whisper of their tales to you and me. 
 
 4 
 
 Some men have worshipped 'neath their mighty beams — 
 
 Some men have dreamed and told the world their dreams ; ' 
 
 Some men have lain most humbly at their feet 
 
 And sunk into the tired child's slumber sweet ; J 
 
 Some men — men? — have you seen plants wilt and worse, ' 
 
 Their base engirdled by the cutworm's curse? — 
 
 Such men with axe and saw have gnawed and gnawed ' J 
 
 And felled to earth what never back to God 
 
 Their lives can raise — nor sons, nor grandsons raise, I 
 
 Through penance of a thousand arbor days. 
 
 Vi 
 
102 
 
 Bird Life in the Park. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 |LONG any trail in the park, you will be sure to 
 meet three large scratching birds — the Cali- 
 fornia Towhee, the Spurred Towhee and the 
 California Thrasher — mowing the dirt aside 
 with his sickle bill. 
 
 Two of these birds are brown ; the Thrasher has a long 
 body, a great curved bill ; the California Towhee is fluffy 
 and fat, with a short bill. The Spurred Towhee is black 
 headed, white and brick-red breasted, and he has decid- 
 edly red eyes, mildly pretty eyes for all their ruby glitter. 
 The Thrasher's note is "quoy quoy," with an upward 
 inflection; the Spurred Towhee calls "to-hee', to-hee'," 
 accent on the last syllable ; the California Towhee or 
 Chewink says his name shortly, emphasis on the first 
 syllable — "che' wink." 
 
 The bright colored Towhee's song is a peculiar vibrant 
 trill on a descending scale, but so burred over it seems to 
 sound on one note. The brown Towhee has a rather 
 thin roundelay like shallow water gurgling about a stone, 
 but the Thrasher is a marvelous singer, cousin he is to 
 the Mocking-bird. No two birds sing quite alike, and 
 they do not sing very often, so if you hear his rare per- 
 formance some early, very early, Spring morning, that 
 day is always set a little apart. Sweet, irregular phrasing, 
 interspersed with drawling calls. You will not question 
 
103 
 
 what bird is singing, if you have learned the pecuHar 
 timbre of his "quoy." 
 
 Now turn your attention to three sparrows, about the 
 size of the English sparrow of town streets. The White 
 Crown, the Golden Crown and the Point Pinos Junco. 
 Their call notes are much alike, a clicking note resem- 
 bling the urge we make to horses between closed teeth. 
 The first two birds are plump and greyish, white stripes 
 between black on the crown of one, dull yellow .streaks 
 with the black on the head of the other. 
 
 The Junco is smaller, black headed, greyish bufif on his 
 breast, and he shows a white flit of feathers, on the 
 fanned out margin of his tail — his song a sunny warble. 
 The White Crown sings the year around : two descending 
 notes, followed by a triplet trill. He sings also in the 
 night. In the moonlight or in the dark silence, his sud- 
 den rippling cadence overflows as if he was so full of 
 music that it burst out of him in his sleep without con- 
 scious volition. The Golden Crown sings three descend- 
 ing notes, plaintively sweet. These six birds are resident 
 wherever they are found in California. 
 
 If, when your visit to the park comes to a close, you 
 have learned to identify these little brothers of the air, 
 school-teacher, parent, laborer, or professional man or 
 woman, you will carry away in your heart a lesson of 
 infinite value. If you can say with authority, "There is 
 a Junco — see the white flit of his tail ; there is the Spurred 
 red-eyed Towhee. Hark, a Thrasher is singing in the 
 thicket," or if far away from the woods, you speak of the 
 
104 
 
 California Towhee, the White Crown and Golden Crown 
 Sparrow, you will never find the words come amiss, no 
 matter when, how or where, you essay to use them. 
 
 t^* t^w (,?• 
 
 We know that meadow larks do not frequent deep 
 canyons, that blue birds do not build in the reeds by the 
 river, but in learning to identify less common birds, we 
 often forg-et that locality will help us to find their names 
 as well as color and shape. And this, while it simplifies 
 the search for classification, doubles and trebles our 
 enjoyment of the woods and fields. The labor of scien- 
 tific arrangement would be rather profitless if we did not 
 absorb a part of the beauty of the outdoors with our task. 
 When we make note of a bird's food, his manner of 
 procuring it, his way of flying and so forth, we learn also 
 something of insect life, something of the flora of a 
 region, something of the loveliness of space, in which 
 dififerent landscapes are set. With the distinguishing 
 range of a bird's habitat, we notice a hundred delightful 
 things, that follow and surround and lure us on in the 
 search for his name. 
 
 When walking over rocky, treeless, sun warmed 
 slopes, and a little metallic songed wren bobs up and 
 down on an outcropping stone, you will know him for 
 the Rock Wren ; you will not confuse him with the 
 Caiion Wren and you have a clear impression of the 
 region he lives in ; the rise of granite against the sky 
 connected by curved lines of exposed sun beaten soil. 
 
105 
 
 You see where his range ends down in the bushy hollows, 
 or where the cool dark forests begin. 
 
 He disappears in a crevice of the noduled stone, 
 creeping through a crack he knows ; there he is again, 
 bowing and singing on a distant rock. So you come to 
 see the beauty that lies upon grey stones, the blue shadows 
 that circle them, the crumbly dabs of rust-red lichens and 
 the flat spreading grey green lichens that color them over. 
 The Rock Wren will open your eyes, to more than his 
 mere name and habits. A vague undefined and unde- 
 fining enjoyment of Nature gives but small reward. We 
 seem to be so constituted that idle dreaming is seldom 
 beneficial. It may be even dangerous to enter the realm 
 of the Open without some obvious thread to guide us, 
 some search to quicken our. perceptions. You find this 
 little grey brown wren, with a black band across his tail, 
 has a somewhat flinty tinkle in his song and you begin to 
 understand how close is the association between sound 
 and matter ; how unconsciously the birds are forever 
 interpreting and echoing what they hear and see. The 
 wind infringes upon this hard rock strewn, barren ground 
 with a hot, monotonous sweep, and the Rock Wren, hear- 
 ing nothing but the whifif of breezes blowing through the 
 unyielding cracks and runways of his stony haunts, sings 
 a stiff, wheezy little lay that seems to fairly crackle with 
 cheerful heat. 
 
 Doubtless when you think of a wren, you picture a 
 small bird with short wings and tip tilted tail, but the big 
 Mocking-bird, the Catbird and the Thrashers all belong 
 
106 
 
 to the wren family. The California Thrasher has among 
 some others, four little kinsfolk in the Big Basin, the 
 Rock Wren, the Canon Wren, Vigor's Wren and the 
 Winter Wren. 
 
 The Dotted CaSon Wren is described by his name. If 
 you add the White Throated Dotted Canon Wren, his 
 image and locality is clearly impressed upon your mind, 
 and you will surely know when you meet him on the 
 banks of a deep ravine. What would you expect to hear 
 in his song? Not the crisp, sunny, metallic music of the 
 Rock Wren. Among all the sounds of his habitat, he 
 hears most distinctly the drop and flow of water plashing 
 down the center of the cool ravine, and his song runs 
 as liquidly clear, through often louder tones, as the voice 
 of the stream penetrates below and above, all the inarctic- 
 ulate sounds of the forest. His song pours out of him 
 in seven or nine descending notes, ending in a round pur- 
 ling, eddying trill. Sometimes he closes his refrain by 
 doubling back on the first notes, a sweet, wild recoil of 
 fluent tones, reproducing the duplex bubble of swift water 
 reverting upon itself. He has been called the "Bugler," 
 and this quick rebound of coiling notes is not unlike the 
 back winding, rallying call of some elfin horn. 
 
 5,9* t^* e^* 
 
 All the small wrens have very similar call notes, harsh 
 syllables which sound like ''crick crick," in alarm run- 
 ning together in a long scolding clatter. How unlike the 
 calm, questioning "quoy quoy" of the big Thrasher. 
 
107 
 
 Vigor's Wren you are likely to find everywhere about 
 village houses or in the far forests. He is another fine 
 singer, a mimic, too, for mockery is a strong character- 
 istic of the wren family. 
 
 But in the wilderness of the Basin, there are many 
 melodies as sincere and joyous as his simple little Strain, 
 and there his song has a riclier quality, a more ebullient 
 rise and fall. In the way of wrens, he often reverses his 
 song, sometimes beginning and again ending with tum- 
 bling grace notes. Vigor's Wren is silver breasted, dark 
 brown on the upper part of his body, lighter beneath ; a 
 long, narrow white line curves over his eye. 
 
 And now we come to the tiny Winter Wren, the 
 smallest wren in the West, perhaps the smallest in the 
 world, certainly in the park, living among the largest 
 trees in the universe. A brown, shadowy mite, difficult 
 to see, flickering in and out of the prostrate boles. Look 
 for him on the ground, never in the high branches. He 
 is also dotted and barred, but you will not confuse hirn 
 with the Canon Wren, if you have said to yourself "the 
 White Throated Dotted Canon Wren" — he is so much 
 smaller and has no soft white patch under his chin. His 
 call note is a faint, short "click," but his song is so clear 
 and loud, it sounds out of proportion with the stubby 
 tailed wee creature, and it has also a wandering, mean- 
 dering quality that seems to carry it up and down and 
 far away from the feathered midget, delving in the 
 depths about a mossy log. 
 
108 
 
 A strange breathless song cut ofif quickly without an 
 ending cadence, as if some sudden interruption had 
 caused the singer to shut his bill and swallow his notes 
 in half a second. Back and forth on rapid tones he sings, 
 with no rests between, rising and falling into different 
 keys, with a movement that sounds blown up and down 
 by the swell and drift of the wind, not controlled by the 
 bird, and ceasing as if a stone wall had come between you 
 and the singer, leaving you with the thought that the 
 cool, breezy zigzag is continuing, as the wind goes around 
 a buttressing hill out of hearing. 
 
 Perhaps in a week or a month, it may be in a year, you 
 will learn the names, localities and manners of ten birds. 
 You have not lost time if it takes you twelve months to 
 know these few, for no moment given to the woods and 
 fields is ever lost. 
 
 You may start out to find a bird and find a river in its 
 stead. You may hunt for a common ground bird and be 
 given the sight of a flock of rare warblers feeding in the 
 top spires of a spruce. You may return home without a 
 bird adventure, a friendly talk with some staunch oak to 
 your credit instead. In looking for the region of certain 
 birds, you may lose sight of the bird entirely and see as 
 you have never seen before the beauty of alders marching 
 in a winding procession along the river margin, the 
 bosomed curve of bare hills, or the sun flecked turn of 
 forest trails. As you seek your heart and mind will be 
 filled. The bird or bee or butterfly you trail may be hid- 
 
 
109 
 
 den. but other visions crowd into its place. For no 
 asking hour is left void in the Open. 
 
 In some shut in day, say your five sparrows and your 
 five wrens over, with descriptive adjectives. 
 
 SPARROW FAMILY. 
 
 The White Crowned Sparrow. 
 The Golden Crowned Sparrow. 
 The Black-headed Point Pinos Junco. 
 The fat, fluffy, big brown California Towhee. 
 The red and black and white red-eyed Spurred 
 Towhee. 
 
 WREN FAMILY. 
 
 The big', brown, sickle-billed California Thrasher. 
 The small, greyish, black-banded tail Rock Wren. 
 The brown. White Throated Dotted Cafion Wren. 
 The silver breasted, white eye-browed, brown 
 
 Vigor's Wren. 
 The wee, brown, shadowy Winter Wren. 
 
 With these names will come the uplift of rocky mesas, 
 the far leafy paths of the woods, the cool ramparted 
 canons, wayside thickets, stretches of chaparrel, and the 
 mossv shrines, in the distant redwoods. 
 
 IM 
 
110 
 
 The Green People. 
 
 By Virginia Garland. 
 
 LL over the park, birds, waterfalls, canyons, 
 hills, shrubs, and trees, are gradually learning- 
 a new sympathy with mankind. The mighty 
 redwoods no longer stand in aloof austerity. 
 Here and there certain trees have not yet unbent; their 
 towering branches are heavy with an ancient sighing that 
 makes moan for the days of long ago, but for the most 
 part the trees have responded to new kindly influences. 
 Whether we imagine this or not is of small matter since 
 our protective attitude has brought about a change in us 
 which conceives their change possible. The trees in the 
 park are guarded, and one result is our better under- 
 standing of and a closer communion with Nature. Are 
 these trees, inanimate, unfeeling, or are we too often 
 obtuse, unfeeling toward them ? 
 
 Stand in the sad, sold woods of Oregon, the dark and 
 doomed forests of northern California, and the most 
 stolid feel a reflex impression of unconquerable gloom. 
 This depression is not all climatic, for the National Parks 
 in the same territory lack in an appreciable degree the 
 heavy melancholy that lies over betrayed woods. 
 
 Even the men who gloat upon the wealth this timber 
 brings hurry away from a nameless dread they feel, but 
 which they would hardly acknowledge as coming from 
 
Ill 
 
 the trees. And with those who must labor year alter 
 year in the lumber camps, there is more insanity than 
 among any other class of outdoor workers. 
 
 When quite outside of our knowledge of commercial 
 conditions, of what fate hangs over the forest, we are in 
 the main made sad in some woods, and soothed and 
 cheered in others ; are we far from the truth in thinking 
 that the trees directly incite our mood and that their mood 
 is influenced by conditions we impose upon them? The 
 forces that breathe from a tree are as complex as the 
 forces that breathe from a human being. 
 
 It is not easy to keep the logical sense between cause 
 and effect clear and true in studying humanity. It some- 
 times happens that we make out our own kind to be 
 strange, unreal, inhuman with the best philanthropic 
 motives. How much more difficult to see and hear 
 the Green People aright whose wordless protest, whose 
 speechless assent reaches only that fine far inner sense 
 of vision and hearing. 
 
 We know that forests in the mass have a direct bearing 
 upon rainfall and weather, as we know that the rise and 
 fall of nations affect prosperity in certain result ; but 
 when we refine our reasoning upon the unseen agencies 
 that act through individual trees, or upon the invisible 
 powers that bear from one human medium to another, we 
 are in a realm of conjecture that might be called imagin- 
 ary no less in one than the other instance, but which 
 signifies further, deeper, more intrinsically than some 
 unimpeachable argument of merely material interaction. 
 
112 
 
 We once thought good forestry only a matter of senti- 
 ment. We are finding that State and National Parks 
 have their physical and moral as well as esthetic value. 
 The pleading, the threatening, of outraged Nature is 
 interpreted by the poet long before the idea works its 
 way into the hard utilitarian brain. So if some of us 
 hear the trees speak, hear their long wailing call when 
 they go down under the axe, hear the answering battle 
 cry of sky and sea, hear their beneficent murmur, their 
 rustling benediction when they are loved and cherished, 
 we are not idle visionaries. The day is coming in the 
 near future when the reckoning, controlling, practical 
 portion of humanity will recognize that the life of a tree 
 is a dififerent expression of and stupendous factor in the 
 life of the whole world. When we destroy our forests, 
 we fling war into the teeth of the elements, that army 
 whose rank and file we are indeed ill fitted to battle with ; 
 when we separate and deaden the soul of a tree, we are 
 segregating and making void just so much power in our 
 own spiritual growth. 
 
 ^* (^* ^* 
 
 The trees in Sempervirens Park are looking down on 
 a dififerent manner of men ; workers who delve about 
 their mighty roots, clearing away restricting litter, open- 
 ing paths along the streams, freeing the choked water, 
 tender of the tiniest vine, regardful of every mossy patch 
 and ferny corner, removing only the cumbering rubbage. 
 A labor of elimination that does not destroy but which 
 clears, opens, reveals. 
 
113 
 
 The great trees know (he tangled native i)lant^ will 
 not be margined b}' silly l)Ox borders. The madrono 
 and oak will lean to the Redwoods' sky touching shafts 
 unfretted by the dissonance of foreign trees. W'hat is 
 left of the wilderness of the park will remain as it was 
 l)lanted before the Pharaohs and the miracle of that com- 
 panion summoned wreathing and arboring in w^hich man 
 lias had no hand, will continue. For the men and women 
 into whose care this wonderful domain has come, know- 
 that there is no landscape gardener like Nature, no ])lant- 
 ing possible that can excel the exuberant, infinite sowing 
 of the sun and wind and rain. The calling of the red- 
 woods, the answering of the elements will go on without 
 the bungling interference of humanity. 
 
 As a road is leveled and strengthened about the con- 
 tour of the hills, the birds will drop along its bare margin 
 a twined line of beauty ; purple thistles and feathery fire- 
 weed and the first transverse sprays of blackberry vine 
 will use these as a support, until their runners are sufifi- 
 ciently vigorous and the thorny mound rests upon its own 
 strong arches. 
 
 When the dead brush is taken from a shady dell, oxalis 
 and wood violet and vancouveria will quickly carpet the 
 hollow. Where a lifeless jagged limb obstructs the view, 
 breaking the jutting curve of stony banks and is lowered 
 to its earth place, the engraver beetle will trace thereon 
 his pretty biting etchings, the rotting tnmks will soon 1)C 
 absorbed in living moss and lichen. 
 
 Through stony clififs cut and laid bare, the rock break- 
 
114 
 
 ing saxifrage will push and heave hanging resetted fes- 
 toons from every crevice. 
 
 Following close upon the removing, invoking toil of 
 men. an answering principle in the fecund earth, covering 
 over, renewing, restoring out of the houndless mystery of 
 Life. 
 
 ^ ^< •.'« 
 
 And the great trees watch and wonder much. Surel\- 
 a new race is coming on down there ; men who measure 
 their girth in love, not in greed, taking the place of 
 creatttres they used to dread more than rot and disease, 
 more than the wrecking fateful winds, more than the 
 blasting, consuming fires. 
 
 Through their branches llie almost unbelievable mes- 
 sage runs — "These men wor.diip God with us." 
 
 THE TREES OF EDEN. 
 
 AN INVOCATION. 
 
 And God said, let the eartli liring forth yras'^. and the lierh 
 yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit. 
 
 And the evening and the morning were th;' third day. 
 
 And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. '-'■'■ ^' 
 
 And out of the ground made the Lord (iod to grow every 
 tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food. '' 
 
 And the Lord God took the man. and put liini in the garden 
 of Kden to dress it and to keep it. 
 
115 
 
 l!Y .IOA(;ri.\ M 11,1. Kit. 
 
 Behold this miracle, the tree, 
 The third day's miracle, behold 
 
 What stateliness, what majestj', 
 
 What comeliness, contour, what mold 
 
 Of limb, of leaf, of arms in air 
 High held in attitude of prayer. 
 
 And yet we hew, and slash and slay 
 God's first born, "pleasant to the sight," 
 
 And set, ere he laid hand to clay 
 
 And fashioned man to burn and blight. 
 
 We see no grace at all : behold 
 We only see the sodden gold. 
 
 The sweet name Nazareth means wood. 
 
 The Christ companied with the trees : 
 He read their leaves, he understood : 
 
 His alphabet the birds and bees. 
 Give us. oh God, to heed, to hear. 
 
 To love, to cherish, to revere. 
 
 Give us to heed how clean, liow tall : 
 Give us like courage, patience, strength. 
 
 To front the four winds, strength to fall 
 Serene and satisfied, full length 
 
 And full of years and majesty. 
 As falls thine Eden fashioned nee. 
 
116 
 
 The Chieftain. 
 
The Redwood. 
 
 117 
 
 TATK FORESTER HO^JAXS officially 
 describes the redwood in these terms: 
 
 LTnder normal conditions of growth the redwood 
 develops a long, cylindrical bole, clear for two 
 thirds of its length, and surmounted by a narrow, tapering 
 crown. Exceptional trees have measured 350 feet in height 
 and 20 feet in diameter. 
 
 Average dimensions of llie trees customarily logged are 200 to 
 275 feet in height, and 3 to 10 feet in diameter, and their ages 
 run from four hundred to eight hundred years. 
 
 In early life, the redwood grows rapidly both in height and 
 diameter. Later, the growth falls off, and in old age is extremely 
 slow. Instances are not rare of an old redwood increasing in 
 diameter only six inches in the last three hundred years. 
 
 Though a fairly proliiic seed bearer the redwood rarely repro- 
 duces itself by a seed. It sprouts readily from the stump and 
 root-collar, and suckers from the roots ; and it is probable that 
 the majority of trees now forming the forest originated in this 
 way. 
 
 This power of reproduction from sprouts is a property 
 denied to conifers in general. 
 
 Another writer says of this process : 
 
 When the deadly a.\e has. felled a stately redwood, wheu the 
 "tree" has disappeared, the massive stump sends up from its 
 circumference a fringe of shoots that grow to saplings, and they 
 to trees, that in the lifetime of a man absorb the growth that 
 gave them birth, and in a few decades they tower — a ring of 
 
(118 
 
 comely "giants" — with interlocking branches shading their ances- 
 tral birthplace and grave. 
 
 The tree has very few enemies, and is well protected against 
 them. The thickness of its bark make it invulnerable to all but 
 the hottest fires, and its wood, also, containing no resin does not 
 burn easily. Very few fungous diseases are dangerous to it. 
 
 The vitality of the tree is also remarkable. It not only lives to 
 an astonishing age, but after being cut it sprouts repeatedly, 
 using the quantities of nourishment stored in the enormous roots. 
 And although successive forest fires will finally kill the stump, it 
 will remain in the soil indefinitely without rotting. 
 
 Redwood bark is of a reddi.sh-gray color, fibrous in texture, 
 and gives to full-grown redwoods a fluted appearance. 
 
 The wood of the redwood varies greatly. The softest and 
 best trees usually grow in the bottoms, the "flinty" timber occurs 
 on the slopes. But this rule does not always hold good. All 
 sorts of unexpected and vmaccountable dififerences in the quality 
 of the timber occur. A soft, fine-grained tree will be found close 
 beside one "flinty" and less valuable. Even the practical logger 
 is never sure until he cuts it what kind of lumber a redwood 
 will yield. The tree's vitality is so great, it endures so many 
 vicissitudes and suff^ers from so many accidents in the centuries 
 of its existence, that the grain of its wood becomes uneven in 
 proportion as its life has been eventful. The wood fibers formed 
 under different rates of growth sometimes get up a tension so 
 great that when the log is sawed the wood splits with a loud 
 report. 
 
 Tn color redwood lumber shades from light cherry to dark 
 mahogany. It is easily worked, takes a beautiful polish, and is 
 one of the most durable of the coniferous woods of California. 
 It resists decay so well that trees which have lain 500 years in 
 the forest have been sent to the mill and sawed into lumber. 
 
119 
 
 Ante-dating History. 
 
 "The redwood tree is interesting- for its size," says 
 Professor Sargent. "Imt it is more interesting- as the sole 
 representative, with the alHed species of the Sierras, of a 
 race of ,q;iant trees which I>efore the qhicial period were 
 wideiy spread over the northern hemisphere." 
 
 While it is true that no specimen of the Sequoia family 
 has been found in any part of the f^lobe except California, 
 and in limited areas here, it is claimed that it has been 
 discovered in a fossil state on Disco Island in Baffin's 
 Bay. far within the Arctic circle. 
 
 Among the relics of the cave man that have l)een 
 found in Europe are pieces of redwood trees. 
 
 The petrified forests of .Arizona are supposed to be 
 remains of Sequoia forests which "went down to the 
 primeval sea," were covered with sandstone and rose 
 again. 
 
 Discovery and Name. 
 
 Discovered at an unknown early date, the coast red- 
 wood was first described and published by Ivanibert of 
 London in 1803. under the name of Taxodium sruif^cr- 
 virens — he thinking the trees formed another species of 
 the well known Taxodiuui or bald cypress of the Eastern 
 States. 
 
 In 1847 Endlicher, a German botanist, believing that it 
 was a distinct genus, published it under the name of 
 Sequoia. This author, contrary to custom, omitted to 
 
give the origin of liis name, and botanists have con- 
 jectured that it was intended to commemorate 
 "Sequoyah," a half-l)reed Cherokee Indian, who. all bv 
 himself, invented an alphabet and taught it to his tribe 
 by writing it upon leaves. This alphabet came into gen- 
 eral use among the Cherokees before the white man had 
 any knowledge of it. In 1828 a periodical was published 
 in it by the missionaries. Sequo Yah w^as banished from 
 his home in Alabama with the rest of the tribe and settled 
 in New Mexico, where he died in 1843. 
 
 Sequo Yah's alphabet consisted of eighty-five charac- 
 ters, one for each sound in the language ; and it was so 
 simple that in a few weeks a Cherokee could learn to 
 read and write. Some philologists pronounce it the most 
 perfect alphabet ever invented. 
 
 It seemed fitting that the redwood should be named 
 for the red man. yet Prof. J. G. Lemmon and others 
 consider it to have been derived from sequor (to follow) 
 alluding to the fact that our redwoods are the followers 
 of a vanishing prodigious race, which Prof. Lemmon 
 considers a much more appropriate and pleasing origin 
 for the botanical name of our monster tree. 
 
 Age. 
 
 I'rof. 1). E. Fernow is probably the foremost authorit\- 
 in forestry in this hemisphere, if not in the world. He is 
 a v(;ry highly educated German, and was connected with 
 the Department of Forestry in the German Empire, later 
 head of that department in the State of New York, and 
 
121 
 
 pn^fe^^sor in Cornell ; and is now al tho hcatl of llic 
 Department of i'orestr}- in the Dominion of Canada, 
 and a professor in the I'niversity of Toronto. 
 
 Professor Fernow s])ent some time a few years ago in 
 thi.s forest. Me said that it was impossible to determine 
 with any degree of certainty its age ; that the usual 
 tests, such as counting the rings, and the like, were 
 misleading and untrustworthy 
 
 His own estimate was that two thousand years was the 
 probable limit of the age of the oldest of the trees. Pos- 
 sibly, but not at all ])robably, some specimens might be 
 older. At the same time, be did not profess to speak 
 with certaint}- or assurance. 
 
 The count of rings on a redwood tree recently felled 
 in another part of the State showed that the tree began 
 life 525 B. C. 
 
 Some years ago. the late Prof. William Russell Dudley, 
 of Stanford I'niversity. wrote a life history of a redwood. 
 The tree in question was one of moderate size, about 
 fifteen feet in diameter, five feet from the ground. It" 
 was 270 feet in height and 2.171 years old. The history 
 of the tree was as follows : 
 
 B. C. 271 it began its existence. The lirsl year of the Christian 
 era it was aljout four feet in diameter about the base. A. D. 245, 
 at 516 years of age, a burning three feet wide occurred on the 
 trunk. One hundred and five jcars were occupied in covering 
 this wound with new tissue. For 1,196 years no further injuries 
 were registered. A. D. 1441, at 1,712 years of age, the tree was 
 burned a second time, in two long grooves, one and two feet 
 wide, respectively. Each had its own system of repair. 
 
122 
 
 One hundred and thirty-nine years of growth followed, includ- 
 ing the time of covering the wounds. A. D. 1580, at 1,851 years 
 of age, occurred another fire, causing a hurn on the trunk two 
 feet wide, which took tifty-six years to cover with new tissue. 
 Two hundred and seventeen years of growth followed this hurn. 
 A. D. 1797, when the tree was 2,068 years old, a tremendous iire 
 attacked it, burning a great sear eighteen feet wide. One hundred 
 and three years enabled the tree to reduce the exposed area of 
 tlie burn to about fourteen feet in width. 
 
 Other Aged Trees. 
 
 There is a famous plane-tree in the».l^gean island of 
 Cos which is said to be at least a thousand years old. 
 I'ut it is said that there is in Europe no tree that can be 
 i:»roved to be more than eight hundred years old. The 
 tree from which is said to have glanced the arrow that 
 slew William Rufus in the New Forest was in existence 
 in ihe eighteenth century, when it was rejilaced by a 
 stone in 1745. 
 
 The Tortworth chestnut — supposed to have been 
 formed by a junction of two trees — was mentioned as a 
 lioundary mark in a record of the year T135. The 
 Swilear Lawn oak in Needwood Forest is proved by 
 documents to have been at least six hundred years old. 
 
 An oak at Tilford. near Farnham, is supposed to have 
 been referred to in a charter granted b\- Ilenry de Blois 
 in 1256. 
 
 These are some of the tallest trees iu Ilritain: the 
 '■Queen Beech" at Askridge Park, 135 feet high; the 
 silver firs at Luss, Loch Lomond, 121 feet high ; and 
 some beeches near Glasgow, which are 1 18 feet high. 
 
123 
 
 Non-inflammable. 
 
 Redwood lunibor contains no resin or turpentine of 
 any kind, and owing to its great resistant qualities of 
 severe climatic conditions, is free from cracking or 
 decay, where cinders might lodge and start fires. When 
 burning it is easily extinguished with a small quantity of 
 water and has the appearance of burned cork, and is 
 harder to ignite a second time than at first. When the 
 famous Baldwin Hotel of San Francisco was burned in 
 the most densely populated part of the city, the firemen 
 confined the flames to the building only ; and while the 
 heat in the interior of the building was sufficient to melt 
 cast iron, the w^eather boarding (which was of redwood), 
 by applying the hose to the outside walls, remained almost 
 intact when the fire had been extinguished within, after 
 it had burned fiercely for five hours. 
 
 At the time of the destruction of San Francisco by fire 
 following the earthquake of 1906, the Southern Pacific 
 Railroad Company saved their depot and yards, built of 
 redwood lumber, south of Townsend street, with their 
 own employees and private fire-fighting facilities. 
 
 Redwood forests are practically unharmed by forest 
 fires, and it is common practice for the lumbermen to 
 fell the trees and peel the bark from them and, when the 
 dry season is on, set fire to the felled timber and burn 
 the branches and bark and other wreckage without prac- 
 tical injury to the saw logs, which procedure would 
 mean disaster to anv other wood. 
 
125 
 
 Sentiment and Shingles. 
 
 IF.X Theodore Roosevelt first stood under 
 the shadow of a redwcxid. he said : 
 
 Here you have some of the great wonders of 
 the world. You have a singularly beautiful land- 
 scape, singularly beautiful and singularly majestic scenery, and it 
 should certainly be your aim to try and preserve that beauty and 
 keep unmarred that majesty. There is nothing more practical 
 in the end than the preservation of beauty which appeals to the 
 higher of mankind. Take a big tree whose architect has been 
 the ages, anything that man does toward it may hurt it and 
 cannot help it. I feel most emphatically that we should not turn 
 a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror pen- 
 etrated to the valley of the Euphrates — into shingles. 
 
 That same season a single tree within six miles of 
 where Mr. Roosevelt stood was converted into shingles, 
 wMth the result : Yield of tree — 66,000 shakes, which 
 sold for $14 per i.ooo, and 300 railroad ties, which 
 sold for 38 cents each. 
 
 To give reader and visitor an estimate or basis of 
 comparison, it may be stated that the tree at the Gov- 
 ernor's Camp, sometimes called "The Daughter of the 
 Forest" and sometimes the "Princess," is what the timber- 
 men call a good shake tree, and it is calculated that it 
 would yield about 60,000 shakes. 
 
 Commercially-minded- men find it difficult to compute a 
 sentimental value in excess of these figures, yet cash put 
 into a cathedral could not produce the sanctuary efifect of 
 these upward shafts that blend the heavens and the earth. 
 
126 
 
 Tributes to These Trees. 
 
 OTABLE among" the word-painting-.s drawn of 
 this forest, is the one wrought by D. M. Del- 
 iiias, and dehvered before the Legislature at 
 the time the bill was pending for the purchase 
 
 of the park. Previous to its delivery Mr. Delmas had 
 
 spent several days in the Big Basin. 
 
 hi the heart of the Santa Cruz Range this chosen spot is found, 
 h presents to the eye the aspect of a vast amphitheater whose 
 encircling walls are the dim heights of mist-crowned mountains. 
 Seen from the crest of the ridge it stretches toward the setting 
 sun, its distant outlines blending the purplish-blue tints of the 
 woods with the hazy vapors of the ocean. From this point of 
 view you catch a confused suggestion of a great forest watered 
 by intersecting streams. Descend from your eminence and enter 
 within the limits of the forest. Your first feeling is one of awe. 
 Your very breath seems liushed by the solemn stillness of the 
 place. Here the winds are mute. Their distant murmurings are 
 unheard within the depths of the shaded solitude. Your step 
 falls noiseless upon the thick carpet of marl — the cast-off vesture 
 of countless seasons — upon which you tread. The crackling of a 
 twig under j'our foot or the startled ci-y of a frightened bird but 
 intensifies the silence which enfolds you like a shroud. Contem- 
 plate now the scene spread on every hand in never-ending vistas. 
 See the great moss-covered oak, the light and graceful maple, the 
 glossy laurel, everywhere entwining their branches and blending 
 the varied hues of their foliage in tangled profusion, while here 
 and there the glistening trunks of clu.stered madronos stand out 
 against the dark background like streaks of yellow sunlight. As 
 you lift up your eyes, behold above the giant forms that sentinel 
 ihc place. Tliese are California's own— hers, for in no other soil 
 
127 
 
 liavc thc3' ever found root aiul under no otlier breeze save that of 
 the Pacific have they ever swayed their boughs. 
 
 A sense of humility overwhehns you as you t>aze upon these 
 massy pillars of Nature's temple, whose tops, lost amid the 
 clouds, seem to support the vault of tiie l)lue empyrean. Tiic 
 spell which the mystic light of some venerable cathedral may at 
 times have thrown upon your soul is tame compared to that 
 which binds you here. That was man's place of worship ; this 
 is God's. In the presence of these titanic offsprings of Nature, 
 standing before you in the hoar austerity of centuries, how 
 dwarfed seems your being, how fleeting your existence ! They 
 were here when you were born ; and though you allow your 
 tlioughts to go back on the wings of imagination to your remotest 
 ancestry, you realize that they were here when your first fore- 
 father had his being. All human work which you have seen or 
 conceived of is recent in comparison. Time has not changed 
 them since Columbus tirst erected an altar upon this continent, 
 nor since Titus buildod the walls of the Flavian amphitheater, nor 
 since Solomon laid the foundations of the temple at Jerusalem. 
 They were old when Moses led the children of Israel to the 
 promised land, or when Egyptian monarchs piled up the pyramids 
 and bade the Sphinx gaze with eyes of perpetual sadness over 
 the desert sands of the Valley of the Nile. And if their great 
 mother. Nature, is permitted .still to protect them, here they will 
 stand defying time when not a stone of this capitol is left to 
 mark the spot on which it now stands, and its very existence may 
 have faded into the mists of tradition. 
 
 jt ^ Jt 
 
 David Starr Jordan. President of Stanford University, 
 has said : 
 
 California Redwood Park is a leaf from the greatest of virgin 
 forests, a sample of the redwoods as they have been for ten 
 thousand years, and one which may be preserved for all times. 
 
128 
 
 3>^- i^^ 
 
 IJesides this, it is a botanical garden where the wax myrtle, the 
 California nutmeg tree, the California whortleberry, the clintonia, 
 * 1 the oxalis, and all the other plants which follow the redwoods 
 may be likewise saved for our descendants. 
 
 ^^ ?^* ^* 
 
 United States Senator Perkins has said : 
 
 T have traveled through the forests of Mariposa, and I have 
 driven through the wonderful forests of southern Germany, yet 
 I have never seen the equal of California Redwood Park. 
 
 ^zj) t^m f^ ^^ 
 
 In some unknown way this foiest has come down to us from 
 probably the pliocene age, bringing with it in all its native loveli- 
 ness and primeval beauty its flora, consisting of its giant trees 
 of sempervirens and embracing some fifty-two varieties of other 
 trees. According to botanists, the Big Basin contains no moraine, 
 neither lateral nor terminal, which clearly shows that it has not 
 been at remote periods even visited by glacial action, and proves 
 it to be of primeval origin and one of the oldest spots known 
 to man. 
 
 Surrounded by its great mountain rim, protected for unknown 
 ages, it comes to us as a heritage from God, and in all its weird 
 aspect it gladdens the heart, inspires the mind with the thoughts 
 of the boundless powers of the Creator, and as we stand gazing 
 at the giant trees, massive, tall, stately and grand, we are 
 tempted to exclaim "They arc the real temple of God !" We see 
 in them the kej' to every church tower, and the lines and angles of 
 our famed gothic architecture. 
 
 By G. Frederick vSclnirtz : "The beattty of the forest is 
 not sitnply in character, but is due to many separate 
 
sources. The trees eontrihntc imieli : llie shrul)s, the 
 rocks, the mosses phiy their part ; the ])urity of the air. 
 the forest silence; the music of wind in the trees — these 
 and other influences comhine to i)ro(hiee woodland 
 l)eauty and charm." 
 
 .J* .jt .jt 
 
 .Mthoui^h jolm llurroui^hs was never in the forest, he 
 delineates it perfectly when in one of his essays he says : 
 "The book of nature is like a pa.qe written over or printed 
 upon with dilTerent sized characters, and in many dif- 
 ferent languages, interlined and crosslined, and with a 
 great A'ariety of marginal notes and references." 
 
 tO 
 
 ■^ 
 
^^iMM 
 
 LRrAg'ia 
 
 '1"%