Life is not always a picking of flowers; often it is a plowing of meadows strewn with hidden rocks. The latter proved to be the lot of the Commissioners in connection with the Yosemite, for their progress was blocked by the hostility of settlers who refused to relinquish their claims. Litigation resulted and the Commissioners encountered only censure and antagonism in their attempts to make of the Yosemite a playground for the people. Happily, they were not so handicapped in their management of the Big Tree Grove, yet here, too, they had difficulties to contend with. Chiefly among these was the problem of human vandalism. Constant vigilance was necessary to guard against those who seemed to take an insatiable delight in destroying all within their reach. Truly, the besetting sin of all “pilgrims” the world over is their unquenchable lust for “specimens.” Like priests of the Capuchin Convent who “unfailingly show some memento of a saint—a bone of his body, a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood—before they extol his miracles,” the “pilgrims” who journey to Nature’s shrines must, at all hazard, carry away some bit of the shrine to awaken the wonder of the rustics at home. Or, if they are thwarted in this, it becomes imperative for them to inscribe their poor little names in some convenient place on the shrine so that all who run may read. What a pity some justly wrathful Sequoia cannot fall on some of these defamers and crush their “eyeballs into dust,” thereby intimidating them and their kind into forever desisting from such acts. The Commissioners were plagued with vandals of yet another sort—the camper and the sheep-herder; the one starting forest fires through negligence, the other purposely to insure better grass for his “hoofed locusts.” In 1889 the Grove was threatened with disaster. A fire, started because of a camper’s carelessness or through the deliberate design of sheep-herders, secured sovereign possession of the surrounding forest and in one place invaded the Grove itself. In a few days the entire annual appropriation was used in saving the Grove from the angry flames. When their fury was finally conquered, black scars that only time could obliterate remained. It was this memorable fire that consumed the Lone Giant, the largest decumbent monarch in the Grove.