Get Started On The Story Of A Thousand-Year Pine Formulated By Enos A. Mills Offered As Leaflet

such a nice little story about a grand tree and its life observed by Mr.
Mills, what a unique book Irecommend,



Opening: The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I had always felt from childhood, but it was that great naturelover, John Muir, who

first showed me how and where to learn their language.
Few trees, however, ever held for me such an attraction as did a gigantic and venerable yellow pine which I discovered one autumn day several years ago while exploring the southern Rockies.
It grew within sight of the CliffDwellers Mesa Verde, which stands at the corner of four States, and as I came upon it one evening just as the sun was setting over that mysterious tableland, its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived and before the axeman came.
Many a time I returned to build my campfire by it and have a day or a night in its solitary and noble company.
I learned afterwards that it had been given the name “Old Pine,” and it certainly had an impressiveness quite compatible with the age and dignity which go with a thousand years of life.


When, one day, the sawmillman at Mancos wrote, “Come, we are about to log your old pine,” I started at once, regretting that a thing which seemed to me so human, as well as so noble, must be killed.


sitelink gutenberg. org/ebooks/ No one seems to know about Enos Mills anymore, which is regrettable, This is an awfully darned good book, His essay about the woodpecker is very enlighteningthey were vital for preserving the health of forests by killing bark beetles, an insect that wipes out forests en masse today.
Trees could recover from the wound made by a woodpecker, but not a beetle, The essay about the two men trapped in their cabin by the bear is an utterly hysterical read.


Available at the Internet Archive:
sitelink org/details/storyatho March,pm as soon as I calm down enough to say what I want to say in decent language.
This book made me SO mad!!

March, noon If you do not want to know what happens in this book, do not read this review because I cannot discuss it without giving away details that will ruin the suspense for a new reader.
So, even though there is no true plot to spoil, consider this a SPOILER ALERT.


Now then, I first discovered Mr, Mills when I read his book sitelinkThe Grizzly: Our Greatest Wild Animal, I had a few little issues with the book but overall it was interesting and I liked the author's writing style.
So I put him down on one of my infamous lists, with plans to read his other titles at Project Gutenberg in order of publication.


Next I learned that his birthday was in April, so I decided I would choose Mills as my Literary Birthday author for the month.
But this first book on my list seemed so short that I decided I would go ahead and read it in March and use the next in line for April.


Still with me Okay, Now, when I saw the title of this book, I could not keep myself from expecting a semiDisney type of story, maybe with the author telling about all the critters he watched while camping nearby, sharing details of the struggles the tree faced during rough weather.
You know, a naturalist observing how the tree functioned in nature,

The very first paragraph took an ominous turn while he was waxing poetic about the tree:
"its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived and before the axeman came.
"

The axeman! Oh, dear, That's not good. So what happened Well, it turns out that Mills got a letter from a lumber company saying they were "about to log your old pine".


And so the axeman cometh,

And I got mad, I very nearly quit reading then,

This is how Mills described the tree:
A grand and impressive tree he was.
Never have I seen so much individuality, so much character, in a tree, Although lightning had given him a bald crown, he was still a healthy giant, and was waving evergreen banners more than one hundred and fifteen feet above the earth.
His massive trunk, eight feet in diameter at the level of my breast, was covered with a thick, rough, goldenbrown bark which was broken into irregular plates.
Several of his arms were bent and broken, Altogether, he presented a timeworn but heroic appearance,

Think of the time that tree spent growing into such a figure, And then stupid Man comes along and all he sees is another thing to destroy, I understood why Mills wanted to be there, He wanted to read the rings of the tree, which of course you cannot do while the tree is alive.
And I know that in the early's there may not have been many true treehuggers around, but I wanted to smack the lumbermen upside the head and give Mills a few too for not trying to save this tree he was so impressed with from being murdered.


Because that is exactly what it was, Murder. They cut the tree down and
"The old pines enormous weight caused him to fall heavily, and he came to earth with tremendous force and struck on an elbow of one of his stocky arms.
The force of the fall not only broke the trunk in two, but badly shattered it.
The damage to the log was so general that the sawmillman said it would not pay to saw it into lumber and that it could rot on the spot.


I had to walk away for a day at this point, Call me overly sensitive, call me too emotional, call me whatever the heck you wish, but those sentences hit me like a twofisted punch in the gut.


After some breathing time, I found that Mills had been given permission to do whatever he wanted to do with the remains.
He had planned to read the autobiography of the tree by examining the growth rings when the tree was sliced up at the sawmill but with the way things turned out, he had to come up with a new plan.
He spent "day after day" cutting open the trunk and limbs, digging up the roots, basically doing an autopsy.
Or necropsy. Or whatever such a procedure is called when performed on a tree,

And then I got another gut punch:
"I carefully examined the base of his stump, and in it I found ten hundred and fortyseven rings of growth! He had lived through a thousand and fortyseven memorable years.
As he was cut down in, his birth probably occurred in, "

Just think about that for a minute, All those years, all that effort, all that LIFE wasted because some damned fools could only see lumber and not a living being.
How many of us will ever be able to see a tree like this again

The rest of the book interprets what Mills found in the rings.
Years of good growth, others of rough times, injuries perhaps from the weight of snow, three hundred years of tranquility, axe scars from men dating around, bullet scars from more idiotic men a few hundred years later.
Even damage from what Mills assumed must have been earthquake shock,

The tree stood tall and survived, maybe not as pretty as it once was, but strong and alive.
Until the axemen came. Why does Man have to be so destructive Why is it that the first thing Man thinks is tear it down, cut it up, destroy destroy destroy A man who cannot see that we are all connected, that Life is Life and should be respected whether it is in a person, a tree, or a bear, is nothing more than a blind fool.
And there are SO many such beasts around, aren't there,

Well, back to the book, Mills finished his postmortem, then did something that made me mad at him again, The lumbermen got the worst of my anger earlier but this time there was no one to share with.
Instead of leaving the remains to do whatever dead trees usually do in Nature, he piled all of it up into a giant pyramid, called the lumbermen to come set it on fire that evening, then hiked up to nearby Mesa Verde and sat there to watch it all burn.


So this majestic tree, after years of life, is killed for nothing.


It cannot even provide nourishment to the ground and the bugs in death, it has to suffer the embarrassment of being burned for the mere entertainment of a man who claimed to have respected and loved all trees, this particular one more than any others.


I'm still going to read Mills as my Literary Birthday author for April, but he is going to have to do some mighty fancy writing to get me over my disgust about what happened in this book.


The story begins "The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I had always felt from childhood, but it was that great naturelover, John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn the language.
"

Mills then proceeds to tell the tale of an old growth pine that had captured his heart.
'His' tree was located near Mesa Verde National Park,

photographs, several small sketches p: Trees, like people, struggle for existence, and an aged tree, like an aged person, has not only a striking appearance, but an interesting biography.


This little book is short and highly readable, It would probably keep the attention of someone who might otherwise not pick up a book about nature.
For example, "The year that Columbus discovered America, Old Pine was a handsome giant with a round head held more than one hundred feet above the earth.
He was six hundred and thirtysix years old, "

I suspect this tale is more than a biography of one tree, rather I think the basic story describes one tree but surely all of the events he described couldn't have happened to the same tree.
.