In 1917 two lumberjacks from the Pacific Lumber Company received a curious request from the backwoods of Humboldt county, California: local resident Charles Kellogg wanted help in hand-sawing a huge chunk cut from a giant sequoia, known locally as the Sierra redwood or simply the Big Tree. Few ordinary customers would ever need a piece of wood this size – 7 metres long, 4 metres across and weighing 36 tonnes. But Kellogg, an eccentric musician and vaudeville star, claimed he needed it to embark on an ecological mission – a cross-country journey requiring nothing less than the world’s largest single piece of carved wood. Just what was he up to?
Growing up motherless in California’s remote High Sierra in the 1870s, Charles Kellogg had an unusual childhood. His father ran a busy general store for local prospectors and so Charles was raised largely by a Native American nanny and an old Chinese cook called Moon. He amused himself by spying on bear dens, watching Moon at work and, best of all, imitating the birds and insects he heard outside. “The moment a white man appeared, I would instantly stop,” Kellogg later recalled. But when he was sent east to be educated at Cazenovia Seminary in upstate New York, Kellogg couldn’t quite hide his frontier roots. For one thing, he was sent his allowance from the Sierra in the form of small gold bars and, for another, he had developed an astonishing talent for whistling and singing. That talent would make Kellogg a household name, and prompt one of the most curious crusading tours the country had ever seen.
School made little impression on Kellogg – at least not the time he spent in its classrooms. “It is possible that I looked into books incidentally,” he later admitted, but he preferred roaming the surrounding countryside. “I came to know every inch of the woods and swamps for many miles around.” There he familiarised himself with birdsongs and learned to mimic them, and at the age of 16 came within hearing of a touring blind organist. The teenager was coaxed into appearing on the touring lecture circuit and eventually into a decades-long booking on B.F. Keith’s High-Class Vaudeville franchise, where he toured nationwide as “The Nature Singer” alongside such acts as “Ideal the Diver” and “The Cycling Brunettes”.
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Sauntering onto a rustically decorated stage with his rucksack on his back, Kellogg would break into and call out to giggling youngsters in the audience in ludicrous “bird voices” – his own favourite being the unlovely squawk of the yellow-crowned night heron. His stage routine mixed crazy vaudeville and backwoods tall tales. After singing and regaling audiences with stories of neighbours who froze to death and prospectors single-handedly lifting horses out of snowdrifts, Kellogg would set up multiple Victrola phonographs and vary their speed so that they played in perfect harmony.
Amid this chaos, Kellogg stressed his love for California’s forests: he was not afraid to bring proceedings in Manhattan’s Hippodrome to a halt while he demonstrated how to create a carefully contained fire with two sticks, or how to deal gently with animals. He was a vegetarian, he proclaimed, and he refused to own a gun.
Kellogg had become America’s first and only eco-vaudevillian. He liked to announce, with a showman’s hyperbole, that he had a 12½-octave range – nearly double that of a piano. That his vocal range was extraordinary was beyond question, though, and he seemed unfazed by show business: the denizens of the theatrical world, he claimed, were not so different from the beasts of the forest. (Coming from Kellogg, this was a compliment.)
Audiences were impressed, and The Washington Post hailed him as “one of the most remarkable human beings of all time”. By 1916, The Nature Singer had squawked and twittered his way into a recording contract with the Radio Corporation of America, teaming up with the Victor Orchestra to create nature-themed novelty songs. He had also developed another curious claim to fame by discovering in John Tyndall’s 1867 treatise On Sound a trick worthy of high-class vaudeville: that a carefully regulated flame could be extinguished by the right frequency of sound. Kellogg learned to pitch his voice to achieve this, and showed off the feat to audiences and fire departments alike. Among firefighters, Kellogg promoted his own peculiar vision of how fires could one day be tackled. “According to this theory,” reported The New York Times in 1912, “one may live to see giant tuning forks or musical instruments taking the place of fire engines.”
Back home, however, things were far from harmonious. After each year’s tour Kellogg returned to California to find more of his native forest destroyed. The most conspicuous casualty was the giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, a species that grows naturally only in the Sierra Nevada. The Timber and Stone Act of 1879, which sold federal lands for a mere $2.50 an acre, had encouraged decades of wasteful logging of these immense redwoods. Sequoias, including some thousands of years old, were routinely destroyed to manufacture such prosaic items as roof shingles and matchsticks. When visiting friends, including naturalist John Muir and nature writer John Burroughs, Kellogg pondered how to impress upon others the seriousness of the threat to the forest.
“Each year, he returned to find more of his native forest destroyed”
“Since all the world could not come out to the forests,” he wrote in his memoir The Nature Singer, “I kept thinking and thinking through many years how to take the forest out to the world.” It wasn’t until the first world war that he found the answer. “I saw a military truck pulling a terrific load out of a mud hole with such ease that it looked to me like a miracle. I knew I had found what I wanted.”
The truck was a Nash Quad, a powerful vehicle reserved during the war for military use. After visiting the Nash factory in Wisconsin, Kellogg convinced founder Charles Nash to send one to the backwoods of California. Now all he had to do was put a forest on it.
After selecting a felled redwood and sawing off a 7-metre section with the help of two local lumberjacks, Kellogg spent months drilling and adzing until he had hollowed out the log and reduced it from 36 tonnes to 8 tonnes. He then sawed it into a shape resembling the cloth bonnet of a Conestoga wagon and mounted it on the Nash truck bed. Inside he fashioned a living space containing a bed, a toilet and a kitchen with sink, table and built-in cupboards. Kellogg dubbed the mammoth wooden vehicle the Travel Log.
Kellogg drove his wooden motorhome back and forth across the country four times, campaigning along the way for the newly formed , an organisation that continues today to buy up private forests for conversion to protected parkland. The Travel Log was a sensation. Few Americans had seen a motorised recreational vehicle before, let alone one made from a tree.
Crossing the country in the Travel Log was no small achievement. Its top speed was 8 kilometres an hour and even at that crawl it was a bone-shaking ride. Visibility was so poor from the driver’s seat that unwary pedestrians ran the risk of being crushed by an 8-tonne chunk of redwood on wheels.
In later years, Kellogg made similar tours with a blessedly lighter vehicle called the Bird Wing: he claimed to have rigged its ignition to engage at the sound of his bird-whistle. Ill health eventually forced him into retirement in the wooden house he had built himself, with everything from his kitchen sink to his taps carved out from logs and tree roots. Nothing survives of the house today. Kellogg’s music hasn’t fared too well either. His 1916 recording of Flower Song was recently dubbed “the most annoying record ever created” by an audio engineer handling its digital transfer: “He sounds more like an angry cat being slowly pressed to death… I had to leave the room when transferring it.”
The Travel Log met a happier fate: Kellogg left it to two sisters who cared for him in his old age. They used it for decades as a sewing room before donating it in 1994 to the Humboldt Redwood Interpretive Association, which has now restored it. As it was the only vehicle of its kind, restorers could only work from photographs. Some mysteries, such as how Kellogg supplied the taps with water, have never been worked out. But it is now rolling once again, and can be seen at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. The forest that surrounds it is much diminished since Kellogg’s youth – but not as much, perhaps, were it not for the journey of the Travel Log.
