Scattered between the giants, like subjects around their
king, one finds noble fir, spruce, or pines, with some Valparaiso
live oak, black oak, pepper-wood, madrone, yew, and cedar.
In May and June, when the twisted and cowering madrone trees are
putting forth their clusters of creamy buds, when the white blossoms
of the dogwoods line the banks of little streams, when the azaleas
and rhododendrons, lovely and delicate as orchids, blaze a bed of
glory, and the modest little oxalis has thrust itself up through the
brown carpet of pine-needles and redwood-twigs, these wonderful
forests cast upon one a potent spell. To have seen them once thus in
gala dress is to yearn thereafter to see them again and still again
and grieve always in the knowledge of their inevitable death at the
hands of the woodsman.
John Cardigan settled in Humboldt County, where the sequoia
sempervirens attains the pinnacle of its glory, and with the lust for
conquest hot in his blood, he filed upon a quarter-section of the
timber almost on the shore of Humboldt Bay--land upon which a city
subsequently was to be built. With his double-bitted axe and crosscut
saw John Cardigan brought the first of the redwood giants crashing to
the earth above which it had towered for twenty centuries, and in the
form of split posts, railroad ties, pickets, and shakes, the fallen
giant was hauled to tidewater in ox-drawn wagons and shipped to San
Francisco in the little two-masted coasting schooners of the period.
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