California Redwood Archive

Our knowledge of California�s redwoods did not begin with photos, travel brochures, or nineteenth century illustrations, but rather with actual pieces of the tree and newspaper accounts. Introduced to the public in 1853, bark exhibitions--or large pieces of redwood stripped from a tree and reconstituted in a shell--were the first visual media to prove newspaper accounts and were often accompanied by cross-section cuts of redwood.

Produced from both types of redwood tree, the Sequoia dendron and Sequoia sempervirens, bark exhibits brought the trees onto a national stage, fascinating audiences from San Francisco, to New York, London and Paris.

Their history begins in 1851, in the Gold Rush town of Murphys, California, where hunter August Dowd worked as a food supplier for the Union Water Company. He spent most of the day on and off his horse, creeping through underbrush, and waiting patiently for prey. On one May morning in 1852 (as the story goes), a bear entered the scope of his gun. He shot it, followed the meandering path of the wounded bear through the valley, and discovered a grove of trees bigger than any he had ever seen before. When Dowd returned to camp and tried to explain to his co-workers what he had seen, they only laughed at him. It was "too big a story" to believe.

Read more about the history of the Discovery Tree and first exhibitions

Like the popular panorama, diorama, rolling canvas, and giant landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, redwood exhibits satisfied a public that was hungry for spectacular experiences. As Rebecca Solnit describes in her work River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. the technology of the mid nineteenth created �a world that was experienced more and more as information and images�as though they sacrificed the near to gain the far.� In the case of redwood exhibits not only was the landscape being experienced as information and images, but the near�the existence of the physical landscape�was sacrificed as trees were stripped and traveled. Despite the difficulty of producing and exporting bark from remote forest locations, along with the challenges of creating an atmosphere of legitimacy around redwood tree exhibits, the activity remained popular. By the turn of the 20th century ten more trees were cut down for exhibition purposes.

Nearly every exhibition claimed to represent the �Largest Tree In The World.� Their vast interiors were used for dances, piano recitals, and school visits. By entering in the hollow shell of a redwood tree viewers could travel to the forest of origin, as well as an adventure into an imagined history within the rings of the cross-section that often made up the floor of the space. Many exhibitions advertised these experiences through descriptions such as this one: "A careful examination of its concentric rings has led to the belief that it is at least 3,000 years old; and it has been facetiously said, that it was probably a sapling before the first stone of the Pyramids was laid, and was contemporary with Moses and the Prophets.� In this example, viewing a tree exhibition is considered to be more than an entertaining moment of virtual reality but also a spiritual communion. In addition to the entertainment value and spiritual associations, the circulation of bark exhibitions across the country were like �units� of information, civilizing the �uncivilized� with high definition visuals of the western landscape.

Framing an exhibition was not always achieved through comforting comparisons with churches, monuments or transformations into dancehalls. They were also presented within the context of western territorial expansion. In the amusements section of the November 10, 1871 issue of the New York Times, P.T. Barnum�s advertisement of his Great Museum includes a redwood exhibition as part of a show with �thousands of other living and representative curiosities, Giants, Dwarfs, Living Skeletons�and the What Is it.� As part of the realities of wilderness, the exhibition excites yet quells the frightening �by-products� of expansion living within the psyche of a nineteenth century audience.

Bark exhibits forced the viewer to reckon not only with the unimaginable physical dimensions of the tree it represented, but also the life changing technology that was rapidly shifting the pace of goods and experiences in the market. People, objects, images and germs were circulating the globe, and as the world seemed smaller, the questions these changes brought became larger.

In an attempt to address the overwhelming influx of information brought on by technological advancements, the practice of visually classifying organisms in museum collections became a popular way of managing natural phenomena like redwood trees. This practice was introduced in America during the late 1700s by Wilson Peale, founder of the first significant American Natural History Museum. In his book Nature and the American, Hans Huth writes of Peale�s collection, �The stimulus given by the museum to the movement to acquaint the public with nature in general and the scenery and natural history of this continent specifically was extraordinary, especially in a day when visual education was scarcely known.�

In Peale�s collection one could see mastodon bones and stuffed buffalo, individual displays, which, when brought together narrativize not only the peculiarity of individual species but also sequencial experience for the comprehension of all species. On the one hand, the viewer is presented information with and educational efficenciey--the objective of the western museum-- but on the other hand the process by which each individual display appears is masked. This is another way of saying the "near" has been sacraficed for the "far", or the tree for it's bark. Asignboard at the entrance of Peale�s museum read, with �the book of Nature open, explore the wondrous world, an institute of laws eternal.�

After the first bark exhibits, they entered into a Natural Museum context. In 1857, �The Mother Of The Forest� a 100-foot-high redwood tree simulation was displayed for the opening of the Sydenham Crystal Palace, where it stood accompanied by daguerreotypes, photographs and living specimens. Of the dozen redwood bark exhibitions produced during the nineteenth century, the only one known to still exist is in the Niagara Falls Museum collection on display in Toronto. Read about the Niagara Falls Museum

Museum displays, newspapers, and broadside advertisements formed the contextual underpinnings that authenticated redwood bark exhibits, however, the resource value of the tree-expressed in accompanying texts- also made for convincing details.

In this excerpt from the first exhibit advertisement by Hanford, a description of the number of houses the tree could have provided lumber for reads, �This wonderful Tree was entirely sound, and was capable of making the enormous sum of 600,000 feet of lumber. This would have constructed 240 houses, each 16 feet wide by 20 feet in depth and suitable height!!!�

More than any other value derived from seeing the tree (its beauty, its exoticism, its relgiosity), the number of houses contained within the imagined tree translated best into the context of urban populations. As a result, the bark and cross-section exhibitions signified massive economic values in California redwood as a resource.

As the 20th century neared Redwood-as-lumber exhibits gained popularity at national expositions including: the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, the American Exposition in New Orleans from 1885-87, the World�s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1903.

In these contexts the redwood exhibits were purely for entertaining or presenting scientific narratives about a mythical landscape, but rather the exhibits were regional trophies used to boast economic value of California various forest land.

By the turn of the century the popularity of bark exhibitions had fallen out of favor. This was partly because of their destructive process, but also because the knowledge of California�s redwoods had become matter of fact and available to camera lens. Late bark exhibitions were criticized. At the Chicago Exposition in 1893 one writer wrote, �it obscures other displays, keeps the light from them, and while to a certain extent it is indicative of California�s great horticultural possibilities, it is an eyesore and a nuisance.�

Between the first exhibition trees by Hanford and Barnum, and the last national exposition trees, a variety of cultural roles were ascribed to redwood exhibitions. Initially they were intended to view nature remotely, the exhibitions were meant to simulate the experience of viewing the base of a tree in nature. As the rings of redwoods were counted, viewing the tree-pieces became a way of understanding history. As exhibitions were included in national expositions they became a way of representing a resource, a state, and a nation. And as part of natural history museums they became a way of quantifying the natural world. Each of these uses isolated, captured, and abstracted the natural landscape to serve cultural roles� an instinct and a perception of our cultural relationship with redwood landscapes described in 1841 by Thomas Cole when he wrote, �Simple nature, is not quite sufficient. We want human interest, incident and action to render the effect of landscape complete." Bark exhibitions satisfied the cultural desire for incident and action in the landscape, they were creative projects that fascinated audiences in 1853 and continue to do so today in London�s Natural History Museum. However in exchange for the image-value gained by stripping a tree or cutting it down the landscape itself vanished.

NOTES:
(details/ formatting forthcoming fyi)

Hutchings, J.M. In The Heart of the Sierras. 1888
Hutchings, J.M. In The Heart of the Sierras. 1888
Kruska, Dennis G. Sierra Nevada Big Trees: History of the Exhibitions 1850-1903. Dawson�s Book Shop, Los Angeles California. 1985
This book is the only book written specifically about the history of redwood tree exhibitions. It sorts through folklore to divulge the most accurate accounts of the subject. It is 60 pages long and only 500 were produced. Beginning with the discovery of the first giant sequoia, Kruska presents the details of numerous exhibits including their publications and broadsides advertising them.

In this broadside advertisement for the Crystal Palace exhibit of 1857, an idea of what the �Discovery Tree� scaffolding looked like can be inferred.
Coast Redwood, A Natural and Cultural History. Edited by John Evarts and Marjorie Popper. Cachuma Press 2001. pg 93 Broadside Announcing Hanford�s Big Tree Exhibit on Broadway, 1854. New York Historical Society. New York daily Tribune article from July 6th 1855 Hanford must have known about Barnum�s exhibit because it was mentioned as being on route to New York in the same issue of the San Francisco Sun that advertised Hanford�s exhibit. Kruska�s book fails to mention this.

Kruska, Dennis G. Sierra Nevada Big Trees: History of the Exhibitions 1850-1903. Dawson�s Book Shop, Los Angeles California. 1985
New York Times, April 9th, 1856
Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London. Charles C. Sellers, Charles Wilson Peale, II, 229
The exhibition in the Niagara Falls museum is seventy-seven feet in circumference and thirteen feet tall. The tree from which the shell was made was cut near the Eel River in Humboldt County, in California on February 14, 1893. It was the highlight of the Forestry Building at the Pan American Exposition, in 1901, in Buffalo. Out of the dozen redwood bark exhibitions produced during the 19th and 20th century, this is the only one known to still exist.
This image shows the Niagara Museum exhibition in its current location on Wellington Street in Downtown Toronto.
http://www.niagaramuseum.com/redwood_exhibit.htm

New York Times, May 13, 1893
Cole, �Essay on American Scenery,� p.109