A bow to a man who made his mark

A LATE SUMMER MORNING, 2004. IN THE DEEP SHADE of a sequoia grove, an unusual party of four dozen visitors climbs a gentle hill. They move more slowly and they’re dressed better than most hikers. And they’re keeping fancier company.

Here’s the park superintendent in his hat and jacket, alongside the National Park Service deputy director. Here are a few historians and reenactors in boots and bandannas. And here are the honored guests at this family-and-friends event, four African American men and women, all descendants of the man who set this day in motion 101 years before. The walkers reach a covered sign and stop to apply mosquito repellent and whisper while the dignitaries prepare to hold forth.

“We heard things off and on,” says Cheryl Dawson, a 58-year-old freelance writer from Los Angeles, recalling her childhood. “But it was just fleeting, because our grandmother died in the ‘50s.... You know he has more VFWs named after him than John Kennedy? He has 34. Kennedy has 33.”

Dawson is a great-granddaughter. She stands beside another one, Shirley Gardner of Lancaster, and they chat with George Palmer, a retired sheriff and history buff who drove down from Sacramento.

Palmer isn’t related, but he’s more than a little interested. In the last seven years, he’s written 45 letters to politicians, all the way up to the White House. Without Palmer, this ceremony might still be a pending pledge.

A late summer night, 1903. There’s an end-of-season party coming together in the Giant Forest, a feast for 100 featuring VIPs from as far as Visalia and Riverside. The banquet table is a fallen sugar pine, and the hosts are several dozen soldiers from the 9th U.S. Cavalry -- an African American “buffalo soldier” contingent assigned to protect public land in the West.

Along with chasing off loggers and poachers and grazing livestock, these men have completed with local laborers the first road into this area -- an eight-mile stretch that opens the park to tourists. They’ve also built a trail system that includes a route most of the way up Mt. Whitney and fenced off the ancient and enormous trees named for generals Sherman and Grant.

The taskmaster behind all this is a 39-year-old West Point graduate and Army captain named Charles Young. Born during the Civil War and raised in Ohio, he is the first African American to manage a national park.

A year from now, posted to Haiti, he’ll be writing to friends here, longing for just another hour under the redwoods. In another 15 years, he’ll retire as a colonel, having fought in Mexico and the Philippines, having become this country’s highest-ranking African American Army officer. He might have become a general during World War I, but in a move later denounced as an act of bigotry, higher-ups blocked him from promotion.

But on this feast night under redwoods and around the sugar pine table, Young is simply the leader who got more done here in one summer than others had in the previous three. It’s at about this time, newspaper accounts suggest, that local leaders propose naming a tree after the captain.

No, says Young. Let’s name a tree for Booker T. Washington instead. If anybody still wants to name a tree for me in 20 years, people can talk about it then.

Early summer, 2001: At park headquarters, they’ve got mail. For several years now, George Palmer has been peppering the feds, pointing out that Booker T. Washington’s tree has been forgotten and Young’s role has been neglected. Even on maps that go back 50 years, the tree is invisible, and nobody’s seen its identifying sign for decades. So when a photo of the Booker T. Washington tree arrives from Wilberforce University in Ohio, which holds many of Young’s papers, wheels spin.

Sequoia historian Ward Eldredge takes the photo into the Giant Forest, looking for road-adjacent suspects. Within an hour, he has a match. Calls are made, plans are laid.

The following year, a happy group gathers to rededicate the Booker T. Washington Tree. And at that ceremony, another idea crops up.

Now the gathered four dozen hold their whispers, and Supt. Richard Martin speaks.

“This might be the last time we name a tree,” he says. “It’s certainly the first time since the ‘30s.”

Behind him stands a sequoia 250 feet high, maybe 1,500 years old, maybe 2,000. Its base is scorched as if it’s been through hell, but the rangers promise it’s as robust as can be. The tree people call it a “monarch specimen,” and it’s just a short stroll from Booker T.’s.

“Do you like this tree?” the superintendent asks the great grandchildren.

“It’s a great day,” says great-grandson Dennis Russell, 60, of Corona.

“I have to work harder now to be a good person,” Cheryl Dawson says, “because I have so much to be thankful for, such a legacy to build on.”

COLONEL YOUNG TREE, says the sign, now unveiled. There’s applause, and a few tears mingle with the mosquito juice.

“It’s a great thing about this country,” Palmer says. “You lobby long enough, somebody is gonna listen to you.”

Back down the hill, there will be a public ceremony with more family, and the Park Service deputy director from D.C. will be quoting Wordsworth at length. But nobody’s going to match the testimony of this tree.

Decade upon decade, in this forest and beyond it, we etch and efface and etch again the little symbols that add up to our national character, and sometimes we get it right.

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To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.