The Mariposa grove of Big Trees, being not far from Yosemite Valley, is the best known, as thousands of tourists visit both places.  There is a big tree at Mariposa for every day in the year, and two very wonderful ones, the Grizzly Giant and Wawona.  Stage-coaches drive into the grove through the tree Wawona, which was bored and burned out so as to make an opening ten by twelve feet.  A wall of wood ten feet thick on each side of this opening supports the living tree.  The great Grizzly Giant towers a hundred feet without a branch, and twice that height above the first immense branches that are six feet through.  This was, no doubt, an old tree when Columbus discovered America, yet it is alive and green and still growing.

The largest tree in the world is the General Sherman, in Sequoia National Park, and it is thirty-five feet in diameter.  This means that the stump of the tree, if smoothed off, would make a floor on which thirty people might dance, or your whole class be seated.  You can scarcely imagine what a mighty column such a tree is, with its rich red-brown bark, fluted like a column, too, and with its crown of feathery green branches and foliage.  The bark is a foot or two thick.  The trees are evergreens, and conifers, or cone-bearers.  Sequoia cones are two or three inches long and full of small seeds.  The Douglas squirrel gets most of these seeds, but there are still seedlings and saplings or young trees enough to keep the race alive in most of the groves.

These groves of wonderful and rare trees are protected as National Parks in the Sequoia and Grant groves, and Mariposa belongs to the state.  It is against the law to cut the trees in those groves.  Their worst enemy is fire, and a troop of cavalry is sent every year to guard them, and to keep out the sheep-herders, whose flocks would destroy the underbrush and young trees.  But, unfortunately, lumbermen have put up mills near the Fresno and Kings River groups, and, wasting more than they use, are destroying magnificent trees thousands of years old in order to make shingles.  When nature has taken such good care of this rare and wonderful tree, the Sierra Giant, men should try to preserve the groves unharmed in all their beauty.

Another sequoia grows in great forests along the Coast Range from Santa Cruz to the northern state-line, and beyond into Oregon.  This is the sequoia sempervirens, the Latin name meaning always green.  Redwood is its common name, and the lumber for our frame or wooden houses is cut from this tree.  Millions of feet of this redwood lumber are shipped from the northern counties of the state every year, up to Alaska or down to Central and South America.  It is also sent far across the Pacific to the Hawaiian and Philippine islands and to China and Australia.