Article May 24, 1900 Issue

Buying the Big Trees

New York Sun

Representative De Vries of California, has introduced a bill directing the Secretary of the Interior to buy the "mammoth tree grove" and "South Park Grove of Big Trees" in Calaveras County, Cal., which are now owned by private persons. The idea is to make national parks of them. By far the largest of these big tree groves is in Mariposa County, and it was a part of the public domain when it was granted to California by Act of Congress, to be held for all time as a place of public resort.

If the two groves which the California congressman wishes to turn into national parks do not contain as many trees as some of the others, they have the compensating advantage of showing the biggest trees of them all, and they were also the first to be discovered. The first the world heard of these giants of vegetation was in 1852, when a white hunter named Dowd reached the larger of the Calaveras groves and found a cluster of ninety-two of these great trees covering a space of fifty acres. When he returned to civilization and told his story, he was credited with being an uncommonly talented liar.

The Calaveras groves attract rather more visitors than the others because they are a little more accessible. Ten trees in the larger grove are thirty feet in diameter. One of the fallen giants is forty feet in diameter and is estimated to have been four hundred and fifty feet high. It was the hoary monarch of the grove and died of old age, say about twenty-five hundred years. A hollow trunk called the "Horseback Ride," seventy-five feet long, gets its name from the fact that a man may ride through it upright on horseback. Just after the discovery of the grove one of the largest trees, ninety-two feet in circumference, was cut down. Five men worked twenty-two days in cutting through it with large augers. On the stump, which was planed off nearly to the smoothness of a ballroom floor, there have been dancing parties and theatrical performances. For a time a newspaper called The Big Tree Bulletin was printed there.

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