John Muir, the famous Sierra Nevada naturalist, made at least eight separate trips into the region that is now within Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, but one of these stands out as far more significant that the others. This journey occurred in the late summer and fall of 1875.
By this time, Muir had been in California for seven years and had established himself in Yosemite as a newspaper correspondent, tour guide, and student of natural history. As the years passed, he had been putting increasing effort into this last department, focusing primarily on glacial geology and botany.
Muir’s botanical interests brought him eventually to the question of the status of the giant sequoias. By the middle 1870s, Muir knew well the three relatively small sequoia groves in the Yosemite area, and he had been exposed to the common interpretation of the time that the Big Trees were a failing race of giants, fading away and approaching extinction. Was this really true, he wondered?
Late in the summer of 1875, Muir set out to answer this question. He had heard stories of additional giant groves to the south of Yosemite, but no one seemed to know much about where they were or what sorts of trees they contained. These questions now became Muir’s.
Muir had already had a busy summer. During the month of July he had traveled south from Yosemite to visit the Kings Canyon, cross the Sierra via Kearsarge Pass, and climbed Mt. Whitney. By July 31st, he was back in Yosemite, but only for a few weeks. Before August ended, he headed south again, this time eschewing the High Sierra for a route that took him through the Sierra’s great forest belt. There he hoped to learn more about the sequoias.
Those who know the Sierra Nevada will marvel at what Muir accomplished over the next two months. During that time, traveling on foot and alone except for an unfortunate burro named Brownie, Muir explored the conifer forest belt of the Central and Southern Sierra. This entailed wandering through uncharted mazes of forests and canyons. Along the way he crossed the great canyons of the San Joaquin, Kings, and Kaweah rivers. All this, apparently, he did without reference to maps of even the most rudimentary sort.
Muir spent much of September exploring the San Joaquin watershed, where he found only two sequoias groves (today’s Nelder and McKinley groves); then he descended into the huge gorge of the Kings River and climbed out to the extensive sequoia groves along the south rim that defile.
Here, in what he called the Kings River Grove, Muir for the first time found extensive stands of giant sequoia full of trees of every age and growth habit. (Today these half dozen groves, which stretch northeastward from Grant Grove through Converse Basin and east into the Boulder Creek country, all have separate names.) Continuing south, Muir wandered through Redwood Canyon and modern Muir and Suwannee Groves before fetching up in the Giant Forest.
By now, Muir had realized that the sequoias prospered in the southern Sierra in a way entirely foreign to their growth habits further north. South of the Kings River, the Big Tree groves came so close together that they formed a nearly continuous sequoia belt.
Muir continued southward until he finally ran out of sequoias, correctly defining their southern boundary as in the Deer Creek watershed of the modern Giant Sequoia National Monument.
By mid-October he began publishing what he had learned. On October 22, 1875, the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin ran Muir’s article “Summering the Sierra, The Giant Forests of the Kaweah, Something about the Sequoia Gigantea of the South Fork of the Kings River.” This apparently represents the first use of the name “Giant Forest” in print, although in this context it does not seem apply to a single grove.
(Muir reworked the notes he collected during his 1875 trip several times for publication in various forms. By 1901, when he finished Our National Parks, Muir’s references to “The Giant Forests of the Kaweah” had evolved into the statement that he found the best of all the sequoia groves on the divide between the Marble and Middle Forks of the Kaweah River and then named that grove “The Giant Forest.”)
Over the following year, Muir summed up his thoughts about the Big Trees and prepared a scientific paper. “On the Post-Glacial History of Sequoia Gigantea” appeared in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in May 1877. The paper made a key point: in the southern Sierra, the sequoias were anything but a dying race. Here, Muir discovered, they grew in vigorous stands over large acreages.
Muir’s 1875 trip changed forever both the popular and scientific views of the giant sequoias. Given protection from lumbermen, domestic sheep, and fire, Muir asserted, the sequoias had a future. He also made clear that the ultimate groves of the giant trees were in the Kaweah and Tule river watersheds.
Within fifteen years, much of this area would become the nation’s second national park.
More than any other event, it was John Muir’s 1875 trip that brought the sequoia groves of the southern Sierra to public attention and made possible their ultimate preservation.
© Wm. Tweed