Among the prostrate trees lies the "Fallen Giant," measuring eighty-five feet around, three feet from the present base. The bark, the sapwood, the roots, and probably the original base, are all burned away. When standing, this monster must have been by far the largest in both groves, and, indeed, larger than any now known in the world. It should have been called "Lucifer," a name hereby respectfully submitted for the consideration of future tourists.
The living trees of this species exude a dark-colored substance, looking like gum, but readily dissolving in water. This has a very acrid, bitter taste, which probably aids in preserving the tree from injurious insects, and preventing the decay of the woody fibre.
The fruit or seed is hardly conical, but rather ellipsoidal or rudely oval in form, an inch and a half long by one inch through, and looking far too insignificant to contain the actual germ of the most gigantic structure known to botanical science.
Their age, indicated by the concentric rings of annual growth, carefully counted and registered by the gentlemen of the State Survey, varies from five to thirteen, possibly fifteen, centuries.
The word "Sequoia," is the Latin form of the Indian Sequoyah, the name of a Cherokee Indian of mixed blood, who is supposed to have been born about 1770, and who lived in Will's Valley, in the extreme northeastern corner of Alabama, among the Cherokees. His English name was George Guess. He became famous by his invention of an alphabet, and written letters for his tribe. This alphabet was constructed with wonderful ingenuity. It consisted of eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable, and it had already come into considerable use before the whites heard anything of it. After a while, the missionaries took up Sequoyah's idea, had types cast, supplied a printing press to the Cherokee nation, and in 1828 started a newspaper printed partly with these types. Driven, with the rest of his tribe, beyond the Mississippi, he died in New Mexico, in 1843. His alphabet is still in use, though destined to pass away with his doomed race, but not into complete oblivion, for his name, attached to one of the grandest productions of the vegetable kingdom will keep his memory forever green.
For the foregoing bit of aboriginal biography, we gratefully acknowledge our obligation to Prof. Brewer and the gentlemen of the State Survey, to whom he originally furnished it.
Had Sequoyah's name been Cadmus—had the Cherokees been Phenicians—and had this modern heathen of the eighteenth century invented his alphabet away back before the Christian era, his name would have stood in every school history among those of inventors, philosophers, discoverers and benefactors; as it is he's "only an Indian." No one can deny, however, that he was one of the best re(a)d men in the history of the world.
Both the Calaveras and the Mariposa groves contain hollow trunks of fallen trees, through which, or into which, two and even three horsemen can ride abreast for sixty or seventy feet. Each grove, also, has trees which have been burned out at the base, but have not fallen. Still standing, they contain or enclose huge charcoal-lined rooms, into which one can ride. The writer has been one of four mounted men who rode their horses into such a cavity in the Mariposa grove, and reined their horses up side by side without crowding each other or pressing the outside one against the wall.
One who has seen only the ordinary big trees of "down east," or "out west," forests, finds it hard to believe that any such vegetable monsters can really exist. Even the multiplied and repeated assurances of friends who have actually "seen them, sir," and "measured them myself, I tell you," hardly arrest the outward expression of incredulity, and seldom win the inward faith of the skeptical hearer. Fancy yourself sitting down to an after-dinner chat in the fifteen-foot sitting room, adjoining the dining room of equal size. You fall to talking of the "Big Trees." You say, "Why, my dear sir, I have actually rode into, and sat upon my horse in, a tree whose hollow was so big that you could put both these rooms into it, side by side, and still have seven or eight feet of solid wood standing on each side of me. No, sir, not romancing at all. It's an actual, scientific, measured fact, sir." Your friend looks quizzically and incredulously into both your eyes, as he says, "Why, now see here, my dear fellow, do you suppose I'm going to believe that? Tell a moderate whopper, and back it up with such repeated assertion and scientific authority, and you might possibly make me believe it, or at least, allow it until you were fairly out of hearing; but to sit here at a man's own fireside and tell him such a monstrous story as that, and expect him to swallow it for truth—ah, no, my dear fellow, that's too much, altogether too much."
So you have to give it over and drop the argument for the present, in the hope that some one of the numerous excursion parties, now so rapidly multiplying every year, will soon include him, carry him into the actual presence of these veritable monsters of the vegetable kingdom, confront him with their colossal columns, and compel his belief.