NATURE'S GREAT MASTERPIECE

In 1879 a visitor to Big Trees Grove described one of the redwoods as having “a knot or excrescence exactly resembling the head of an elephant—ears, trunk, eyes, and everything.” In 1883 a visitor from Selma, Alabama recounted his visit to the region:

“We have just returned from a visit to the ‘Big Trees.’ We never realized so fully that we were in California, until we stood in their midst. There are many curiosities which will amply repay a visit across the dreary mountains and plains, but these wonderful, gigantic growths, with their tops reaching so far skyward, are worth them all.”

One of the many trees the Alabama visitor recounted was the Jumbo. To date this 1883 mention of the Jumbo Tree is the earliest in print. 

Soon more visitors began to single out this unique redwood. The portion of the tree which resembled the head of an elephant was a burl. A frequent feature of redwoods, burls are the hard, woody growth around dormant buds usually found at the base of some trees. Sometimes, as in the case of Jumbo, a burl forms higher up on the trunk.

Author's Personal Collection

The name Jumbo derived from another famous curiosity of the day. Jumbo was an African elephant which was captured as a calf in 1861 somewhere in French Sudan and transferred to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In 1865 he was taken to the London Zoological Gardens where he was christened Jumbo, a name that may have come from the Swahili word, jumbe, meaning chief. 

Despite being tremendously popular with the English public, Jumbo suffered at the London Zoo from a poor diet and infected teeth. In 1882 he was purchased for $10,000 by the American showman P. T. Barnum. In the United States Jumbo toured with Barnum's circus and became an instant sensation. Sadly, on September 15, 1885 Jumbo was killed by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada while exercising at a rail yard. His mounted skin and skeleton were subsequently placed on tour. In 1900 the skeleton was given to the American Museum of Natural History. Jumbo’s skin was donated to the Barnum collection at Tufts College (later Tufts University) in Massachusetts where it was destroyed in a fire in 1975.

Fall River Daily Herald, June 27, 1882

The Jumbo Tree was once one of the most mentioned redwoods at Big Trees Grove and was a popular subject of picture postcards of the era. 

Author's Personal Collection

Jumbo no longer appears as it once did to Victorian visitors. Sometime in the last hundred years portions of the elephant shaped burl broke off, causing it to no longer bring to mind the once famous pachyderm. Unfortunately, today the Jumbo Tree, which is located in the Fremont Group, goes unnoticed by most visitors. 

Sources: Dissecting “Jumbo” – A Picture Postcard History,” by Frank Perry, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, January 5, 2015; Camping Out in California, by Mrs. J.B. Rideout, 1889; "A Trip West - the Sights Seen in California by a Selmian," Selma Times [Selma, Alabama], August 31, 1883; “Jumbo: Origin of the Word and History of the Elephant,” by Sandra Lash Shoshani, Jeheskel Shoshani and Fred Dahlinger, Jr., Wayne State University, Department of Biological Sciences, DigitalCommons, Volu2, Issue 2, September 6, 1986.