The tar-heads, withdrawn some distance into the forest, sat leaning against a stump, chatting and grinning together, now and then screeching by turns.
I asked Revenue Stamp, a good-natured, middle-aged Indian, where Buck was. He pointed to his hut, and replied, with an affable smile, “He whiskey drunk.” “And who,” I inquired, “is that fat girl with him?” “Last night he take her; new squaw,” was the answer. I could hardly believe, but it was the actual truth; and I went back to camp an enlightened but disillusioned man. I left that day, and never had an opportunity to “free my mind” to Jerry. Since then I guardedly avoid all discussion of the “Indian question.” When interrogated, I dodge, or protest ignorance; when pressed, I have been known to turn the subject; or, if driven to the wall, I usually confess my opinion that the Quakers will have to work a great reformation in the Indian before he is really fit to be exterminated.
The mill-people and Indians told us of a wonderful group of big trees (Sequoia gigantea), and about one particular tree of unequalled size. We found them easily, after a ride of a few miles in a northerly direction from our camp, upon a wide, flat-topped spur, where they grew, as is their habit elsewhere, in company with several other coniferous species, all grouped socially together, heightening each other’s beauty by contrasts of form and color.
In a rather open glade, where the ground was for the most part green with herbage, and conspicuously starred with upland flowers, stood the largest shaft we observed. A fire had formerly burned off a small segment of its base, not enough, however, to injure the symmetrical appearance. It was a slowly tapering, regularly round column of about forty feet in diameter at the base, and rising two hundred and seventy-four feet, adorned with a few huge branches, which start horizontally from the trunk, but quickly turn down and spray out. The bark, thick but not rough, is scored up and down at considerable intervals with deep, smooth grooves, and is of brightest cinnamon color, mottled in purple and yellow.
That which impresses one most after its vast bulk the grand, pillar-like stateliness, is the thin and inconspicuous foliage, which feathers out delicately on the boughs like a mere mist of pale apple-green. It would seem nothing when compared with the immense volume of tree for which it must do the ordinary respirative duty; but doubtless the bark performs a large share of this, its papery lamination and porous structure fitting it eminently for that purpose.
Near this “King of the Mountains” grew three other trees; one a sugar-pine (Pinus Lambertiana) of about eight feet in diameter, and hardly less than three hundred feet high (although we did not measure it, estimating simply by comparison of its rise above the Sequoia, whose height was quite accurately determined). For a hundred and fifty feet the pine was branchless, and as round as if turned, delicate bluish-purple in hue, and marked with a net-work of scorings. The branches, in nearly level poise, grew long and slenderly out from the shaft, well covered with dark yellow-green needles. The two remaining trees were firs (Picea grandis), which sprang from a common root, dividing slightly, as they rose, a mass of feathery branches, whose load of polished blue-green foliage, for the most part, hid the dark wood-brown trunk. Grace, exquisite, spire-like, taper boughs, whose plumes of green float lightly upon the air, elasticity and symmetry are its characteristics.
In all directions this family continue grouping themselves, always with attractive originality. There is something memorable in the harmonious yet positive colors of this sort of forest. First, the foliage and trunk of each separate tree contrasts finely,—cinnamon and golden apple-green in the Sequoia, dark purple and yellowish-green for the pine, deep wood-color and bluish-green of fir.
The sky, which at this elevation of six thousand feet is deep, pure blue and often cloudless, is seen through the tracery of boughs and tree-tops, which cast downward fine and filmy shadows across the glowing trunks. Altogether, it is a wonderful setting for the Sequoia. The two firs, judging by many of equal size whose age I have studied, were about three hundred years old; the pine, still hale and vigorous, not less than five hundred; and for the “King of the Mountains” we cannot assign a probable age of less than two thousand years.
A mountain, a fossil from deepest geological horizon, a ruin of human art, carry us back into the perspective of centuries with a force that has become, perhaps, a little conventional. No imperishableness of mountain-peak or of fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image half lifted over pathetic desert,—none of these link the past and to-day with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity, trees that began to grow before the Christian era, and, full of hale vitality and green old age, still bid fair to grow broad and high for centuries to come. Who shall predict the limits of this unexampled life? There is nothing which indicates suffering or degeneracy in the Sequoia as a species. I find pathological hints that several other far younger species in the same forest are gradually giving up their struggle for existence. That singular species Pinus Sabiniana appears to me to suffer death-pains from foot-hill extremes of temperature and dryness, and notably from ravenous parasites of the mistletoe type. At the other extreme the Pinus flexilis has about half given up the fight against cold and storms. Its young are dwarfed or huddled in thickets, with such mode of growth that they may never make trees of full stature; while higher up, standing among bare rocks and fields of ice, far above all living trees, are the stark, white skeletons of noble dead specimens, their blanched forms rigid and defiant, preserved from decay by a marvellous hardness of fibre, and only wasted by the cutting of storm-driven crystals of snow. Still the Sequoia maintains perfect health.
It is, then, the vast respiring power, the atmosphere, the bland, regular climate, which give such long life, and not any richness or abundance of food received from the soil.