likewise named from the county in which it stands, is about sixteen miles directly south of the lower hotel in Yosemite valley, and about four miles southeast of Clark's Ranch. Like the Calaveras Grove, it occupies a shallow valley or depression in the back of a ridge which runs easterly between Big Creek and the South Merced. One branch of the creek rises in the grove.
The grant made by Congress is two miles square and embraces two distinct groves; that is, two collections of big trees, separated by a considerable space having none. The upper grove contains three hundred and sixty-five trees of the true Sequoia Gigantea species, having a diameter of one foot or over. Besides these, are a great number of younger and smaller ones.
The lower grove is not as large, and its trees are more scattered. It lies southwesterly from the upper. Some of its trees grow quite high up the gulches on the south side of the ridge which separates the two groves.
On Wednesday, July 7th, 1869, the largest trees of this grove were carefully measured, under the guidance and with the assistance of Mr. Clarke himself, one of the State Commissioners charged with the care of these groves and of the Yosemite valley. To prevent misunderstanding and insure uniformity, each tree was measured three feet from the ground, except where the outside of the base was burned away, when the tree was girted seven and a half feet above ground.
The following figures are taken from that day's phonographic journal, written on the spot:
The "Grizzly Giant," seven and one half feet up, measures seventy-eight and one half feet in circumference. Three feet above ground this tree measured over a hundred feet round; but several feet of this measurement came from projecting roots, where they swell out from the trunk into the mammoth diagonal braces or shores, necessary to support and stiffen such a gigantic structure in its hold upon the earth.
One hundred feet up, an immense branch, over six feet through, grows out horizontally some twenty feet, then turns like an elbow and goes up forty feet. It naturally suggests some huge gladiator, uncovering his biceps and drawing up his arm to "show his muscle." This is the largest tree now standing in the grove, and is the one of which Starr King wrote:
"I confess that my own feeling, as I first scanned it, and let the eye roam up its tawny pillar, was of intense disappointment. But then, I said to myself, this is, doubtless, one of the striplings of this Anak brood—only a small affair of some forty feet in girth. I took out the measuring line, fastened it on the trunk with a knife, and walked around, unwinding as I went. The line was seventy-five feet long. I came to the end before completing the circuit. Nine feet more were needed. I had dismounted before a structure eighty-four feet in circumference, and nearly three hundred feet high, and I should not have guessed that it would measure more than fifteen feet through."
Here, as in Yosemite and at Niagara, tourists are usually disappointed in the first view. The lifelong familiarity with lesser magnitudes makes it almost impossible for the mind to free itself from the trammels of habit, and leap at a single bound, into any adequate perception of the incredible magnitudes which confront him. One needs spend at least a week among these Brobdignagian bulks, come twice a day and stay twelve hours each time, before he grows to any worthy appreciation of their unbelievable bigness.
Of the other trees, the largest ten, measured three feet above ground, gave the following circumferences: