Seeing America First, with the Berry Brothers — John Shaqi
Seeing America First, with the Berry BrothersColby, Eleanor
History
Seeing America First, with the Berry Brothers
Colby, Eleanor
Canada -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature; United States -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature
The cascades of the Yosemite Park are among the finest on earth.
The Bridal Veil is like a shower of lace or mist and is called "the
birthplace of the rainbow," because there are so many rainbows playing
in the spray. One of the cascades is called by the queer Indian name
of Lung-oo-too-koo-ya. The Yosemite Falls would make Niagara seem like
a dwarf so far as height is concerned, though a much larger volume of
water flows over the rocks at Niagara than at Yosemite Falls.
[Illustration:
General Sherman 280 feet high
Logs on Flat Cars
The Grizzly Giant Mariposa Grove
SEQUOIA PARK-CALIFORNIA
In The Giant Forest]
Today we Berry Wagon Boys have seen the oldest living thing. It began
to grow at least 2000 years before Christ was born, and will probably
be living thousands of years from now. If it could talk, it could tell
wonderful stories of things it saw when the world was young, but it can
only stand and wave its arms gently when the wind blows, for it is just
a tree. It stands with many other giant cedar trees in Sequoia Park,
California, and until a hunter discovered it in 1879, probably no white
man had ever seen it. This hunter named the tree "General Sherman,"
and it surely looks like the commanding officer of this huge tree
regiment. It is a sequoia tree 279 feet high and so large that twenty
men standing with outstretched arms can just reach around it.
The Grizzly Giant, the biggest sequoia in Yosemite Park, is much more
shaggy-looking and battered than the general, and its heart has been
eaten out by fire, but it is a brave old giant and keeps right on
living in spite of that painful accident.
The sequoias are named after Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian who invented
an alphabet and a written language for his tribe. These trees will
surely "keep his name green" long after any other monument would have
turned to dust. The sequoias are sometimes called "the Methuselahs of
the forest," but that old Bible character only lived to be 969 years
old, and these giant trees are mere babies at that age.
We boys think the sequoia forest the most solemn place we were ever in.
The trees tower up so high above you and make you feel so sort of small
and new and useless! Then there is scarcely a sound, and you cannot
hear your own footsteps on the soft carpet of pine needles.
It seems dreadful to cut down trees which have been growing so long,
yet occasionally one is made into lumber. After standing for a thousand
years or more in the forest, it must seem strange to be cut into
sections, loaded on flat cars, and started on a journey to some distant
place to be made into ship masts or furniture or some other thing of
which the tree never dreamed when it stood in its home on the slope of
the Sierras.
[Illustration:
Hopi Point
Side Walls of THE GRAND CANYON
The Cambrian Plateau—_North from Grand View Point_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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