The Holbrook news., 1910-08-05
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A TREE.

A venerable yellow pine had been cut down, says Enos A Mills, in "Wild Life on the Rockies" It came to the earth with tremendous force. and struck so hard that it shattered the trunk thoroughly. The sawmill man
 said it would not pay to saw it into lumber, and that it could rot on the spot. Receiving permission to do as he pleased with the remains, MT. Mills at once began to cut and split both the trunk and the limbs, and to transcribe their strange records. Day after day he worked. He dug the roots and dis sected them. and with the aid of a magnifier studied the life of the old tree.
 I found in the base of the stump ten hundred and forty-seven rings of growth. As the tree was cut down in 1903. its birth probably occurred in the year S56.
 Some of the rings were thicker than the others; in places, also. two or three of them were together This was the result of unfavora5le wcather-of drought or cold. Burns, bites, bruises. torn bark and broken arms all showed, and from them I was able to make out the old trees history.
 For nearly three centuries little had happened to it but the ordinary acci- dents from the crowding and pushing. and even the falling of other trees. In the summer of 1901, as I made it out, a stroke of lightning tore a limb out of it's round top and shattered shoul- der. During 1348 it lost two of its largest arms. Perhaps the accumula- tions of heavy snow did this.
 In the lower section of Old Pines trunk I was saving off portion, when the tool, with buzz-z-z! suddenly jumped. and cutting away the wood carefully, I discovered a flint arrow head, and then another. The outer ring which these arrows had pierced was the six hundred and thirtieth, so that the year must have been 1486.
 The year that Columbus discovered America Old Pine was a handsome giant, with a round head held more than a hundred feet above the earth. The year 1540 was q memorable one, for during that year camping-party built a fire against the instep of the tree, and some one hacked it with an axe.
 In 1762 the season was not regular. After the ring was well started. some thing, perhaps a cold wave, for time checked its growth, and so the wood for that year resembled two years growth; but the difference between this double or false ring and a reg ular one was easily detected.
 I discovered what seemed to be in dications of earthquake shocks from time to time. In the year 1911, or early in 1872, the tree must have ex- perienced a violent one. for the wood was checked and shattered, and at one point, some distance from the ground, was a bad break. That quarter of the tree which faced the cliff had suf- fered a rock bombardment. One of the stones of about five pounds weight, had remained embedded in the side of the tree.
 In the year 1859 some one made an axe-mark on the old pine that may have been intended for a traiI-blaze ] and in the same year another fire had l badly burned and scared its ank' wonder if some prosDectors came | this way in 1859 and made camp by the tree.
 While I was working over the old | pine a Douglas squirrel which lived | near by used to stop every day in it's | busy harvesting of pine-cones to look on and scold me. As I watched him placing his cones in a hole in the ground under the pine-needles, won- dered if one of his buried cones would remain there uneaten, to germinate and expand ever green into the air. and become a noble giant to live as long and as useful life as Old Pine. I found myself trying to picture the scenes in which this tree would stand when the birds came singing back from the southland in the spring-time of the year 5000