Yet more must be told. Much vandalism has been committed on the Sequoia by man. Early accounts are filled with these “botanical tragedies” which were perpetrated whenever the venture appeared profitable. For instance, in 1878, a butchered specimen of the Giant Sequoia was shipped from Tulare City to San Francisco for exhibition purposes and gain. It was the largest Sequoia the vandals could find in the forest. Fourteen feet above the ground they made the first cut and for twelve days nine men disturbed the age-old peace of the place with the ring of axes and the rasp of saws. Finally, the monarch that had defied the passions of the elements for centuries fell, conquered by the blade. Then the inside of the stump, which was 21 feet in diameter, was hewn out to within a dozen inches or so of the foot-thick bark and the hollow shell sawed into fifteen gigantic slabs. With indefatiguable energy, a road six miles in length was constructed to haul these out of the forest. Each slab made a load for eight horses, while two railroad cars were required to transport them all. The so-called “curiosity” was set up on Market Street as the largest tree yet discovered in California. Strangely enough, this act elicited hardly a whisper of indignation or a word of protest from Californians who seemed to regard the exhibit as a “real novelty.” The Calaveras Grove suffered grievously at the outset from such barbaric acts. Two of its most imposing trees were destroyed. One of the grandest trees in the Grove was bored down with pump-augers by five men in twenty-two days in order to make a dancing floor—butchered, in other words, to make an American holiday. Its great trunk, 302 feet in height and 96 feet in circumference, was hacked and chopped by the usual “pilgrims” desirous of securing specimens of their visit. The other, the “Mother of the Forest,” was stripped of its bark in 1854 to a height of 116 feet—veritably “skinned alive” so that its bark could be sent to the Crystal Palace in England, where the curious of Europe could see how large and fine California’s Big Trees really were. Naturally enough, this act brought death to the tree. “For years,” Hutchings remarks, “its majestic form perpetually taunted the belittled and sordid spirits that were the authors of her ruin. Yet the elements sympathized with her unmerited disgrace and attempted to hasten her dismemberment to cover the wrong.” In the early part of the present century a fire almost completed the work. Now but a great blackened trunk remains with two disfigured limbs bent upward like human arms as if to say, “Forgive them, for only in darkness does vandalism flourish.”