Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove, Carleton Emmons Watkins

Exhibition Label: "Trees & Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature & Culture," Mar-2009, Steve Goddard Watkins left his native New York for California around 1850, in the midst of the Gold Rush. In San Francisco he began to master the photographic arts, ultimately becoming a critical figure in the emerging arena of California landscape photography. In 1869, the head of the California Geological Survey, Josiah D. Whitney, published many photographic illustrations by Watkins in The Yosemite Book, including a variant of the photograph exhibited here. Whitney describes this tree, a famous Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in The Yosemite Book: “The largest tree in the Lower Grove is the one known as the ‘Grizzly Giant,’ of which two photographs are here given, (Nos. 23 and 24), one showing the whole tree, the other the base, with Mr. Galen Clark, the Guardian of the Valley and Grove, standing, with his six feet two inches of well proportioned height, as a scale from which to estimate its dimensions.” Galen Clark and Carleton Watkins played an important role in the early years of the Environmental Movement. Clark was the fist Anglo-European to “discover” the Mariposa Grove and he was instrumental in the passage of the 1864 Yosemite Grant, the first grant to protect a wilderness area for public use. Watkins’ photographs also played an essential role by bringing the beauty of Yosemite Valley and its trees to the public’s attention.