of the dogwoods line the banks of little streams, when the azaleas
and rhododendrons, lovely and delicate as orchids, blaze a bed of
glory, and the modest little oxalis has thrust itself up through the
brown carpet of pine-needles and redwood-twigs, these wonderful
forests cast upon one a potent spell. To have seen them once thus in
gala dress is to yearn thereafter to see them again and still again
and grieve always in the knowledge of their inevitable death at the
hands of the woodsman.

John Cardigan settled in Humboldt County, where the sequoia
sempervirens attains the pinnacle of its glory, and with the lust for
conquest hot in his blood, he filed upon a quarter-section of the
timber almost on the shore of Humboldt Bay--land upon which a city
subsequently was to be built. With his double-bitted axe and crosscut
saw John Cardigan brought the first of the redwood giants crashing to
the earth above which it had towered for twenty centuries, and in the
form of split posts, railroad ties, pickets, and shakes, the fallen
giant was hauled to tidewater in ox-drawn wagons and shipped to San
Francisco in the little two-masted coasting schooners of the period.
Here, by the abominable magic of barter and trade, the dismembered
tree was transmuted into dollars and cents and returned to Humboldt
County to assist John Cardigan in his task of hewing an empire out of
a wilderness.

At a period in the history of California when the treasures of the
centuries were to be had for the asking or the taking, John Cardigan
chose that which others elected to cast away. For him the fertile
wheat and fruit-lands of California's smiling valleys, the dull
placer gold in her foot-hill streams, and the free grass, knee deep,
on her cattle and sheep-ranges held no lure; for he had been first