None of them were alive as late as 160 years ago. What that meant was that Mann and his cronies had to come up with yet "other" trees to use to gin up "proxy data" for temperatures from 1850 to about 1998. So, they used "other" trees that'd grown in protected river valleys. The result was the EARLY data has to do with trees growing exposed to Siberian wind, the stuff from 1850 to 1960/1998 from trees growing in sheltered groves, and data from 1960/1998 to present (whatever present he wanted I suppose) "actual data" from "somewhere" "more or less" "probably".
You trick those samples enough, and pick this tree rather than another, and next thing you know you have a hockey stick graph!
The way Mann and his cronies selected the data means that they did so with malice aforethought ~ which means fraud when it comes to the government contracts they justified ~ which means that ol'boy ain't gonna' leave prison for a darned long time!
I certainly HOPE SO!
Is there any possibility that these trees were close enough to the great Tungusku meteor event to have be blown down that way, or be close enough so that the vast destroyed/flattened area could have influenced the climate. There was also probably a colder period following Krakatoa in 1883, and Katmai in 1911 or 12.