The affair was approaching a crisis. The mayor's investigation had been protracted, and the clamors and shouts of the mob often reached his ears, when at last he found it necessary to acknowledge that the proceedings of the officer were illegal, that the city was liable for the value of the cattle, and in order to appease the mob, he pledged his individual word for the payment of the money. The party then returned triumphantly to their homes in the Redwoods, and thus the affair ended.
[Felling Trees in the Redwoods.]
January 30, 1854. On an excursion to-day I stopped on the way to see two trees felled. When the reader is told that I had passed more than six months in the Redwoods, and had seen the trees fall around me almost every day, he will suppose that such scenes would lose their novelty for me. It is, however, a scene of no ordinary sublimity to behold one of those monster trees, nearly as high as the Bunker Hill Monument, fall to the ground, and it is a sight which I never tire of seeing.
I speak of them as being nearly as high as the Bunker Hill Monument, because I have seen none of the largest and tallest trees, they having been felled before I arrived here. But a comparison with the monument will serve to give a better idea of their great height than a statement in figures. Imagine then one of them, such as have grown here, and such as are still standing in other forests,—imagine one placed beside the monument, and towering fifty or even seventy-five feet above it, and you will have a conception of the grandeur of these magnificent forests.
The two trees whose fall I was about to witness stood side by side half way up a steep acclivity. One of them had been cut off, and stood leaning against the other.
Two men were at work on the latter tree. I seated myself on a stump at the foot of the hill, and awaited the result. Presently a sharp snap or crackle announced that the tree was about yielding to the efforts of the axe-men, and they stopped and looked up. It stood, however, and they continued to ply their axes. Soon there came another loud crackle, and the two trees began to sway in the direction the axe-men had intended. They now retreated to a secure place, while the trees, moving slowly and majestically at first, but with an accelerated motion, came sweeping down, accompanied with a loud and protracted crash as the fibres of the uncut portion were torn asunder, and striking the ground with a force that made it tremble, and with a noise like the booming report of a heavy cannon. Each tree was broken into several pieces, which came rolling like mighty giants down the hill, tumbling over each other, and strewing the ground with large fragments torn from their sides and ends, while every branch was stripped from the trunks. They landed at last at the foot of the hill, and within a rod of the stump on which I sat, and sent forward a thick and suffocating cloud of dust, from which I hastened to make my escape.
"Ah! we would go a great many miles in Massachusetts to see such a sight as this;" said one of the axe-men, a young man from that state, "But we can never see any thing like it there."