The Calaveras Sequoias

In eighteen fifty-two, a hunter named Augustus Dowd was tracking a grizzly bear through the Sierra foothills when he walked into a grove of trees and stopped. He had found the Calaveras giant sequoias. The trees were so large, and so completely outside anything in his experience, that he reportedly had to go back to camp, get other men, and bring them back before anyone would believe him.

What happened next tells you nearly everything you need to know about mid-nineteenth-century American attitudes toward natural wonders.

Within a year, loggers felled the first and most accessible of the great trees, a specimen the promoters named the Discovery Tree, using pump augers because no saw was long enough. Its stump, roughly twenty-five feet across, was planed flat and used as a dance floor. The following year, a showman named George Trask and his partners stripped the bark from a second, even larger tree, to a height of one hundred sixteen feet. The bark was shipped in sections to exhibitions in New York and London, where audiences paid to see it. That tree, which the promoters called the Mother of the Forest, did not die right away. It kept its foliage for two more years, lost its last leaves within five, and stood as a bare, dead giant until a wildfire burned away much of what remained in nineteen oh eight.

Decades later, showmen bored a tunnel through yet another great tree, wide enough to drive a stagecoach through. This they charged admission for. The tree, somehow, survived.

The Calaveras grove's early history is not a story of vandalism by a few bad actors. It is the dominant impulse of the era applied to a grove of living things. Exploit, exhibit, monetize. The first instinct was not wonder. It was commerce.

The trees that survived this are still standing in the north grove below you. Thirty-three of them exceed two hundred feet. They were ancient when Gold Rush California found them, and most of them are ancient still, which says something about the trees and something else about the uses California found for them when it had the chance.