How America Cut Down California's 2,000-Year-Old Giant Redwoods

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Stand at the base of a California giant redwood and look up. The bark beside you is 2 feet thick. The trunk climbs higher than a 30story building. And if you could follow it all the way to the crown, you would be staring at a living thing older than Rome. These trees were already 2,000 years old when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. They were standing here when Christianity was a rumor. And in the second half of the 1800s, a generation of American men working with axes and crosscut saws and almost nothing else set themselves to bringing them down. I want to tell you their story today. The story of how America cut down California's 2,000-year-old giant redwoods. This is also, before it is over, the story of a man named John Mir, the Scottishborn naturalist who would 40 years too late persuade Congress to protect what was left. But it starts before Mir. It starts with a man named Augustus T. Dow.

[00:00:57]In the spring of 1852, Dow was working as a hunter supplying meat to the Union Water Company crews, building flumes in the Sierra Nevada foothills near a place called Murphy's Camp in Calaveris County. He had wounded a grizzly bear and he followed the blood trail into a ravine he had never walked. He looked up. He stopped. The bear was forgotten.

[00:01:18]In front of him stood a tree so vast he could not at first believe it was a single tree. He went back to camp and told the men. They laughed at him. They thought it was a tall story from a man who had failed to bring down his bear.

[00:01:32]Dow brought them out to the grove a few days later and the laughter stopped.

[00:01:36]This was the first time Anglo America would put a name to what we now call the giant sequoia. Seoa dendrin gigantium.

[00:01:44]The grove Dow had walked into is known today as the North Calaveris Grove.

[00:01:50]The biggest tree he showed his colleagues that day, the one he had stumbled into chasing a wounded bear, would come to be called the Discovery Tree. Within a year of being discovered, it was being cut down. The men who took down the discovery tree in 1853 did not have a saw long enough to cut through it. The trunk at the base measured more than 20 ft across, so they bored it. A pump augur was a heavy iron rod fitted with a screw cutter at the tip worked by two men turning a horizontal cross handle. One walking around the trunk to drive the rod, the other steadying it true. They sank holes about 2 in across and as much as 4 ft deep into the wood, withdrew the augur, moved a few inches over, and did it again. Hole after hole all the way around the circumference until the cut line had been perforated through the heartwood. They worked five men in shifts. The work took them about 3 weeks. Many sources site 22 days.

[00:02:49]Exact period records inconsistent.

[00:02:53]When the holes had punched through enough of the heartwood, the tree still refused to fall. It sat there severed at the base, balanced on its own weight.

[00:03:02]The men drove wedges into the curf.

[00:03:05]Nothing. They worked the wedges with sledges through the night. Nothing.

[00:03:10]Finally, on the second or third day after the cutting was finished, a strong wind came down the ravine, and the discovery tree tilted and dropped onto the floor of the grove with a sound that men a mile away said they could feel in the ground. The stump that remained when it was leveled and planed was wide enough for a dance floor. I have read accounts of what came next, and they read like a circus. The owners of the stump set planks on it. They held catillians. They posed for photographs.

[00:03:40]They cut a section of the trunk a few feet thick, hollowed it out, and floated it down to San Francisco to be displayed as a curiosity. Visitors paid to walk through it. Some of those visitors, the Eastern Newspaper men and naturalists, went home and wrote that California was inventing trees that could not exist.

[00:03:58]They did not believe the photographs. If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, the workers nobody ever wrote a book about, subscribe to Westbound Archive. One click, then come back. The country, it turned out, had been keeping a secret.

[00:04:14]The same kind of trees grew the length of the Sierra Nevada, scattered in groves from north of Yusede down past the King's River. And a related species, the coast redwood, sequoia seervirons, stretched in a near continuous fog belt along the Pacific from southern Oregon down to a few miles below the big su coast. Where the giant sequoia of the Sierra was the most massive living thing on Earth, the coast redwood was the tallest. It rose more than 350 feet from the forest floor, more than 370 in the largest documented cases. Tallest verified coast redwood is over 370 ft.

[00:04:53]Exact record crown disputed by year. By the 1860s, the price of lumber on the West Coast was climbing fast. San Francisco had burned six times in 8 years and rebuilt itself every time.

[00:05:07]Sacramento needed wood. Stockton needed wood. The mining camps in the Sierra needed flumes, slle boxes, timbers for shaft cribbing, and ties for the new narrow gauge railroads pushing into the high country. The Pacific lumber industry, a small affair in the 1850s, became a juggernaut in the 1860s and 70s, and the men running it looked at the giant trees and saw not a wonder.

[00:05:34]They saw a year of payroll standing on a single root system. I want to tell you how they cut them down. Because the engineering of it, the choreography of bringing a tree the size of a building to the ground with hand tools is one of the most extraordinary things ever done with muscle on this continent, and it has been almost forgotten. The first problem was the base. A giant seoia or a mature coast redwood does not have a clean cylindrical trunk at ground level.

[00:06:04]It flares outward, sometimes for the first 20 ft, into a buttressed swell of rootwood. Cutting through that swell would have required a saw twice the length of any saw that existed. So, the cutters did not cut at the base. They climbed. They built springboards. A springboard was a heavy plank about 6 ft long, tapered at one end, and shaw with iron.

[00:06:29]The cutter would chop a small notch into the bark 8 or 10 feet up the trunk, drive the iron tip of the springboard into the notch, and step out onto the plank like a man stepping onto a diving board. From there, sometimes 30 ft above the ground in the case of a large tree, he and his partner faced each other across the trunk and started to saw. The saws they used were called crosscuts.

[00:06:53]The loggers called them misery whips.

[00:06:55]They ran 6 to 12 feet long. Two handles, two men, one pulling and one not pushing. A good crosscut team could put a saw through a foot of redwood every few minutes on a small tree. On a giant seoia 20 ft through, they would saw for hours, then days. They would chop a deep undercut with axes on the side they wanted the tree to fall toward. Then they would come around the back, climb their springboards again, and saw the back cut. They would drive wedges into the back cut to keep the tree from pinching their saw. As the cut deepened, the wedges did the work of pushing the trunk forward, ounce by ounce, until the fibers at the hinge failed and the tree began to lean. A giant sequoia falling is not like any other tree in the world.

[00:07:41]It does not come down like a pine, fast and clean. It comes down slow because the air resists a column of wood 20 ft across and because the limbs above are catching on neighboring crowns and shearing off in pieces. It comes down with a sound the loggers compared to a long roll of thunder. And when it hits the ground, even on a soft duff floor, it can break itself in half. The men who cut these trees lost as much as a quarter of the merchantable timber in the fall alone because the trunk would shatter against the ground it had stood on for 2,000 years. I want to mention here a tree that no longer exists called the mother of the forest. She stood in the Calaveris grove a short walk from the stump where Dow's discovery tree had been. She was older than the discovery tree. She was about 320 ft tall by the careful measurement of the time. Verify t never amazing the vither forest height vary by this. She was most likely the very privately very few much month at the height. She was about 320 ft tall by the careful measurement of the time.

[00:08:46]Verify Pman with no skill as a logger and a great talent as a showman climbed her with a crew, drove rings of nails into her bark to give them footholds and proceeded to strip the bark off her in numbered sections top to bottom around the full circumference to a height of about 116 ft. Verify stripped height commonly cited near 116 ft. But this year we preferred home in 8550 ft and then by rains was with 115 ft. Verify stripped height commonly cighted near 116 ft revealed because they messed the best by the world. Really a 15 ft tall which was the most best by the world and specifically they were cdering the world. Verify generally a number 16 ft and reassembled inside a crystal palace exhibition for paying visitors to walk through. Bark was reportedly displayed in New York and later at Sidenham in England. Rooting is worth confirming with primary source. The naked tree, stripped of her protection, died standing. It took about a decade. For the rest of the century, she stood in the grove as a gray skeleton, a column of dead wood, while tourists climbed her on the same nail rings the barkmen had used.

[00:10:05]Before I go on, do me one favor and subscribe. The algorithm buries old engineering stories unless enough people tell it they want them. One click, then I will show you the rest.

[00:10:16]I have read what the records preserve of the lumber companies that operated along the Redwood Coast, and the scale is harder to absorb than the trees themselves. By the 1880s, the Humbult Bay region of Northern California was producing lumber on a scale the rest of the country could not match. The mills at Eureka and Arcada and Mendescino were running around the clock. The Pacific Lumber Company, founded in the 1860s, would by the end of the century own hundreds of thousands of acres of coast redwood. And every tree that came down those slopes had to be moved. The trees were too big for any wagon in most rivers. So, the men built systems for moving them. The simplest system was the bull team. A bull team was a yolk of eight or 10 or 12 oxen hitched in pairs to a chain, dragging a log along a corduroy road of cross-laid skids. The skid road was greased, often with whale oil and sometimes with water in the rainy season, and a single log on a graded skid road could be pulled by oxen at the pace of a slow walk. The men who drove the bull teams were a profession of their own. They were called bullwhackers. The bullwhacker walked alongside the team with a long goad calling the oxen by name. The records preserve a few of those names, mostly the oxen and not the men. Most worked anonymously.

[00:11:39]A bullhacker's wage on the Redwood Coast in the 1880s was on the order of $3 a day. Wage figures vary by year and operation. The men slept in bunk houses near the cut, ate at long board tables, and walked back into the woods at first light 6 days a week. The oxen, in some ways, were treated better than the men.

[00:11:59]A team that hauled hard for a week had to be rested, fed, watered, and shaw the same as a draft horse, and a bullhacker who broke an ox by working it too hard could lose his place that night. When the country was too steep for oxen, the loggers built flumes. A flume was a wooden trough, V-shaped or U-shaped, suspended on trestles across the contour of the mountain, sometimes for 20 or 30 m, sometimes for 50. A flume was filled with water diverted from a stream at the top. A log dropped into the upper end would ride down on a thin sheet of fast water until it reached the mill or the railroad siding at the bottom. The men called these flumes mountain rivers.

[00:12:40]They were among the boldest pieces of light timber engineering in the country and almost none of them survive. When even flumes would not serve, the loggers built railroads. They built them on grades a normal railroad could not work.

[00:12:54]Sometimes 10% grades using small geared locomotives called shayes that could climb where a rod locomotive would have slipped. They laid track on temporary trestles, hauled out the timber, then pulled up the rails and laid them again in the next valley. A redwood logging railroad was a movable thing. It existed for as long as the slope above it had trees. And then in 1891 came an event that no naturalist on the west coast forgot. A crew working in the Converse Basin Grove on the King's Riverside of the Sierra fell the giant seoia they called the Mark Twain tree. It was somewhere over a thousand years old.

[00:13:34]Verify commonly cited near 1,300 years.

[00:13:38]Exact ring count varies by source. The decision had been made to take this tree down, not for lumber. Sequoia wood is brittle and shatters in the fall and is not the easy money the loggers wanted.

[00:13:50]The Mark Twain was cut down to send a cross-section of its trunk, a slice several feet thick, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and another slice to the British Museum in London, so that people on the other side of the country and the ocean could see with their own eyes that the trees were real. It took two men with crosscut saws and axes about 2 weeks to bring it down, working from springboards. Most accounts give around 13 days. Exact felling duration not firmly documented.

[00:14:23]When it fell, it broke into pieces along the trunk.

[00:14:27]The two cross-sections were cut from the cleanest length, finished and created, and shipped across the country and across the Atlantic. They are still on display today. And the man who paid for the work, the timber operator who owned the contract, took photographs of his men standing on the stump that they were already calling even before the slices were created a relic. I cannot read those photographs without thinking of John Mir. Mirror was born in Scotland in 1838. He came to America as a boy. By the late 1860s, he had walked from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico for the pleasure of seeing the country. He arrived in Yusede Valley on foot in 1869 and decided he would not leave the Sierra until he understood it. He stayed for years.

[00:15:17]He herded sheep in the high country, mapped glaciers nobody before him had walked, wrote essays for eastern magazines that were the first many readers had ever seen of the West, and slowly, methodically started to make a case nobody wanted to hear. The case was that the trees were not infinite. In the 1870s and 80s, Mure was writing letters and lobbying senators and walking presidents into the high country to show them with their own hands on the bark what stood there. In 1890, Congress acted. President Benjamin Harrison signed the bills that created Sequoia National Park and Yusede National Park in the same year, the second and third national parks in the country after Yellowstone. Harrison was not a wilderness man. He was a Civil War general and a Republican lawyer from Indiana. He signed because Mir and his allies had spent the previous 5 years building enough public pressure that no eastern senator could vote against the bills without having to answer to the newspapers back home. Seoia covered the giant forest grove and the general Sherman, which was already known by then to be the largest tree on Earth by volume. Yoseite, which had been protected as a state grant since 1864 under Abraham Lincoln, became a full federal park. In 1892, Mure founded the Sierra Club to keep the protection from being rolled back. He did not save them all. The Converse Basin, where the Mark Twain tree fell, was logged almost to nothing. The bool tree, one of the largest giant sequoas still standing, is in that grove, and it survives only because the company foreman of the day, reportedly could not bring himself to cut it. Widely reported, but folkloruric in its retelling. The Calaveris Grove, where Dow's Discovery Tree had fallen, and the mother of the forest had been stripped, was bought and protected and is today a state park.

[00:17:14]I have read the descriptions of the stump of the discovery tree which is still there in the middle of North Calaveris Grove. The stump is hollowed out, weathered for more than a century and a half with a roof built over it to keep the rain off. People walk inside it. The floor of the stump is wide enough for a small gathering. And if you put your hand on the inner wall and count the rings, which is hard because they are tight at the heart and you have to take it on faith, you find that the tree was alive in the time of the Roman Empire.

[00:17:44]I want you to think about that for a moment. A tree growing in a quiet ravine in California while Augustus is in Rome.

[00:17:51]A tree still growing while the Vikings sailed to North America.

[00:17:56]A tree still growing in the time of the Magna Carta and the Reformation and the founding of the American colonies. A tree alive when George Washington was a child. And alive when Abraham Lincoln signed the law that protected its cousins in Yusede Valley. And then in 22 days, five men with augers in the year 1853 take it down so that visitors can dance on the stump. The men who cut these trees were not villains. They were paid by the day. They worked in cold rain and in summer fire weather. They built the railroads and the towns and the homes and the ships of the west with what they cut. Many of them died from the work. Their hands and their backs paid for the country that grew up around them. The records do not preserve the names of most of them. The few names that do survive are the bullwhackers and the foremans and the men whose photographs were taken on a stump. I am not telling you this story to make you angry. I am telling you because the country that came out of these decades was built by men who could not have known what they were spending. By the time John Mir got his ear in Washington, more than 90% of the original old growth coast redwood forest had already come down. 95% of original old growth eventually lost. Figure varies by what date is used as cutoff. We are walking every day on land that used to grow trees taller than our buildings. We sit in churches and houses and barns and rail stations whose timbers were cut from trees twice as old as the religion we practice in them. And in California, in the high country and along the fog coast, the survivors still stand. the General Sherman, the General Grant, the Bull, the Stag, the President. They are protected now by national parks and state parks and a few private land trusts. They will outlive everyone reading this. They will outlive the next several thousand years of human history if we do not interfere with them again.

[00:20:00]If this story stayed with you, subscribe to Westbound Archive. Every week I find another piece of what these men built and say their names out loud while I still can.