The Sunset Land Author:John Todd Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BIG TREES AND YO-SEMITE VALLEY. There is a natural tendency to disbelieve the traveller who comes back and reports things which he has see... more »n, that are very unlike our own experience. We think he must have been in a kind of mental fog, in which everything looked large; or he must have been credulous and easily imposed upon; or that he comes home wishing to be a hero, and is therefore tempted to exaggerate. It is also an acknowledgment of our own ignorance and want of enlargement, to own that another has seen what we never saw, and can tell us of things which we cannot deny, but which we can doubt. I am about to speak of things, which, ac- BIG TREES. 77 cording to what we have seen and known, cannot be true ; and all we can do, in such cases, is to shake the head gravely, look wise, and feel that we know it all. Now, I shall not, probably, state a fact which has not been stated before, and which will not be tested hereafter by many of my readers; and yet I shall not be surprised if what I say shall be doubted. But we have no time for moralizing. Who has not heard of "the Big Trees" of California? In 1830 we heard of trees in that land whose height was nearly three hundred feet. The.se, however, were the common sugar pines of the region; they were not the big trees since discovered, and which no visitor of California should fail to see. Though the name of "I. M. Wooster, 1850," is carved on one of these trees, it was not till 1852 that a hunter, by the name of Dowd, having wounded a bear, which he followed till he came to a group of these huge trees, made them known. Forgetting his bear, he gazed in astonishment, and finally returned to the camp, where men were constructing water-works. His tale was received with shouts of laughter and derision. A few d...« less