Abstract
The Sequoia Files: the tree of wonder: The cult of the Sierra Nevada giant sequoia, which lasted through the second half of the 19th century, reflected not only its significance as an emblem for American primitivist and nationalist discourse, but also the more popular taste for the marvelous in nature, widely associated with California after 1850. This paper reviews a series of descriptions of sequoias published between 1860 and 1890, in order to identify the main components of a highly consistent genre. Centering on the sequoia as a challenge to representation, this literature tends to describe the logic of exploration in purely rhetorical terms, and thus to translate the otherness of the frontier into a space of language play, which seems typical of the Victorian era.
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