Late July, early August, and one’s thoughts turn to vacation. How many of us Griswolds, as in National Lampoon’s Vacation, pile into the heap and head to our country’s treasures, the National Parks maintained by our federal government. I did a few weeks ago, to Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks in eastern California.
These places are where the biggest trees in the world are. The Giant Sequoias unique to the groves there run to nearly 300 feet and top out at 3,000 years of age. They are columnar, meaning that the circumference of their massive base is largely maintained all the way up. They are so huge that when a branch fell off one of them a few years ago, it was larger than any single tree east of the Mississippi River.
“God’s big show” in California, as Muir put it.
We have all heard, in school and so forth, that in the nineteenth century, agents of capitalism came into this region and cut most of these trees down. It was touch and go for a while for the whole species, until the government, care of petitioning environmentalists like John Muir, came in and declared the place off limits while major specimens still stood.
The National Park guides I encountered on this trip let slip that this general narrative is not entirely in comportment with the facts. To be sure, the trees stood undisturbed by humans through the eras of the Native Americans and the Spanish Viceroyalty. And only with the coming of the Yanks after 1850 did many (several thousand) of the trees come down.
You’ve seen the pictures—gents in stilted costume standing inside the wedge-cut of the tree they just made with their axes. Then the whole thing was felled, toppling with a quivering death throe like that of a sentient animal, as one keen observer put it, and it was off to the lumber mill.
Except this last part rarely was fulfilled. Giant Sequoia wood is basically useless. It is not hard or possessed of tensile strength when sawed into 8-foot boards, the way we like our wood for economic purposes. To maintain this tree in its massive proportions, the wood has a unique constitution that is more suggestive of a lattice of cork than of steel or anything like that. When the tree falls, it often shatters. If somehow it is carefully brought down, when milled, it yields little of value aside from low-end shakes for house siding.
Apparently, it took a while for this to dawn on our geniuses out West in the Gilded Age, and somebody lost boatloads of money. It dawned on me: who and how much? I researched a little and have come up dry, outside of repeated inferences that the endeavor was unprofitable. Relevant facts appear to be lost to history: namely who ponied up investment dollars for the big-tree logging failed to realize the whole thing was fruitless and took a bath?
