The first grove of Big Trees discovered by white men was the Calaveras Grove of Big Trees in California. This was in the spring of 1852, and the discoverer was A. T. Dowd. Soon the story of the Big Trees found its way into the newspapers, and no other plant ever attracted so much attention or gained such celebrity within so short a period. The species was named in honor of Sequoyah, or Sequoia, to give it the Latin spelling, a Cherokee Indian of mixed blood, who was also known as George Guess. He invented an alphabet and written language for his tribe. The Big Trees are the oldest living things in the world. It is impossible to appreciate their huge size from a mere description. They must be seen; and even then a sense of futility strikes the beholder. The Big Trees grow in groves, never forming groups by themselves, but always scattered among a much larger number of trees of other kinds. Says John Muir, the famous naturalist: “The whole tree for the first century or two, or until it is a hundred or one hundred and fifty feet high, is arrowhead in form, and, compared with the solemn rigidity of age, seems as sensitive to the wind as a squirrel’s tail. As it grows older, the lower branches are gradually dropped and the upper ones thinned out, until comparatively few are left. The immensely strong, stately shafts are free of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so. The large limbs reach out with equal boldness in every direction, showing no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so finely molded in outline, and so perfectly subordinate to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven or eight feet in diameter, and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general outline is approached. Except in picturesque old age, after being struck by lightning or broken by thousands of snow-storms, the regularity of forms is one of their most distinguishing characteristics. Another is the simple beauty of the trunk, and its great thickness as compared with its height and the width of the branches, which makes them look more like finely modeled and sculptured architectural columns than the stems of trees, while the great limbs look like rafters, supporting the magnificent dome-head. But though so consummately beautiful, the Big Tree always seems unfamiliar, with peculiar physiognomy, awfully solemn and earnest; yet with all its strangeness it impresses us as being more at home than any of its neighbors, holding the best right to the ground as the oldest, strongest inhabitant.”