Because of these things
there is a tale to be told, the tale of Cardigan's son, who, when his
sire fell in the fray, took up the fight to save his heritage--a tale
of life with its love and hate, its battle, victory, defeat, labour,
joy, and sorrow, a tale of that unconquerable spirit of youth which
spurred Bryce Cardigan to lead a forlorn hope for the sake not of
wealth but of an ideal. Hark, then, to this tale of Cardigan's
redwoods:
Along the coast of California, through the secret valleys and over
the tumbled foothills of the Coast Range, extends a belt of timber of
an average width of thirty miles. In approaching it from the Oregon
line the first tree looms suddenly against the horizon--an outpost,
as it were, of the host of giants whose column stretches south nearly
four hundred miles to where the last of the rear-guard maintains
eternal sentry go on the crest of the mountains overlooking Monterey
Bay. Far in the interior of the State, beyond the fertile San Joaquin
Valley, the allies of this vast army hold a small sector on the west
slope of the Sierras.
These are the redwood forests of California, the only trees of their
kind in the world and indigenous only to these two areas within the
State. The coast timber is known botanically as sequoia sempervirens,
that in the interior as sequoia gigantea.
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