T

HE Sequoia National Park is twenty-four years old, yet, east of the Rockies, it is scarcely known. Yellowstone and Yosemite are the only two names which the enormous majority of Easterners think of when National Parks are mentioned. Nevertheless, Sequoia is, perhaps, in point of average beauty, the superior of all. It was dear to the heart of John Muir, Father of National Parks, and Chief Geographer R. B. Marshall, who knows them, having surveyed or traversed them in person, has declared in print that it possesses beauty as great as all others combined.

It is par excellence the camping-out park, as some day will be discovered.

Perhaps the most potent reason for its lack of celebrity is that this is the

Big Tree Park, and the general public associates the Big Trees of California with Yosemite. The Mariposa Grove, within easy reach of the Yosemite Valley, contains several enormous sequoia trees. In fact the Yosemite National Park contains three groves of these giants, the two others being the Merced and Tuolumne Groves, which lie within easy reach to the northwest.

The Sequoia National Park, however, which lies many miles south of Yosemite, was created to preserve, for the use and pleasure of the people of the United States, by far the greatest groves of the oldest, the biggest and the most remarkable trees living in this world. They number 1,166,000. Of these, 12,000 exceed 10 feet in diameter. The General Sherman tree,

A tree that has lived 500 years is still in its early youth; one that has rounded out 1,000 summers and winters is only in full maturity; and old age, the three score years and ten of the sequoias, does not come for seventeen or eighteen centuries.

"How old the oldest trees may be is not yet certain, but I have counted the rings of seventy-nine that were over 2,000 years of age, of three that were over 3,000, and of one that was 3,150.

"In the days of the Trojan war and of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt this oldest tree was a sturdy sapling, with stiff, prickly foliage like that of a cedar, but far more com

pressed. It was doubtless a graceful, shapely conical tree, twenty or thirty feet high, with dense, horizontal branches, the lower ones of which swept the ground. Like the young trees of to-day, the ancient sequoia and the clump of trees of similar age which grew close to it must have been a charming adornment of the landscape. By the time of Marathon the trees had lost the hard, sharp lines of youth, and were thoroughly mature. The lower branches had disappeared, up to a height of a hundred feet or more; the giant trunks were disclosed as bare, reddish columns covered with soft bark 6 inches or a foot in thick

ness; the upper branches had acquired a slightly drooping aspect; and the spiny foliage, far removed from the ground, had assumed a graceful rounded appearance. Then for centuries, through the days of Rome, the Dark Ages, and all the period of the growth of European civilization, the ancient giants preserved the same appearance, strong and solid, but with a strangely attractive, approachable quality."

The Sequoias are found scattered all over the park, which has an area of 161,597 acres, but the greater trees are gathered in thirteen groups of many acres each, where they grow close together.

The following is a list of a few of the principal trees, with their names, height, and diameter.

Height and Diameter of Principal Trees.

GIANT FOREST GROVE

General Sherman, height 279.9 feet; diameter, 36.5 feet.

Abraham Lincoln, height, 270 feet; diameter, 31 feet.

William McKinley, height, 291 feet; diameter, 28 feet.

MUIR GROVE

Dalton, height, 292 feet; diameter, 27 feet.

GARFIELD GROVE.

California, height, 260 feet; diameter, 30 feet.

GENERAL GRANT GROVE

General Grant, height, 264 feet; diameter, 35 feet.

George Washington, height, 255 feet; diameter, 29 feet.

The General Sherman tree was discovered by James Wolverton, a hunter and trapper, on August 7, 1879, at which time he named the tree in honor of General Sherman, under whom he