This
supply is by no means exhausted, but to-day the heart of the lumber
interest is on the Pacific coast.
Around the great central valley which is drained by the Sacramento and
the San Joaquin rivers, six hundred and forty miles long, lie mountain
ranges on whose slopes are some of the noblest forests of the world. To
the north of the central valley the trees of the east and west join,
forming a heavily wooded belt quite across the state.
In the trade, the greatest demand is for lumber of the pine and fir
trees, and of these California has as many species as Europe and Asia
combined. She has, indeed, only a little less than one fifth of all the
lumber supply of the United States. Her most valuable tree for commerce
is the sugar pine. It attains a diameter of twelve feet or more and is
often two hundred feet high. But the most interesting trees of
California and of the world are the Sequoias, the oldest of all living
things. Very far back, in the time of which we have no written history,
in the moist days of gigantic vegetation and animals, the Sequoias
covered a large portion of the earth's surface; then came the great ice
overflow, and when that melted away, almost the only things living of
the days of giants were the Sequoias of middle and upper California, and
those on some two thousand acres over the Oregon line.
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