THE TREE - Trees and Men
Long before Maine became known as the Pine Tree State, before the men who accompanied De Soto complained of Florida as "cumbersome with woods and bogs," before Columbus and his intrepid crew from three little wooden ships knelt in reverent thankfulness on the shores of San Salvador Island in the Caribbean Sea, before Leif Ericson and his Norsemen set sail from the North Atlantic coast of an uncharted continent with a cargo of timbers for Greenland, there were, among the seemingly limitless forests of what is now known as North America, many of the same giant sequoias that now tower above their giant associates in isolated areas of the western slopes of the continent. Today, after more than three centuries of exploitation and development, few other trees are standing that may be said to "remember" any of those adventurous explorers. The sequoias could recall them all.
Were Columbus and his crew to return to see what has happened to the new land they discovered 457 years ago, they might find among perhaps a dozen varieties of trees some individuals that were standing when the discovery was reported to their royal patrons. These are the hardy, long-lived ones of more than a thousand tree species that inhabit this country.
Along the east coast a few of the original southern cypress or the bald-cypress still stand—but very few. Some of the biggest eastern hemlock could probably look that far back, as could also a few of the Carolina hemlock, in isolated coves of the Great Smoky Mountains. This is the tree that the late Charles Sprague Sargent described as America's most beautiful conifer. Among the broadleaved hardwoods they would find early companions only among the white oaks and post oaks, with possibly a rare old sassafras tree.
