KINGS OF THE FOREST

"Sunday we were led to the big trees, not, indeed, the very largest, but large enough to gratify my curiosity. In company of several gentlemen, besides Mr. Joseph Bloch and his family, we took a ride into the mountains, which in scenery and vegetation are like the Sierra Nevada. A winding road cut into the mountain above the [San Lorenzo] River, leads along a terrible precipice upward through a forest of tall, red trees, a species of cedars and thick undergrowth. The precipice of the narrow canyon, pierced by the river, becomes steeper as you ascend, so that you roll on the edge of a perpendicular wall, as it were, 500 to 800 feet high. The horses and the driver do not appear to mind it, for they go as fast as if they were on a level turnpike in Ohio. The narrow gauge railroad is now below and then above you. Where the canyon widens there are powder mills and saw mills, sometimes 500 to 600 feet perpendicularly below you."

Author's Personal Collection

"We have driven seven miles through the forest, the size of the trees always increasing. Now we leave the main road, cross the river and ascend a steep hill and we are among the big trees. I measured one and found the circumference of the base to be seventy-five feet. Their growth is similar to the hickory, tall, straight and without branches, to a height of perhaps fifty to seventy-five feet. Some of these large trees are nearly two hundred feet high. There is an abundance of them on this mountain. Several of them have been burned out at the base to serve as huts for human beings, and in one of them a shoemaker had a regular cabin with windows cut through the body of the tree. There is a regular picnic ground among these trees. Platforms are constructed for the usual purposes, and a family has made its home there, selling things for the accomodations of the sightseers, of whom quite a number have been there to-day. The grove, composed of these kings of the forest, gray with moss and surrounded by luxuriant shrubs and young trees, looks mighty, dark and mysterious. The awful silence is interrupted by swarms of blue birds only. Here is unrolled to your gaze nature in her strength and as majestic as on the first Sabbath when creation had just been finished."

"After six hours gazing we returned to Santa Cruz with impressions of the grand and awful which can hardly be described ... In the evening there was a meeting of all the Isrselites of this city in the St. Charles Hotel. There were twenty gentlemen and nineteen ladies there."

Source: “Editorial Correspondence,” by Isaace M. Wise, Editor and Proprietor, The American Israelite [Cincinnati, Ohio], August 17, 1877.