How California’s Giant Sequoias Tell the Story of Americans’ Conflicted Relationship With Nature
In the mid-19th century, “Big Tree mania†spread across the country and our love for the trees has never abated
By Zach St. George
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
In the winter of 1852, while chasing a wounded grizzly bear in the mountains of eastern California, a hunter named Augustus T. Dowd encountered a very large tree. It had red-orange bark and clouds of sea-green needles, and it would’ve taken more than a dozen men with outstretched arms to encircle it. When Dowd told his campmates what he’d found, they laughed. Then he took them to see the tree.
Newspapers trumpeted the discovery, calling the find—long known to Native Americans—“the Sylvan Mastodon†and “the Vegetable Monster.†Soon, another group of men returned to Dowd’s tree and, perhaps inevitably, cut it down. Everybody counted the rings on the felled trunk differently—one reporter estimated it to be 2,500 years old, another 4,000 and a third 6,500. “It must have been a little plant when Samson was slaying the Philistines,†one wrote.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-california-giant-sequoia-tell-story-americans-conflicted-relationship-nature-180968389/#VvYEOpkdA1wdVOlq.99
