The Red Redwood

General Sherman, the giant tree in Sequoia National Park, was also named the Karl Marx Tree.

In 1890  the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, a utopian colony of California socialists begun by Burnette G Haskell, editor of the radical Truth newspaper (“Truth is 5c a copy, dynamite 50c a pound”) who helped organise Coast Seamen’s Union and when it became the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, Haskell was its first treasurer. He also organised the International Workingmen’s Association (named after the 1st International.)

In 1888 he decided to create a community in Kaweah, a neglected region because of inaccessibility, building a lumber mill. The Kaweah Co-operative Colony attempted to compete with the outside world on capitalist terms. They viewed the  mountains and their timber in economic terms.

 Contrary to what most histories of the Colony say, it is clear that they did not intend to lumber
the Sequoia of the Giant Forest. They said it "would be nothing short of vandalism to indiscriminately destroy these sentinels of past centuries .... " Haskell welcomed the establishment of the park because he thought it would benefit the Colony. Much to their surprise, Sequoia National Park was expanded to more than double its original size. The Kaweah Colony disintegrated in much bitterness soon after the Secretary of the Interior ruled that their land claims were not truly bona fide. The Federal Government did not even reimburse the colonists for their 18 mile road, which was appropriated along with their lands.