The Valley of the Giants

The Valley of the Giants

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Title: The Valley of the Giants
Author: Peter B. Kyne
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5735] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 18, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS
BY
PETER B. KYNE
AUTHOR OF CAPPY RICKS, THE LONG CHANCE, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY DEAN CORNWELL

TO MY WIFE

THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

CHAPTER I
In the summer of 1850 a topsail schooner slipped into the cove under
Trinidad Head and dropped anchor at the edge of the kelp-fields.
Fifteen minutes later her small-boat deposited on the beach a man
armed with long squirrel-rifle and an axe, and carrying food and
clothing in a brown canvas pack. From the beach he watched the boat
return and saw the schooner weigh anchor and stand out to sea before
the northwest trades. When she had disappeared from his ken, he
swung his pack to his broad and powerful back and strode resolutely
into the timber at the mouth of a little river.
The man was John Cardigan; in that lonely, hostile land he was the first
pioneer. This is the tale of Cardigan and Cardigan's son, for in his
chosen land the pioneer leader in the gigantic task of hewing a path for
civilization was to know the bliss of woman's love and of parenthood,
and the sorrow that comes of the loss of a perfect mate; he was to know
the tremendous joy of accomplishment and worldly success after

infinite labour; and in the sunset of life he was to know the dull despair
of failure and ruin. Because of these things there is a tale to be told, the
tale of Cardigan's son, who, when his sire fell in the fray, took up the
fight to save his heritage--a tale of life with its love and hate, its battle,
victory, defeat, labour, joy, and sorrow, a tale of that unconquerable
spirit of youth which spurred Bryce Cardigan to lead a forlorn hope for
the sake not of wealth but of an ideal. Hark, then, to this tale of
Cardigan's redwoods:
Along the coast of California, through the secret valleys and over the
tumbled foothills of the Coast Range, extends a belt of timber of an
average width of thirty miles. In approaching it from the Oregon line
the first tree looms suddenly against the horizon--an outpost, as it were,
of the host of giants whose column stretches south nearly four hundred
miles to where the last of the rear-guard maintains eternal sentry go on
the crest of the mountains overlooking Monterey Bay. Far in the
interior of the State, beyond the fertile San Joaquin Valley, the allies of
this vast army hold a small sector on the west slope of the Sierras.
These are the redwood forests of California, the only trees of their kind
in the world and indigenous only to these two areas within the State.
The coast timber is known botanically as sequoia sempervirens, that in
the interior as sequoia gigantea. As the name indicates, the latter is the
larger species of the two, although the fibre of the timber is coarser and
the wood softer and consequently less valuable commercially than the
sequoia sempervirens--which in Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, and
Sonoma counties has been almost wholly logged off, because of its
accessibility. In northern Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte
counties, however, sixty years of logging seems scarcely to have left a
scar upon this vast body of timber. Notwithstanding sixty years of
attrition, there remain in this section of the redwood belt thousands
upon thousands of acres