Chapter I
THE Sequoia is nature’s most magnificent endowment. King of trees, it has no rival in size the world over, nor is it approached among living things in age. Noblest of all conifers, it has the grandeur of granite and the solemnity of marble. Venerable in aspect, it savors of great antiquity, seeming always to wrap itself in the memories of the past. So striking, indeed, is this feature of its appearance that the intellectual traveler often wonders if its race has played a grander part in the past. Is it a living survivor of an extinct age of monsters?
Time was, and not long ago, when such a question bearing on the antiquity of the Sequoia would have been lightly considered. Now, however, mankind is not altogether satisfied with things as they are, but is mindful of how they came to be so, and the ceaseless searches of science are unveiling the mysteries of the past. The spade unearths a coin whose imprint betrays the beliefs or customs, the finish or crudeness, of an ancient civilization. The discovery of a clay tablet, the uncovering of a ruined temple or a forgotten tomb, sheds fresh light upon the history of a people. Bit by bit the evidence accumulates, and as the vision of the past becomes less dim science is better able to conjure up before the mental eye the imposing pageants of a world that has passed away.
Shakespeare calls the world a stage. The allusion, though, is confined to men and women. But as the scientist views the great earth-drama that has been enacted throughout the ages he sees a far more extensive application of this thought. To him “the races of the children of life” are the players, by reason of the fact that all life has been superseded by more complex and more highly evolved forms. Indeed, for millions of years countless multitudes of living creatures have played their little parts on this earthly stage and have gone their way into oblivion. The majority have left as little record as the autumn leaves that drift by the wayside. These are the so-called “lost creations.” Yet a sufficient number have been preserved for the later instruction and delight of man. “Everything,” observed Emerson, “in nature tends to write its own history. The planet and the pebble are attended by their shadows, the rolling rock leaves its furrows on the mountainside, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bone in the stratum, the fern its modest epitaph in the coal.”
These remains filed away in the archives of nature’s great storehouse constitute the record of the rocks. And as science reconstructs a civilization of yesterday from its rude implements, in a similar manner it interprets the mute meaning of these fossils in the rocks. The dry bones and empty footprints are given animation and pictured as they are supposed to have been when alive. Great flying reptiles, called pterodactyls, with an enormous wingspread of twenty-five feet, have fallen into Miocene seas and have been entombed with the leaves and muds of their shallow bottoms. Huge reptiles, called dinosaurs, have stalked across the mud-flats of primeval lakes, leaving their broad footprints in the oozy surface. The tide has come in and gently covered the impression with a fine sediment and preserved it forever. Further deposits of sediment have accumulated and the whole become submerged, until, under constant pressure, they have been compacted into rock and in the course of time have been raised again to dry land.
The record of the rocks discloses the fact that the Sequoia flourished on the earth when these dragons of old time and their weird kin inhabited it. Its forests extended over three continents and it blessed with its shade these creatures more strange and huge than the earth has since borne. Under its high, arching columns dinosaurs took toll of all that could be conquered. Within sight of its imposing forests others, equally formidable, wallowed in shallow seas, while overhead soared pterodactyls, neither bats nor birds, but giant lizards that had acquired the power of flight.
This was millions of years ago. It was during the middle period of life, or, what geologists term the Miocene. It was before the advent of fur and feathers—aeons, almost, before man’s coming. In point of time the antiquity of all living things on earth today is of a recent yesterday when compared to the antiquity of the Sequoia. The frail tenure of human works is as but a thousand years amid eternity; nothing; a mockery.
The pick of the fossil hunter has unearthed fossil remains of Sequoia leaves and cones in strata as early as the Triassic. This period represents the morning of reptilian life and is the first of three great ages of the Miocene. At its advent moving life had already safely crossed the border-line of its dependence on water for existence and had succeeded, slowly and laboriously, in invading dry land. Hence, the Sequoia as a race has a claim to almost fabulous antiquity.
Memorials of the Sequoia’s ancestry are more abundant in the rocks of the two succeeding periods of the Miocene, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. Under the lava flows of Mt. Shasta imprints of its leaves and cones are found. This is indubitable evidence that the Sequoia existed in California at that time. Fossil remains have also been found in localities ranging from “France and Hungary to Spitzbergen and from Greenland to Oregon and Nebraska.” These stratified remains offer positive proof that the Sequoia was a great genus covering the entire Northern Hemisphere and that the now desolate Arctic regions, which were then warm, were luxuriant with many of its species. In short, the Sequoia was one of the chief garments of the earth’s vegetation during Miocene times. Its forests must have been the most imposing the earth has ever known. Truly, they were the forests primeval.
It is not a little remarkable that the Sequoia was in existence even before the very mountains which are enobled today by its presence. The vagaries of mutability have been such that it was actually present on earth during the genesis of the Sierra Nevada and saw this range lifted to its place in the sun. Indeed, the eternality of the hills is a misnomer, for mountains have their birth and their youth, their old age and their obliteration. Like successions of living forms they have had their entrance and exit on this terrestrial stage.
During the early period of the Miocene, that country which lay between the Rockies and the Pacific was a flat plain of low relief, with meandering streams and vague divides. Occasional rounded hills broke the monotony of this plain. These were but the abraded stumps of a pre-existing mountain mass—the ruins of mountains that had been. About Jurassic time a general disturbance occurred in the present region of the Sierra Nevada. This was accompanied by an intrusion of a vast body of molten rock which, when solidified, became the granite of the Sierra. During the Cretaceous the entire region between the Rockies and the Pacific again awoke and began to bulge at slow and intermittent intervals. The Sierra block had its origin during one of these upheavals and acquired a slight westward slant.
During the age that gave man to the world, the Sierra was uplifted to the light. About the dawn of the Quaternary, the last of the great divisions of geological time, the greatest manifestation of Sierra mountain building took place. This convulsion of the earth hoisted the snowy range to its present sublime elevation.
Following this upheaval came an age of ice. It is to this period that Yosemite Valley owes its glaciation. In fact, the present indefinable charm and fierce grandeur of the High Sierra are legacies of this reign of ice. However, the glaciation of the Sierra must not be correlated with the continental glaciations which ushered in the age succeeding the Miocene. The former glaciation is “more properly to be regarded as corresponding to the very last episode of that long and varied chapter in the geological history of the continent,” states Lawson. Though the final uplift of the Sierra block is a long time past as years go, geologically speaking it is not remote. Indeed, the Sierra Nevada might “safely be placed among the young and giddy mountains of our planet.” From the comparative point of view, on the other hand, the waste of years that have elapsed since the Sequoia first waved its magnificent evergreen dome toward the heavens is bewildering.
Impressive as the evolution of the Sierra must have been, few of the dramas of the earth which science has restored are more wonderful than the restriction of the Sequoia exclusively to the mountains of California. The record of the rocks following the great Age of Reptiles tells quite a different story. With amazing abruptness all the rich diversity of reptilian life apparently ceased. Some change seems to have occurred, blotting it out forever, for not a scrap of evidence remains of its continued existence. The dinosaurs are no more; the pterodactyls have vanished. A new type of life, that of the mammal, now holds dominion over the earth. Most astounding of all, the Sequoia still carries on, even to the present day—living survivor of the Age of Reptiles.
Authorities are not agreed concerning the causes that led to the extinction of the reptiles. Science still ponders over the mystery. A feature so extraordinary seems to demand an unusual explanation. Causes of a violent cataclysmic nature are advanced as valid interpretations. Yet science refuses to take cognizance of universal calamities and considers them as apocryphal because they are too unnatural. Climatic conditions, in the main, are probably responsible, for it is upon climate that the wealth or poverty of life on the globe depends. That which was a land of comfort, of abundant food, and of continual summer may have become, through a process of alternate haste and deliberation, a land of long winters, of bitterness and hardship. The good days of the world were exchanged for hard times, and those who could not survive were gathered to their forefathers. This, together with volcanic eruptions which took place on a stupendous scale, followed by glaciations of continental extent, apparently conspired in the ultimate undoing of reptilian life. These causes, in all likelihood, are responsible also for the shrinking of the majestic Sequoian woodlands to a mere fragment of their ancient, vast extent.
About the end of the Miocene the earth became intensely active. In its agitation some of its seething interior was exuded to the surface in a deluge of lava. At the same time fountains of molten rocks shot up from volcanoes, causing the heavens to rain fire about them, and sifting ashes afar over the earth. Rivers and lakes floated up in immense clouds of steam over which the blazing beacons suffused weird colorings—lights and shades of an inferno that not even the pen of a Dante would have the temerity to attempt to describe. A land of beauty had become filled with forms of the gloomiest and ghostliest grandeur. The great dinosaurs looked with disquietude upon it all. Unable, by reason of their cumbersomeness, to migrate to a gentler clime, they stoically awaited their doom. The pterodactyls, terrified, fluttered to the ground, flapping their great useless wings as the unearthly flashes from the heavens fell upon them. The noble Sequoias, even more impotent to make a retreat, held their ground until set afire or enveloped in floods of molten lava. At length, having exhausted its fury, this agent of wholesale ruin ceased as if stricken lifeless in the midst of its maddest rioting, and the land became a far-stretching waste out of which life had apparently gone forever.
The unknown complex of causes which brought about the ice age that followed probably completed extermination of the reptiles, and it certainly brought the Sequoia, as a race, perilously near to extinction. The temperature became too cold for life adapted to the warm conditions of the Miocene age. As a result, reptilian life paled and declined, until finally its feeble flame flickered out entirely with the arrival of the glacial epoch. The vast amount of water that had been vaporized during the volcanic eruptions returned to the earth in the form of snow. This accumulated in such enormous quantities that continents came to be white worlds where the vacant sky communed only with the silent ice. Pulseless and cold, these vast continental ice caps were as eloquent of death as were the fiery lava flows. Uncharted, trackless seas of ice they were, with all traces of earthly travail buried far beneath them. And a terrible solitude was the lord of this universe.
The scientific world is equally perplexed regarding the mysterious chain of events that again caused the amelioration of climate. At any rate, the warmth of summer gradually overtook the snows of winter, and the ice wasted away. Like morning mist it vanished in the sunshine. Lakes filled the yawning throats of volcanoes. Light and beauty replaced ashes and death. Life, too, ebbed back from the southland and conquered the desolation, filling the vacant world with a glorious animation. But it was a different type of life that came. Mammals instead of reptiles now held undisputed dominion. Of all the rich diversity of life that flourished before the advent of the ordeal of volcanic fire and the chilling empire of ice, apparently only the Sequoia escaped utter destruction.
It is this singular survival that prompted John Muir to write of the Sequoia as a “tree which the friendly pines and firs seem to know nothing about. Ancient of other days, it keeps you at a distance, taking no notice of you, speaking only to the winds, thinking only in the sky, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among the neighboring trees as would the homely mastadon and hairy elephant among the bears and deer. It belongs to an ancient stock and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees.”