Blogfinger

By Kathy Arlt, Contributing Writer  @Blogfinger

Two summers ago I took a road trip across the US. (Not, however, on a bicycle.) One of the places I visited was Sequoia National Park in California. The attraction there, of course, are the magnificent Sequoias growing 6,000 feet above sea level on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Here is what I saw:

In 1877 the idea of a “road trip” wasn’t so much as a glimmer in anyone’s eye. Land travel was limited to horses or railroads, both of which could take a casual traveler only so far. The first transcontinental railroad line had been established only eight years earlier, in 1869, and a second route wouldn’t open until 1882. And travel to the West was dangerous. There were train and stage coach robbers along the route, and US troops and settlers were still battling with native Americans. (“Custer’s Last Stand” was just the year before, in 1876.) 1877 editions of the Asbury Park Journal regularly reported “Indian uprisings” in various western states and territories. On top of that, cross-country travel was expensive. A one-way ticket between New York and San Francisco would’ve cost more than $2,500 in today’s dollars.

So, since many people couldn’t—or wouldn’t—travel to see California’s magnificent trees, enterprising entrepreneurs brought the trees to them. On June 16, 1877, the Ocean Grove Record, carried this announcement.

Naming giant trees after generals and statesmen was common in the 1800s, and many stands of Sequoias and Redwoods in California carry the same name, so it’s hard to say exactly where the “Daniel Webster” came from. More than likely, though, given its dimensions, it was a coastal Redwood. (Sequoias tend to be shorter and wider.) Unfortunately I couldn’t find a photograph of the tree’s exhibition, but the sight might have resembled this illustration from The Wonders of the Yosemite Valley, and of California, by Samuel Kneeland (1872).