American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  In terms of sheer quantity, domestic fuel demands accounted for the greatest number of felled trees in the new nation. America, after all, had been a land “of good living for those that love good fires” since the time of the Pilgrims. Settlers built homes with gigantic, inefficient fireplaces that chewed through wood and lost about 90 percent of the heat out the chimney. These hearths were often able to hold logs four feet across—the standard unit for cut wood, the “cord,” measured 4 by 4 by 8 feet, or 128 cubic feet. Crèvecoeur, describing his wood use in America, wrote: “One year with another I burn seventy loads, this is, pretty nearly so many cords.” Americans collectively burned roughly 1.08 billion cords up through 1810—of these, 268 million cords were spent just between 1800 and 1809.

  In 1742, Benjamin Franklin, fearing that wood “will of course grow scarcer and dearer,” had attempted to remedy the gross wastefulness through innovation. He invented a self-enclosed iron heating stove that consumed exponentially less wood than a traditional fireplace. But it was slow to catch on. In the countryside, where most Americans lived, few saw any need to increase their fuel-use efficiency. Settlers considered the Franklin stove (and its many derivatives) as an unnecessary capital expense, and one that increased labor to boot—its small opening required that settlers cut fuelwood down from its cord dimensions into fifteen-inch chunks. Franklin’s stove was more rapidly adopted in the cities; however, when coal-burning models appeared later, urban Americans hesitated to abandon wood fuel even though coal was often cheaper. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, coal accounted for less than 10 percent of the nation’s aggregate energy consumption.

  A similar scenario of wooden resources trumping labor and capital was log cabins, the archetypal symbol of frontier settlement. This housing style likely originated in New Sweden, a short-lived, mid-seventeenth-century colony along the Delaware River. Settlers of all backgrounds quickly co-opted the design as the most pragmatic for a forested environment. The advantage was that it used wood before labor or capital. Each home required about eighty logs between twenty and thirty feet for the main structure and several dozen split logs for gables and the roof. But no costly nails or precision holes were necessary, and the entire process took between one and three days with help from a few neighbors. The subsequent draftiness made roaring fires obligatory day and night, continuing the cycle of wood consumption. These buildings, meant to be temporary shelters, proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As late as 1855, more than thirty-three thousand remained in New York State, housing for about one-fifth of all farm families.

  On the commercial side, Americans were equally profligate in the industries that depended on wood. An excellent example of this concerned the sawmills that dotted every waterway across the country. The wider a sawmill’s blade (at least before modern metallurgy), the less prone it was to breakage and the better suited it was to high-speed operations. But wide saws made a broad cut, or kerf, which unnecessarily wasted large amounts of wood. To put this in perspective, a kerf one-tenth of one inch converted 10 percent of every one-inch-thick board into sawdust (for lengthwise cuts). When billions of board feet were cut, differences in kerf added up to enormous quantities of wasted lumber. According to one historian, circular saws in England, where wood remained scarce, were half the width on average of their American equivalents until the time of the Civil War.

  Similar indifference to efficiency pervaded the naval stores industry of the South. The longleaf pines, an excellent source of pitch, tar, and turpentine, stretched across the coastal plains from Virginia southward all the way to Texas. Southerners extracted the raw materials by “tapping” the pines, cutting a “V” into the bark and leaving a pan to catch the exudate. While it was possible to harvest the sap in a way that left the trees relatively uninjured, destructive practices developed that needlessly killed untold numbers of trees.

  Intensive wood use had become a profound part of the national mind-set. Even as the newer technologies of Mumford’s paleotechnic era—steam power, railroads, iron, and steel—began to arrive, Americans modified them to suit their wood-centric lifestyle. In the case of iron, for example, nearly all British smelters had shifted by 1800 from charcoal (a wood derivative) to coke (a coal variant). But the first American experiments with coke only took place in 1835. Twenty years later, almost 80 percent of American iron furnaces were still using charcoal. This despite the fact that charcoal was more expensive to produce than coke and less efficient—eight tons of wood were required to produce two tons of charcoal; charcoal was 2.6 times as bulky as coke; and, ultimately, 1.7 tons of coke did the same work as two to three tons of charcoal. In the case of early steam engines, which began appearing in large numbers early in the nineteenth century, wood persisted as the primary fuel well into the 1880s. Up and down the nation’s rivercourses, thousands of woodcutters and scavengers, known as woodhawks, mined the land, ready to supply steamboats wherever they stopped. Coal only proliferated once Americans had stripped the lands near the waterways of wood.

  From the fireplace to the steam furnace, endless supplies of wood shaped the way that Americans behaved and developed. As late as 1840, roughly 95 percent of the nation’s energy needs for heating, lighting, and locomotion still came from trees. Americans on a per capita basis consumed almost six times more lumber than their British counterparts during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French essayist, in talking of the way settlers approached their environment, once commented, “It would be difficult to describe the avidity with which the American rushes forward to secure this immense booty that fortune offers.” Not until the middle of the nineteenth century would some Americans begin to question their country’s attitude toward nature and trees.

  3

  The Unrivaled Nature of America

  The Big Trees of California

  THE DRIVE TO EXPAND WESTWARD was a defining characteristic of America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lewis and Clark, Johnny Appleseed, and Daniel Boone were all contributors to a grand effort that rapidly reoriented America away from its coastal roots. Many felt that it was the nation’s fate to stretch across the entire continent, an idea later known as “manifest destiny.” This goal finally became a political reality in 1848 after the United States defeated Mexico in the Mexican-American War. As a condition of peace, the nation gained over 1.2 million square miles of territory, an area encompassing nearly all of the greater Southwest and also California, the great and majestic guardian of the Pacific.

  The newly claimed Californian territory turned out to be a land of geological and natural wonders. Separated from the rest of the continent by the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it possessed a climate and topography unique in the nation and the world. The earliest American settlers—especially those who flooded the region’s forested interior during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s—sent accounts to their eastern relatives of fantastic flora, spectacular scenery, and unknown animals. Often these narratives took the form of “tall tales,” mythic yarns that attempted to distill the grandeur and curiosity of this newly claimed land. Mark Twain, the rakish author, satirized this phenomenon in his famous short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” In it, the narrator, who admits to having a “lurking suspicion” that the entire episode is a myth, recounts a California tale of a frog named Dan’l Webster who “could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see.”

  Of course, not all the stories coming out of the territory were fictitious.

  In the spring of 1852, Augustus T. Dowd was working for a California mining outfit, Murphy’s Camp, located in the Calaveras County of Twain’s story. The camp had employed Dowd as a hunter to supply the workmen with fresh meat, and day after day he roamed the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas in search of game. One afternoon in May, having shot and wounded a bear, Dowd pursued the injured animal through a wilderness of pitch pine, sugar pine
, white fir, and incense cedar. Eventually, the chase landed Dowd in an unknown part of the mountains about sixteen miles from his camp, near the headwaters of the Stanislaus and San Antonio Rivers. He looked up and saw before him a tree with dimensions too great to comprehend. According to James Hutchings, a California explorer and promoter who published the best-known account of Dowd’s discovery, “All thoughts of hunting, or bear pursuing, were forgotten, or absorbed and lost in the surprising admiration which he felt.”

  Dowd rushed back to his camp to share the news of what he had found, but the other miners, inured to California’s culture of exaggeration and invention, dismissed his entreaties as just another tall tale. A few days later, Dowd once more burst into camp, this time claiming to have shot the largest grizzly bear he’d ever seen. He rounded up a troop of men for assistance, and they set out into the wilderness of the Sierras, hiking deep into the forest, across ridges and ravines, beyond cliffs and canyons, until they arrived at the gargantuan trunk that Dowd had encountered days before. According to Hutchings, Dowd then cried out, “[N]ow, boys, do you believe my big tree story? That is the large grizzly I wanted you to see. Do you still think it a yarn?”

  The trees that now surrounded Dowd’s men soared heavenward, free of branches for more than one hundred feet. Hundreds of feet higher still hung their ragged, evergreen crowns. But the most overwhelming feature was their massive girth, with some over thirty feet wide at the base, a footprint as large as that of a single-family home. Dowd’s big trees made the old-growth forests of New England look like a collection of twigs—the mighty white pines that had once provided masts for the British navy rarely grew wider than four feet, but a single branch from the big trees could be six feet across! These forest miracles were, quite simply, the largest living objects on earth.

  For Dowd, these trees must have appeared almost supernatural, even divine, but botanists and explorers have filled in much of the mystery over the years. Relatives of the big trees once thrived across three continents, but glaciation and climate changes restricted their survival to California alone. Currently, the trees occur naturally along a chain of groves that stretches approximately 260 miles through California’s Sierra Nevadas at altitudes between five thousand and seven thousand feet. Mature trees number only in the tens of thousands (about one hundred of which are found in Dowd’s Calaveras Grove), a paltry number for any species, and the list of remarkable specimens is below five hundred. While these quantities are minuscule, the lucky trees that have survived several hundred years of nature’s wrath to reach maturity are effectively indestructible: They have no serious fungal enemies; a root and trunk system sturdy enough to survive windstorms; and a bark up to three feet thick that withstands the heat of wildfires. The oldest specimens have been measured at thirty-five hundred years old, with the largest trees containing over half a million board feet of lumber, more wood than is typically found in several acres of healthy forest. And yet, this incredible feat of natural engineering sprouts from a seed half a centimeter across.

  Dowd was not the first to notice the big trees. Native Americans knew the species well, and most historians agree that the first westerner to document them was Zenas Leonard, who explored California’s Yosemite Valley in 1833. His journal, which surfaced only in 1904, described trees that measured “from 16 to 18 fathoms [six feet equal one fathom] round the trunk”—given his Yosemite location, he had likely encountered the Mariposa Grove, a large collection of big trees about one hundred miles south of Calaveras. Dowd’s discovery, however, brought the trees to the attention of the general public for the first time. A small California paper, the Sonora Herald, published his finding in 1852, and although many questioned the story’s validity, accounts of the big trees soon appeared in nearly every major newspaper throughout the country. Within a year, the news reached London.

  Enterprising Californians rushed to capitalize on the public’s burgeoning interest. Axes in hand, they descended on the Calaveras Grove and cut down the very specimen that had first captivated Dowd. According to Hutchings,

  This tree employed five men for twenty five days in falling it. . . . [A]bout two and a half days of the twenty-five were spent in inserting wedges, and then driving them in with the buts [sic] of trees, until, at last, the noble monarch of the forest was forced to tremble and then to fall, after braving “the battle and the breeze” of nearly three thousand winters.

  One can only imagine the sound of such a grand tower crashing to the forest floor, the echo of more than a thousand tons reverberating through the mountains. After the tree was leveled, the team stripped off over fifty feet of the bark with the intent of shipping it to the 1853 New York World’s Fair for display. One observer was “dreadfully shocked at the vandalism and barbarity of flaying that giant of the woods and depriving California of its greatest growing exponent.” Another justified this initial felling on practical grounds: “[I]n taking its proportions to the World’s Fair . . . millions of the inhabitants of the earth will see it.”

  Promoters shipped the initial load of stripped bark, which weighed twelve tons, across the country to the delight of easterners who had refused to believe the newspaper reports. The following year, another Californian entrepreneur removed 116 feet of bark from a different tree. This supposedly required the labor of five men for ninety days. The 8-foot sections were shipped downriver to San Francisco, then around Cape Horn in Chile, en route to New York, but no buildings in America were large enough to hold the reassembled display, which measured 90 feet around at the base. The bark subsequently traveled to England, but even the grand buildings of London were too low to accommodate it. Finally, in April 1857, the display found a permanent home within the massive Crystal Palace of Sydenham, England, but a fire later consumed the building and the tree.

  Other pieces of various big trees toured the country throughout the nineteenth century. One noteworthy exhibit was held in Boston in 1871, when a special building was erected for the event. Louis Agassiz, the esteemed Harvard natural historian and one of the most respected scientific minds of the age, was so impressed that he sent an unsolicited endorsement to the exhibit’s organizers, which ended up featured in the promotional broadside: “Nobody who has any curiosity to see something of the wonders of nature ought to allow the opportunity of seeing a section of one of the big trees of California to pass unimproved.” According to one paper, “The average attendance has not been much less than a thousand a day.”

  While many experienced the big trees through these traveling displays, others flocked to Calaveras to see them in their natural habitat. A Connecticut traveler, upon first seeing the grove in 1856, wrote, “[I]t really seemed that we had never seen a tree before. And yet they were only medium specimens.” The original site, located far from any settlements and initially accessible only on horseback, developed into one of California’s premier early tourist destinations. By 1854, there was an onsite hotel with accommodations for more than fifty guests. Promotional literature encouraged people to take advantage of the grove’s excellent hunting and trout fishing. The tree that had been felled in 1853 was incorporated into the convivial scene. An early visitor explained, “The stump has been planed off and . . . used as a ballroom and stage for a theatre.” Hutchings added, “[H]owever incredible it may seem, on the 4th of July [1854], 32 persons were engaged in dancing four sets of cotillions at one time [on the stump], without suffering any inconvenience whatever; and, besides these, there were musicians and lookers on.”

  Over the years, countless American luminaries visited the big trees and shared their impressions in widely read travelogues. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune and an abolitionist who helped found the Republican Party, visited in the late 1850s and imagined, correctly, that the “forest mastodons” were “a relic of some bygone world.” William Cullen Bryant, poet, naturalist, and long-serving editor of the New York Evening Post, described them in 1872 as “vast beyond any thing that I had ever seen.” Both Theodore Roo
sevelt and William Howard Taft made tours of the big trees during their presidencies.

  The big trees not only testified to the power of nature, but symbolized America and its greatness in the minds of many. Scottish poet James Hedderwick commented in an 1862 article that “it is only a country like America which can produce these mammoth enormities in whole forestfuls.” Trees had built the nation, been responsible for its strength and rapid expansion, so it was only fitting that their proudest specimens be found within its shores. Many of the big tree nicknames honored great Americans or national symbols, including George Washington, Uncle Sam, and General Sherman, the decorated Civil War officer whose name was bestowed on the largest tree of all, measuring 275 feet tall and 109 feet in circumference.

  In the mid-1850s, the national pride that Americans felt for their mammoth trees triggered a controversy that set scientists aflame on both sides of the Atlantic. Traditionally, botanical naming rights belonged to the first scientist to correctly identify any given species, and this privilege was often used to pay tribute to friends, colleagues, or public figures. In the case of the big trees, an Englishman published the first taxonomic description on December 24, 1853, labeling them with a new genus, Wellingtonia gigantea, an homage to the legendary Duke of Wellington, who had defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Few names could have been more offensive to America’s scientific community. Renowned American naturalist C. F. Winslow, tossing aside botanical convention, summed up the attitude of the nation’s scientists:

  [I]t must have been a prominent idea . . . that American Naturalists would regard with surprise and reluctance the application of a British name, however honored, when a name so worthy of immortal honor and renown as that of Washington would strike the mind of the world as far more suitable to the most gigantic and remarkable vegetable order indigenous to a country where his name is the most distinguished ornament. As he and his generation declared themselves independent of all English rule and political dictation, so American Naturalists must, in this case, express their respectful dissent from all British scientific “stamp acts.” . . . I trust the scientific honor of our country may be vindicated from foreign indelicacy by boldly discarding the name now applied to it, and by affixing to it that of the man whose memory we all love and honor, and teach our children to adore.