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Ella M. Sexton - Stories of California
alive in most of the groves.
These groves of wonderful and rare trees are protected as National Parks in the Sequoia and Grant
groves, and Mariposa belongs to the state. It is against the law to cut the trees in those groves. Their
worst enemy is fire, and a troop of cavalry is sent every year to guard them, and to keep out the
sheep-herders, whose flocks would destroy the underbrush and young trees. But, unfortunately,
lumbermen have put up mills near the Fresno and Kings River groups, and, wasting more than they use,
are destroying magnificent trees thousands of years old in order to make shingles. When nature has taken
such good care of this rare and wonderful tree, the Sierra Giant, men should try to preserve the groves
unharmed in all their beauty.
Another sequoia grows in great forests along the Coast Range from Santa Cruz to the northern
state-line, and beyond into Oregon. This is the sequoia sempervirens, the Latin name meaning
always green. Redwood is its common name, and the lumber for our frame or wooden houses is cut from
this tree. Millions of feet of this redwood lumber are shipped from the northern counties of the state
every year, up to Alaska or down to Central and South America. It is also sent far across the Pacific to
the Hawaiian and Philippine islands and to China and Australia.
While the sequoia gigantea delights in a clear sky and hot sunshine, its brother, the
sempervirens, prefers a cool sea-coast climate, offering frequent baths of fog. There is also a
difference in the size of these trees; the redwood is often three hundred feet high, but is less in girth than
its relative in the Sierras. There is not much underbrush and little sunshine in the cool, green redwood
forests, each tree rising tall and stately for a hundred feet without branches, while the green tops seem
almost to touch the sky as one looks up. Through the woods one hears the blue jay scream and chatter,
and the tap, tap of the woodpecker as he drills holes in the bark to fill with acorns for his winter store.
When the lumberman looks at these beautiful forests, he sees only many logs containing many thousand
feet of lumber, which he must get out the easiest and cheapest way. He only chooses the finest and
largest trunks, and there is great waste in cutting these. The men begin to saw the tree some eight or ten
feet from the ground, and soon it trembles and falls with a mighty crash, often snapping off other trees in
its way to the ground. After all the selected trees have fallen, fires are started to burn off the branches and
underbrush so that the men can work easier. This fire only chars the outside bark of the big, green logs,
but it kills all the young saplings, and leaves the once beautiful forest a waste of blackened logs and gray
ashes. When the fire burns itself out, the logs are usually sawed with a cross-cut saw into sixteen-foot
lengths, since in that form they are easy to handle. Then oxen or horses haul them out; or sometimes a
wire cable is fastened to them by iron "dogs," or stakes, and a little stationary engine pulls them away to
the siding at the railroad track. Here they are rolled on flat-cars, fastened with a big iron chain around the
four or six logs on the car, and taken on the logging train to the mill-pond. They lie soaking in the water
until drawn up to the keen saws of the sawmill that cut and slice the wood like cheese. The bark and
outside is carved off as you would cut the crust off bread, and then sharp, circular saws cut boards and
planks till the log is used up, and the log-carriage lifts another to its place. As the shining steel bites into
the wood the noise almost deafens you and the mill shakes with the thunder of log-carriage and feeders.
Useless ends, slabs, and refuse are burnt in the sawdust pit, where the fires never go out. Very much of
the tree is wasted and all the limbs. The redwood tree has so much life and strength, however, that it
sends up bright green sprouts around the burnt stump, and standing trees charred outside to the tops will
have new branches the next season. In the older forests tall young trees are often seen growing in a ring
round an empty spot, the long-dead stump having rotted away.
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