A True Story of the Beauty of the Redwood Forests

In 1868 gold was discovered in an old sawmill in northern California. In response to this find, thousands of easterners ran to populate a state they detested just months before. Yet, at this same time, another type of gold was found, and the people that were already in California mined it. This was Red Gold. Red gold wasn't a rare mineral found in the deep recesses of the earth, it was a living entity of Mother Nature: the Sequoia tree.

In Northern California the Sequoias tree or red wood as they are called, trees grow to phenomenal heights. Some of these trees are so old and large that a good portion of them towers above the inflated white clouds. When these clouds congeal they form a complete cover, and the Native Americans believed that when this happens, certain nature gods gathered for conferences and revelry on the top of these clouds, A tree as big as this, sometimes reaching heights of ten stories high, could have easily built an old miner's house, and there would still be enough wood to build all his furniture. One tree could bring the men who cut the trees down, cutters, more money than most of the gold miners were making in a whole year. Even though these gold miners could barely afford it, they knew the strength of the wood and knew they needed a place to live, so they gladly paid for it. Even though the wood was so hard it would bend their homemade nails they tried to hammer into it. This was the Red Gold.

Camps that held the men who harvested these giants soon popped up all over the northern California Coast Range of Mountains and the redwood forests. These camps peppered the northern California forests. There were no roads to get to these trees, only trails made by the men who frequented the forests. At first these men were trappers and lumberjacks who knew how to wield an ax, and had enough determination to hew their way across an expanse as big as their house in order to drop a beast of a tree. The average width of one of these immense trees is so great that if a six-foot man stood at the base of one that had fallen over, there would still be 6-7 feet of tree above his head. The average circumference of a redwood tree is about 41 feet around. It makes one curious how a mortal man would have the strength, power, or endurance to chop through a tree of such width. The money that these cutters made fueled their determination and the sweat that continually poured from their pores. As more and more people realized the monetary potential, many came into the forest of giants and gathered themselves into groups and camps.

One of these camps sits right off the Klamath River at the top of a 3500 ft Coast Range Mountain. The kings of the area, the mighty redwood, whom they had come to cut down, dwarfed the men of this camp. Now Highway 1 runs 300 feet from this camp, and a little, yellow, three by four rectangular sign which informs the busy drivers that they are "¾ of a mile from "the Redwood Trail." What "the Redwood Trail" signifies is as unclear to me now as it was when I first saw it at age 7. Exactly one mile past the old sign is a turn off that leads to an old overgrown dirt road. At the end of this road is a redwood-chipped clearing which serf ices as a parking lot and is slowly being taken back by nature. At the end of the parking lot a small, crooked white sign says "Redwood Trail," scrawled in black paint, without a stencil. .

When the camp was first established in the California Mountains, the nearest town was Klamath, at 45 miles away and 2000 feet down the mountain. The men that inhabited these camps were from all races and all cultures. The one thing that each man had in common was that they didn't fit into society or the changing world. There was the cowboy without a horse to ride or cow town to plunder, the trapper who lost his traps as well as his furs, the sick who flocked to the west and only wished death. Lumber jacks also escaped to these large camps looking for better prospects. The lumberjacks weren't as numerous as one might expect. The lumber jacks usually arrived, worked real hard for their money, then left and settled down to an easy familial life elsewhere. Although the money was a major draw, these men escaped to this camp nestled miles away from society's claws for more reasons than just the money that was available. They went there to have a freedom that couldn't be expressed to others, a freedom, which could only be achieved in a lawless society. At the end of the three-hundred-foot trail that was made by the California Parks and Recreation department many years ago, sits a run down shack which looks more like a run down prison than a housing for more than 50 men. When the camp was in full working order, the inside was whitewashed and held 50 beds. Now, the inside is paved with memories, strained faces looking out of pictures, and rusted machinery which has become museum pieces

A dilapidated box hangs by one bent nail begging for money to stop Mother Nature from taking this place back from the men who bore into her womb and tore out her children. The trail continues from the back of the house, winding and leading the follower along the logging industry that began with those leathery faces that plastered the walls of the neglected shack. Neither rhyme nor reason guides the trail, only small black signs written and embossed by the Audubon Society, making some sort of sense of where you are and why. What this particular machine is, what flower this is, what plant this is: these little plaques make sure to give us the Latin names for each plant as well as the common one. Interestingly, the plant never seems to want you to look at this sign, they always seems to cover it up to the point that many of the signs look green with white embossed letters that don't spell any definable word. The trail leads deeper into the forest pointing out some miscellaneous facts.

This trail was never walked by any of the men whose pictures grace the walls of the fallen shack. The California Parks department in cooperation with the Audubon society placed these trails here. This trail is merely here to pull the tourists around by their noses like animals. The mindless wandering of the trail as well as the complete lack of purpose points out the lack of care that was put into it. The directors of this project felt very little for the blood and sweat of the men and their life, which can be seen through the mindless wandering. By this trail's meaningless, the life of the men who worked and sweated in this camp, is diminished to a couple of bad overgrown plaques.

These men worked long hard hours, and when they weren't working they drank. Sometimes the drinking got out of hand and fighting occurred. In these fights the men would brutally hurt one another. Usually these men had no doctors and had to rely on what medical knowledge fellow woodcutters knew, which was probably very little. Many deaths occurred in the camps because of fighting related injuries than all other injuries combined. Once a man was hurt, he wasn't allowed to just take it easy. Every man worked a full day, sick or not. Therefore little injuries such as a cut arm could be a cutters' death warrant. The cold, damp climate was a haven for infection. Once an infection erupted, gangrene was not far behind, ending in unsanitized amputation and death. When these men died there was no funeral or ceremony, only a hole. This is how these men lived and died.

At the end of the wandering, meandering trail is a beautiful field that beckons a picnic. This spot is the obvious picnic spot of the "Redwood Trail," even without the little two by two brown picnic bench sign that signifies you're allowed to eat your lunch here on the nonexistent picnic tables. The majestic redwoods ring the field. The only plants in this acre of land are bright yellow daises. Every time I've seen this field the daisies are always in bloom. On a Discovery Channel program, I saw this field covered in a light snow and those little daisy heads still peeked above the cold frozen ground. This beautiful field looks as if God himself came down and touched the field and made it gold. Here the Red Gold has been transformed into petals of gold that rustle and sway with the music that Mother Nature pipes on her flute for only the yellow daises to hear. When the wind whips the little heads back and forth, the waves of joy pass through all that see it and back.

While leaving the wondrous, God touched field, the parents make sure to shy

their children away from a little black and white embossed sign that the children have already read:

"Cemetery. Sometimes these lawless men got out of hand, and there were bad consequences. Here you stand at their cemetery."

These rough, leathery men buried many of the people they worked next to. In this field, 100 feet from the shack and out of sight of the daily activities, was where they chose to bury them. A photograph plastered in the shack shows rows and rows of red wood planks with hand scrawled charcoal names. The caption under the photo says "Yellow Daises Field." A planter unknown to us, the people who live in the time when the haven for the lawless is but a few hundred feet from a busy highway, planted a simple flower which is native to the lowlands of California over the graves of these men. Who this planter is can be only speculated. But maybe the Indian gods, who reside on top of those clouds that hide the tops of the great Sequoias, came down off their lofty seats and brought forth the true feeling of happiness into a field of death. Then, to make sure that this happiness was perpetuated, the Indian Gods asked the wise old redwoods if they would please look after the dead and not interfere.