Where Would Communists Seek a Haven? At Redwoods

Two hundred and seventy-five feet tall and more than 3,000 years old, a giant redwood called the Karl Marx Tree once spread its sheltering arms above the 19th-Century Kaweah Cooperative Colony of Central California. The Friedrich Engels Tree--another redwood, only slightly smaller--was nearby.

Those trees were named for the two men whose philosophy had inspired the Kaweah colonists to venture into the fog-haunted wilderness now known as Sequoia National Park.

They were communists, and their 1886 Kaweah Cooperative was intended as a working model of the Marxist paradise that they believed would so appeal to the mass of American workers that the entire United States would forthwith embrace their political and economic system.

Part of History

“Nothing is left of Kaweah today, of course,” U.S. Magistrate Richard Combs said. “It’s a part of history that is downplayed; isn’t mentioned in any of the literature at the park’s visitors center.”

But Combs knows.

For 16 years, Combs has been magistrate for Kings and Tulare counties as well as part of Kern County, holding forth in a courtroom at the park headquarters. And for nearly twice that long, he has been tracking down memorabilia and information, while writing a book about Kaweah.

There were 400 colonists, Combs said, followers of San Francisco orator and labor leader Burnett Haskell, who settled on the land amid the big trees, filed homestead claims and built a school, library, general store and blacksmith shop.

They dug irrigation canals; planted crops, vineyards and orchards; organized their own orchestra; printed their own money, literature and a monthly journal called the Commonwealth, and made a little (U.S. legal tender) money selling post card pictures of the big Karl Marx Tree.

“With shovels, crowbars and dynamite,” Combs said, “they constructed one of the finest roads of that day, an 18-mile wagon road leading to the forests of giant sequoias which they intended to harvest.”

The road, no longer used but easily discernible, led to a sawmill built by the colonists.

“But they decided against felling the giant trees,” Combs said. “They cut smaller trees instead.”

Of course, the colony attracted attention.

“Great streams of visitors came,” Combs said, “to see the idealists and their experiment . . . leading socialists, philosophers . . . many journeying from as far away as the capitals of Europe.”

But the experiment was doomed--by the trees themselves.

A New Name

In 1890, Congress passed a bill establishing Sequoia National Park, and the colonists--who had already fallen to squabbling among themselves--found their homestead claims invalidated. By 1892, the last of them were gone.

But tourists still come to see the Karl Marx Tree. It has a new name now, of course.

The people who took over from the colonists had their own pantheon of heroes and the big redwood, with its base circumference of 103 feet and lower limbs bigger than any tree growing east of the Mississippi, was named for one of them--a towering leader in a long-ago war. That big sequoia is known as the Gen. Sherman Tree.