Buffalo Soldiers were the first rangers of Sequoia National Park
Before the National Park Service existed, the job of guarding Sequoia's giant trees fell to Black cavalry and infantry troops, the Buffalo Soldiers. Their commander, Captain Charles Young, only the third African American to graduate from West Point, was barred from leading combat units, so he built roads, hosted politicians and fought vandalism instead.
President Benjamin Harrison signed the park into existence on September 25, 1890, making it the second national park in the United States and halting logging among its giants. It now covers 404,064 acres of the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, with almost 13,000 feet of vertical relief topped by Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet, the highest summit in the lower 48 states. Its star is the General Sherman Tree in the Giant Forest, the largest tree on Earth by volume.
The land was home to Native peoples long before. Evidence of settlement goes back to about AD 1000, and the Western Mono, some 2,000 strong, lived mainly along the Kaweah River, leaving pictographs at Hospital Rock and bedrock mortars for grinding acorns. The first white homesteader, Hale Tharp, arrived in 1858 and lived inside a hollowed fallen sequoia, where John Muir sometimes stayed. Within a few years epidemics of smallpox, measles and scarlet fever had killed most of the local Native population, and the survivors were forced out of Hospital Rock by 1865.
Logging nearly won. In the 1880s the utopian Kaweah Colony hoped to make its fortune from sequoia timber, and thousands of trees fell before anyone realised the wood splinters too easily to be worth much. Under Young, the soldiers named trees after notable figures, among them Booker T. Washington, to encourage their protection, and he pressed the Interior Secretary to enforce laws against logging and carving names into bark.
Fire is the modern threat. In the Castle and KNP Complex wildfires of 2020 and 2021, researchers estimated about 7,974 of 26,403 mapped sequoias died. Trees in stands given prescribed burns within the previous decade had their odds of dying cut by 77 percent, and those burns probably saved at least 1,888 trees. Today 84 percent of Sequoia and neighbouring Kings Canyon is wilderness reachable only on foot or horseback.
Source: Sequoia National Park
