National mythologies are based as much on features of landscape as on heroic individuals, ideals, and great events. Simon Schama here tells how the "discovery" of giant sequoias in the 1850s helped to confirm America's sense of manifest destiny "at a time when the Republic was suffering its most divisive crisis since the Revolution."
It was Augustus T. Dowd's big joke. On a spring morning in 1852 he had been after a wounded grizzly, meaning to finish the brute off and provide the men of the Union Water Company with fried bear for the rest of the week. That was his job. As he was tracking the animal through the woods of sugar pine and ponderosa, the flickering light gradually dimmed. Without any warning, Dowd abruptly came face to face with a monster. It was maybe 50 feet around and, as close as he could guess, nearly 300 feet high. It was a tree.
Of course, no one at Murphy's Camp would believe him. They were more likely to credit a giant bear than a giant tree, he supposed. And so he told them the next day that the biggest grizzly there ever was was lurking right there, deep in the woods. And when he took them right up to the strange thing, a cinnamon-brown tower etched with deep furrows up its whole length, cavities a man's arm could disappear into, not a branch below 50 feet and its crown invisible, he could point and jump about and crow and laugh: "Boys, do you now believe my big tree story? That's the grizzly I wanted you to see. Now do you believe my yarn?"