Chapter 1

From Gold Rush to Lumbering Community

Discovery and Settlement

Humboldt County is situated in northwest California approximately 250 miles north of San Francisco and 50 miles south of the Oregon border. Stretching 108 miles from north to south, it is one of California’s largest counties, encompassing an area half the size of Massachusetts. Topographically, rugged mountains hem the county in on three sides against the Pacific Ocean. Humboldt was finally connected to the state and national railroad network in 1914. Before then, Humboldt Bay usually provided access to the county. Humboldt Bay, a large lagoon extending 14 miles in a north–south direction and varying in width from .5 mile to 4 miles, is the most natural harbor between San Francisco and Portland.¹

Until the mid-twentieth century, a belt of towering redwood trees that stretched the length of the county dominated the landscape. The redwood belt varied in width from 3 to 20 miles and covered more than 500,000 acres. This band of trees was part of a massive tract of redwoods that once ran from north of the Oregon border to south of San Francisco. Coast redwoods are the world’s tallest trees, often growing to a height of more than 300 feet.

A substantial population of Native Americans lived in northwest California until the mid-nineteenth century. European and American explorers made a few expeditions to the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but with the exception of a few Russian trading posts that were defunct by the 1820s, no permanent settlements were established. The California gold rush led to the first white settlement and the disruption and eventual annihilation of most of the region’s Native American population. By the summer of 1849, the gold mines in the Trinity Mountains, 50 miles to the east of Humboldt Bay, were among the most productive in California. Because Humboldt Bay is well concealed from ocean vessels by miles of sand dunes, it was not immediately discovered by the argonauts and they had to reach the diggings by means of a laborious overland route from Sacramento. In the fall of 1849, however, a group of miners, led by the famous western explorer Josiah Gregg, stumbled on the bay after an exploratory expedition from the Trinity Mountains.

The news of Gregg’s discovery of Humboldt Bay, and the almost simultaneous discovery of Trinidad Bay, 20 miles to the north, led to settlements on the fringes of both bays and new trails to the diggings. The first towns in Humboldt County thus originated as supply stations for the Trinity mines. Arcata, located at the northernmost point of Humboldt Bay, provided the most direct route to the mines and was the center of population and business activity in the early 1850s. For a few years, Trinidad vied with Arcata as the most important settlement, but by 1854 its population had dwindled dramatically in the face of competition from towns on Humboldt Bay. Eureka, which was to become the county’s major township, was the last of the early settlements founded on the bay. It was not as well served by trails to the diggings as Arcata and Trinidad, but, unlike its rivals, it was a deepwater port. Eureka quickly became the major lumbering port in the county and one of the most important lumber-producing towns on the Pacific Coast. (See map.)

Economy and Politics

Shipments of lumber from Humboldt Bay began in 1850. The close proximity of the forest to the bay, and the great demand for timber in gold rush California, enticed entrepreneurs into the lumber business. The first sawmill was erected in September 1850, and by 1854 nine steam-powered mills operated in the county, seven of them in Eureka. These mills represented a capital investment of over $400,000 and employed 130 workers. The largest mill, capitalized at $100,000, employed 35 men and could cut 60,000 feet of lumber daily. Most of the other mills had a capacity of not more than 20,000 feet per day and employed fewer than 10 men. Approximately 200 workers supplied the mills with logs, and $400,000 was invested in logging operations. A substantial portion of this capital went into building primitive railroads to link Eureka with the gradually receding forest. In 1854, 138 lumber vessels arrived in San Francisco from Humboldt County, and the 11 months preceding June 1854 saw 19 million feet of lumber exported from Humboldt Bay. Nevertheless, the progress of the lumber industry was uneven in the pioneer years because its fortunes were highly dependent on the regional and national economies. The depression of 1855 forced a virtual suspension of lumbering operations, and not until 1866 did production levels match the boom year of 1854.²

Another feature of the county’s early development was the growth of agriculture. Humboldt’s river valleys possessed extremely fertile soils. The climate was benign, with temperatures ranging between 45 degrees in winter and 65 degrees in summer and an average annual rainfall of 40 inches. Agricultural pioneers began settling in the Eel River Valley and on the flat and unforested land surrounding Arcata and Eureka in 1850. By the end of the decade, the Eel River Valley, which extended from a point just south of Humboldt Bay to the southern and eastern reaches of the county, was the focal point of agricultural settlement. In spite of labor shortages and problems of internal transportation, agriculture flourished. Wheat, barley, oats, and potatoes were the principal crops; production of them doubled between 1854 and 1860, and over 3,500 acres were under cultivation by 1860. The stock business also developed rapidly in the late 1850s, with the number of cattle increasing from 1,812 in 1854 to nearly 20,000 by 1860.³

Humboldt County’s pioneers came from many places. People lured by the gold rush were mainly from New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Invariably these migrants took the sea route to California, via the Isthmus of Panama or around Cape Horn. The other main group of pioneers came from the Midwest and the border states. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of them made their way to California overland, and most of them commenced farming on arrival in Humboldt.⁴ The county had a very transient population in the 1850s. Of the almost 300 people on the county’s first tax list in 1853, only a third were residing in Humboldt when the 1860 census was taken. In spite of the high turnover rate, the origins of the county’s population did not change much in the early years. In 1860, 80 percent of the population (2,100 of 2,694) were native-born. Of them, 470 were born in California, and all were under twenty-one years of age. The midwestern states, Middle Atlantic states, northern and southern border states, and New England states contributed roughly equal proportions to Humboldt’s population. The majority of the county’s 594 foreign-born residents came from the British Isles and Canada.⁵

The distribution of wealth in pioneer Humboldt County was distinctly unequal. In 1860, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population owned 26 percent of the wealth, and the top 10 percent accounted for 40 percent of the community’s total wealth. At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom 50 percent owned only 13 percent of the wealth. Income distribution was more skewed in the “urban” townships of Eureka, Arcata, and Bucksport. In Arcata, for example, the top 5 percent possessed 45 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent held only 9 percent. Moreover, these figures significantly understate the maldistribution of wealth. According to the 1860 census, 486 employed people in the county (out of 1,559) did not own any property or assets worth enumerating.⁶

Issues of state and national concern, especially the growing sectional crisis, dominated the political life of Humboldt County in the 1850s. There was little divisiveness over local political issues. Shortly before the local elections of 1857, the Humboldt Times (the county’s only newspaper from 1854 until 1858) stated that the outcome would be determined “by the personal propriety of the candidate more than by his political associations.”⁷ The Humboldt Times devoted the majority of its coverage to state and national politics, as did the Northern Californian, which emerged briefly to challenge the monopoly of the Times in 1858. The Times wavered between Stephen A. Douglas Democrats and the Republican party in the late 1850s. In the 1860 presidential elections, Douglas, aided by an endorsement from the Times, received a plurality of the votes cast, garnering 445 compared to 335 for Abraham Lincoln, 232 for John Breckinridge, and 20 for John Bell. The Douglas Democrats and the Times did not take the South’s threat of secession very seriously. However, dismayed and outraged by the South’s eventual secession, most of the leading Democrats in the county, with the strong support of the Times, urged the formation of a Union party in California, and in June 1862 the Humboldt County Democratic and Republican parties merged.⁸ In the interim, Republican Leland Stanford won a majority of the county’s votes in the California gubernatorial contest of September 1861. Support for the Union party was so strong by 1863 that the Times attributed the apathy of voters to its ascendancy.⁹ In the 1864 presidential election, Lincoln trounced George McClellan, receiving almost twice as many votes as his rival in the county.

For most of the 1850s, Humboldt County experienced modest and uneven growth because its population levels and economic vitality were highly dependent on the fortunes of the gold miners and the lumber market. By 1860, the county had a population of only 2,694 people. Nevertheless, by the late 1850s, with the gold rush subsiding, Humboldt had become a relatively stable pioneer community based on the agricultural economy of its hinterland and the lumber industry centered in Eureka. The Times proclaimed that “permanent citizens, substantial businessmen and real laborers” were “taking the place of adventurers, town lot speculators, gamblers and their usual associates.”¹⁰ By 1860, Eureka with 581 residents was the largest township in the county, followed by Arcata with 524. Both towns possessed a scattering of general stores, craft shops, saloons, and hotels, and a variety of fraternal orders, including branches of the Odd Fellows, Masons, and International Order of Good Templars.¹¹

The population of Humboldt County grew steadily during the late nineteenth century, reaching 27,000 inhabitants by 1900. Population growth occurred mainly in the immediate vicinity of Humboldt Bay and in the Eel River Valley. Although logging operations, and to some extent sawmilling activity, began to take place farther from Eureka, the county seat enhanced its position as Humboldt’s major city. It contained approximately a third of the county’s population by the 1880s, and in 1900, 8,500 people lived in the general township area.¹² The origins of Humboldt’s population remained fairly constant throughout the late nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the proportion of inhabitants born in California rose substantially after 1860. The New England states (especially Maine), the Middle Atlantic states, and the midwestern states, in that order, continued to supply the bulk of the native-born population. Foreign-born residents remained in the minority, fluctuating between 22 and 32 percent of the population. As late as 1900, immigrants from the British Canadian provinces accounted for the largest proportion of the foreign-born population. The Irish and Germans ranked second in terms of their representation among the county’s foreign-born from 1870 to 1900, although by 1890, Scandinavians took over second place (see Table 1).

For most of the period, Humboldt County agriculture experienced steady growth, especially in the production of cereals, livestock, and dairy products. A depression in the late 1870s and the early 1880s, however, had a serious impact on farming. The cultivation of potatoes, the county’s most important crop for years, declined from 19,608 tons in 1879 to 4,714 tons in 1880 and never recovered. The total number of acres cultivated diminished from 27,897 in 1880 to 17,297 in 1881.¹³ In the aftermath of the depression, an important shift occurred in the structure of the county’s agricultural economy. Production of most cereal crops declined, and more land was devoted to raising livestock. Humboldt became one of the leading wool-producing counties in California. But the dairy industry became the most important branch of the county’s agriculture. By 1900, Humboldt County ranked eleventh in population of California’s 58 counties and third in the value of its dairy products.¹⁴ Dairying remained second only to the lumber industry in importance to the county’s economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Fledgling Lumber Industry

During the late nineteenth century, Humboldt County became one of the most important lumbering regions in the United States. In 1908, the Census Bureau referred to Humboldt as the “metropolis” of the California lumber industry and called its mills perhaps the most technologically advanced in the world.¹⁵ No significant transfer of resources from agriculture to lumber occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The county’s agricultural sector expanded, but did not grow nearly so rapidly as the lumber industry. As early as 1870, while agriculture almost certainly employed more people than lumbering, the annual value of lumber production ($704,100) exceeded that of agriculture ($557,212).¹⁶ By the 1880s, employment in the lumber industry surpassed employment in agriculture; in 1890, lumber accounted for 80 percent ($3.5 million) of Humboldt’s exports and agriculture for 20 percent.¹⁷

The rapid expansion of the lumber industry began in the late 1860s. In 1870, 40 million feet of timber were cut, and the industry employed more than 400 workers.¹⁸ By the late 1870s, lumber production had almost doubled, there were 20 mills in the county (compared to only 8 in 1866), and nearly 1,000 lumber workers in the Eureka area alone.¹⁹ The depression of the late 1870s briefly interrupted the expansion, but the 1880s proved to be a watershed era in the industry’s development. There were 22 mills in the county in 1881, and in the next five years 6 large sawmills were established.²⁰ The most conservative estimates put lumber production at 120 million feet in 1887, and the county’s two leading newspapers reported that the industry employed 2,000 men.²¹

Investment by outside capitalists played an important role in the county’s lumber industry in the 1880s. The Pacific Lumber Company, owned principally by Nevada entrepreneurs and soon to become one of the giants of the Pacific Coast lumber industry, commenced full-scale operations in 1887. The Korbel brothers of Sonoma established the Humboldt Lumber Mill Company in 1883 at Blue Lake, 5 miles east of Arcata. Also in 1883, a syndicate financed primarily by Scottish capital attempted to consolidate much of the county’s lumber industry. Yet, in spite of the influx of outside capital, the Humboldt lumber industry continued to be owned and operated primarily by local entrepreneurs until the early years of the twentieth century.

The expansion of the county’s lumber industry in the last three decades of the nineteenth century reflected a nationwide boom in the demand for lumber. Wood continued to be the major energy source in the Gilded Age, even though coal gradually superseded it. Shipbuilding, railroads, and construction all depended for their growth on an abundant and inexpensive supply of wood. Per capita consumption of wood products in the United States quadrupled between 1850 and 1909.²² The continued growth of the San Francisco Bay Area and the “instant urbanization” of southern California, beginning in the late 1870s, were major factors stimulating the expansion of the Humboldt County lumber industry. Over half the annual output of lumber went to San Francisco. Some of this lumber was transshipped to the eastern United States and abroad, but most of it was used in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although large quantities of lumber went directly to the ports of San Pedro and San Diego, the southern California market never surpassed the Bay Area as the primary market for redwood lumber. Foreign markets were cultivated as early as the 1850s, but only rarely was more than 15 percent of production exported.²³

The growth of the lumber industry in the 1870s and 1880s and the receding timber stands in the immediate vicinity of Eureka and Humboldt Bay forced lumbermen to conduct logging operations farther afield and often to establish mills close to these operations. Eureka remained the site of several large mills, but most plants founded after 1880 were situated either north or east of Arcata or in southern Humboldt County in the Eel River Valley. Even by 1880, more lumber workers resided in and around Arcata than in Eureka.²⁴ A necessary condition for the decentralization of the lumber industry was an improvement in intracounty transportation. Before 1870, the lumber industry depended on rivers and a rather primitive railroad network. Beginning in the mid-1870s, several of the larger lumber companies embarked on extensive programs of railroad construction to link all the major lumber-producing areas of the county with Eureka. By 1887, 14 mills depended entirely or partially on railroads, and by 1892 there were 150 miles of railroad track in the county.²⁵ Humboldt County businessmen and residents lobbied determinedly for a connection with the state and national railroad network, but the geographic isolation of Humboldt and its rugged topography deterred prospective investors. Until 1914, when the completion of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad finally integrated the county into the national rail network, the county remained almost entirely dependent on shipping services from Humboldt Bay for the transport of both cargo and passengers. The sea voyage to San Francisco took twenty-four hours, and the twice or thrice weekly passenger service cost $5. Through a combination of primitive wagon roads and railroad connections, overland transportation to San Francisco was possible before the arrival of the Pacific Northwestern Railroad, but the journey usually took two days. Consequently little cargo and few passengers traveled this route.

As the Humboldt County lumber industry expanded during the 1880s, many lumber companies completed the almost total vertical integration of their operations.²⁶ A few companies used subcontractors to supply their mills with timber, but most relied on their own logging operations. Lumber companies invariably owned their timberlands and rarely paid fees to cut on other people’s land. In the 1870s and 1880s, entrepreneurs became increasingly preoccupied with securing vast acreages of strategically located timberlands. Even small concerns possessed several thousand acres, while larger ones owned 20,000 acres or more by the late nineteenth century. Most lumber operators realized that the supply of timber was finite and that the long-term viability of the business depended on securing large tracts of timberland. Many companies acquired all or part of a local railroad and a fleet of sailing vessels and steam schooners. Most had marketing offices in San Francisco, and all large companies operating outside Eureka had company stores.

The redwood lumber manufacturers made repeated efforts to regulate output and control prices. The first such effort occurred in September 1854 with the establishment of the Humboldt Manufacturing Company, but the depression of 1855 ended this experimental venture. A host of lumber trade associations came and went in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It proved difficult to obtain the cooperation of the less competitive Mendocino redwood lumber businesses. Moreover, competition from other kinds and sources of lumber, and the tendency of the industry toward overproduction, frequently caused lumber capitalists to renege on gentlemen’s agreements and trade associations to dissolve within a few years.²⁷

The majority of Humboldt County’s nineteenth-century lumber entrepreneurs were from relatively humble origins.²⁸ William Carson, David Jones, Joseph Russ, Daniel Newell, David Flanigan, David Evans, John Vance, Isaac Minor, John McKay, and Frank Graham, to name only the more prominent examples, played pivotal roles in the development of the county’s lumber industry, yet all arrived in Humboldt with few means. Two factors account for this pattern. First, most of these men had considerable mechanical or technical skills before coming to the county, some in logging and others in related areas. During the nineteenth century, the efficiency of milling and logging operations depended on the skill and experience of the proprietor. Second, most of the men started their careers in the lumber industry during the 1850s and 1860s, before the capital required for entry became prohibitive for an individual, although many entered into partnerships, at least initially, to raise the necessary capital.

William Carson was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1825. As a youth, he worked in his father’s small logging business. In September 1849, infected with gold rush fever, he took a ship to San Francisco. There he worked at the mint for a while before proceeding to the Trinity gold mines. Food shortages compelled Carson and his companions to spend the winter of 1850 in Humboldt County. In order to support himself, Carson contracted to supply one of the county’s mills with logs. He engaged in logging for several more years before becoming a partner in a lumber mill. During the early 1860s, in partnership with John Dolbeer, Carson established what was soon to become one of the largest lumbering concerns in the county, and by the 1880s, he was one of the county’s wealthiest and most revered figures. According to the 1860 census, Carson was worth $11,000. On his death in 1912, his estate was valued at $20 million.²⁹

John Vance was born in Nova Scotia in 1817. At age sixteen he began learning carpentry and shipbuilding. He then went to Roxbury, Massachusetts, and worked for a few years in the building industry. Like Carson, he was lured to California by the gold rush. Arriving in San Francisco in 1850, he spent an unfruitful year at the diggings. He moved to Humboldt County in 1852, and while employed as a carpenter and millwright, converted a wrecked steamer into a sawmill. Vance also engaged in merchandising in the 1850s.³⁰ Humboldt County’s first tax list, compiled in 1853, assessed Vance’s total wealth at a modest $1,600. By the 1870s, he had become one of the county’s wealthiest lumbermen.

Isaac Minor was born on a Pennsylvania farm in 1830. He came to California in 1851 and spent eighteen months at the diggings. Arriving in Humboldt County in 1853, he acquired a pack train and sold goods to miners. In 1859, he settled on a ranch and engaged in stock raising, only to have most of his herd destroyed by Indian raids in 1862–1863. Undaunted, Minor remained in the county and in 1875 entered the lumber business with Noah Falk. In 1881, Minor’s career was hailed as proof that “even if unsuccessful at first, by energy a person may attain a competency, and become a useful and productive citizen.”³¹ By the early twentieth century, Minor was one of the wealthiest men in the county. Early in the new century, he sold 26,000 acres of redwood lands in Del Norte County for $960,000 and another 13,000 acres in Humboldt for $430,000.³²

Many of the men who occupied the second echelon of leadership in the lumber industry—those who became logging foremen or mill supervisors—rose from the ranks by dint of their wide-ranging experience and technical aptitude. “The foreman is always a man of long experience and broad judgment, who has passed through several grades of the service, and is familiar with the details of the different kinds of work,” asserted the Humboldt Times in 1889.³³ Lumber entrepreneurs attempted to oversee the day-to-day field operations of their businesses, but as the size of the workforce grew and milling and logging operations spread over a wider area, this task became more difficult. Increasingly, they had to rely on a foreman to make important decisions about the organization of production and the hiring and management of workers.

A large proportion of the rank and file of the Humboldt County lumber workforce had almost certainly worked in the lumber industry before coming to the county and were drawn to Humboldt by a pattern of occupational migration. The 1860, 1870, and 1880 census records show that a substantial number of Humboldt County’s lumber workers came from Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Lumbering had been predominant in these regions in the early and mid-nineteenth century, but during the second half of the century, they ceased to be at the apex of the American lumber industry as the gravitational center of the industry shifted westward. Although the bulk of lumber capital, entrepreneurs, and workers migrated to Great Lakes states up until the 1880s, a significant transfer of lumber resources to the Far West also took place.

In 1860, 27 percent of the native-born men employed in the lumber industry were from Maine, while nearly 80 percent of the foreign-born engaged in lumbering were from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Workers from these areas made up half of the total lumber workforce in 1870 and 45 percent in 1880.³⁴ Women were not employed in logging or milling operations until World War I.³⁵ During the war, an acute shortage of labor and a booming demand for lumber resulted in the employment of women in some of the larger mills. But this was regarded, and indeed proved to be, a temporary expedient.

A mix of “pull” and “push” factors caused lumber workers from Maine and the Maritime Provinces to undertake this transcontinental migration. On the push side, the general decline of that region’s lumber industry forced many lumber workers and farmers to contemplate migration, and by the 1840s, they were beginning to flock to Boston and other large New England cities and towns. “California fever,” as it was called, infected even the remotest parts of the northeastern American continent and accelerated the exodus from many of the region’s lumbering and farm communities. In July 1851, the Frontier Journal of Washington County, Maine, spoke of “wagonloads” of men who had left the county for California.³⁶ Out-migration continued steadily throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although a majority of the migrants from the Maritime Provinces went initially to New England, a sizable minority went directly to California. The well-developed trade in lumber and other items between the region’s small ports and the Far West facilitated the migration of lumber workers. Ship captains or companies catered directly to the Pacific Coast passenger market, and steerage was obtainable for a modest fee.³⁷

Like William Carson, the majority of lumber workers were drawn to California by the glitter of gold. When the diggings proved disappointing, the migrants reverted to the occupation they knew best, plying their skills in the fledgling California lumber industry. By the late 1850s, when gold rush fever had subsided, most lumber workers from Maine and the Maritime Provinces almost certainly went west hoping for immediate employment in the lumber industry. The higher wages obtainable in California and the relative ease of transportation to the West Coast sustained this transcontinental migration. Kinship and friendship networks also played a role: Canadians and people from Maine working in the California lumber industry wrote to relatives and friends with glowing tales of life in the Golden State.³⁸ Frank Fraser, whose parents migrated from New Brunswick in the 1860s, recalls how it was common practice for lumber employers to “send back every year and get a few of the younger fellows” who had experience in the lumber industry.³⁹ Gilmann Knapp remembers instances of neighbors and friends moving from Canada to Humboldt County to rejoin former neighbors and friends.⁴⁰ Many lumber capitalists who migrated to the Great Lakes states returned to Maine and the Maritime Provinces to recruit labor and, in some instances, brought their labor force with them.⁴¹ It is likely that many Humboldt County lumber entrepreneurs did the same thing.

During the nineteenth century in most parts of the United States and Canada, lumbering was an occupation often combined with farming. But the vast majority of men who migrated from Maine and the Maritime Provinces to work in the Humboldt County lumber industry were full-time lumber workers. By 1850, most lumber workers in New Brunswick were unable to combine farming or other occupations with work in the mills and woods. Low wages and high land prices and rents discouraged employment in agriculture, while the expansion and commercialization of the province’s lumber industry necessitated the virtual full-time employment of workers in areas often far removed from their homes. The pattern was similar in Maine and the other Canadian Maritime Provinces.⁴² In part, this explains why comparatively few of the first generation of Humboldt County lumber workers combined farming and logging. In 1860, 46 of 168 lumber workers owned some real estate; in 1870, only 68 of 397 did. Seventeen of 46 owned less than $500 worth of real estate in 1860, and in 1870, 24 of 68 fell into this category. These figures include the holdings of lumber capitalists and lumber workers who did not necessarily farm the land they owned.⁴³

Lack of farming experience before coming to Humboldt was not the only reason so few pioneer lumber workers engaged in agriculture. As in Maine and the Maritime Provinces, lumbering in Humboldt County generally employed workers for most of the year. Moreover, the lumbering season overlapped more directly with the growing and harvesting season than it did in the Northeast. In the latter region, logging generally began with the onset of winter and lasted until spring; in Humboldt and the Far West, the logging season commenced in the spring and continued until the heavy late-fall rains suspended operations. H. S. Turner, whose father migrated in 1853 to work in the Humboldt lumber industry, stressed two additional reasons the early lumber workers did not purchase more land. First, many of them went west “to make their whack . . . and to return to their eastern home and sweetheart, to marry and settle down in those snow clad states,” even though many ended up staying in Humboldt County.⁴⁴ Second, only a small amount of the county’s land was available for purchase. Much of the land had not been surveyed and was not open for entry; other land had been acquired or taken under squatters’ rights.⁴⁵

The Work Process

A considerable degree of labor specialization existed in both logging and milling operations by the late nineteenth century and was especially pronounced in the California redwood lumber industry. In 1886, the wage list of the Excelsior Redwood Company listed 18 occupational classifications in logging and 19 in mill work.⁴⁶ Logging camps varied greatly in size, with larger companies employing anywhere from 30 to 100 men.⁴⁷ Harvesting redwood trees with average diameters of 12 to 16 feet and sometimes standing 300 feet placed great demands on the ingenuity of lumbermen and heightened the division of labor. So daunting were the technical problems that not until the 1860s did extensive logging of redwoods begin.

How the redwood lumber industry operated can best be conveyed by describing the primary work processes. Two choppers were responsible for cutting down a tree. The head chopper decided how to fell the tree in order to cause the least damage to it and to adjacent timber. On steep hillsides, redwoods were usually felled uphill, and sometimes a soft bed of brush was laid to cushion the giants’ fall. Scaffolding was erected from 6 to 15 feet from the base of the tree so that the choppers would not have to cut through the widest part of the trunk. The choppers made a giant undercut halfway through the tree that was often 6 feet high at the periphery. Old logging photographs show as many as 20 men standing in the vast undercut. The choppers then moved to the other side of the tree and began sawing through to the undercut. As the saw progressed, wedges were driven in to relieve pressure on the saw and direct the fall of the tree. It is little wonder that the felling of a large redwood often took a week.

Peelers removed the tough and stringy bark of the redwood tree before buckers began cutting the fallen giant into lengths of 8 to 12 feet. By the late nineteenth century, most camps employed a filer to keep the saws sharp. Next, the logs had to be transported to the mill. From 1850 to 1880, before the construction of an extensive rail network, logs were floated downriver to the mill. By the 1880s, most large logging operations relied on railroads to transport logs and this eliminated many of the uncertainties associated with river transportation. But the logs still had to be transported to rivers or railroads along logging roads that had to be carved through the forest. The most important logging road, the skid road, was reinforced with cross logs in a corduroy pattern so that the heavy, 8- to 12-foot sections of redwood could be slid along them. In the early spring, most of the men in the logging camp worked at building these roads, which cost about $5,000 a mile to construct. A crew of men known as swampers assumed the main responsibility for road construction and maintenance. Teams of horses or oxen pulled the logs over the skid roads. In charge of each team was the most important person in the camp, the teamster, or bullwhacker. It was his responsibility to negotiate the skid roads up hill and down dale with his precious cargo of logs. He was accompanied by a water packer, or slinger, whose job was to throw water in front of the lead logs to make the road more slippery.

In 1881, logging operations in Humboldt County, and before long in the whole United States, were greatly facilitated by Humboldt County lumberman John Dolbeer’s invention, which soon became known as the Dolbeer donkey. An upright boiler powered a horizontal shaft, from which ran long lines of thick rope that could be fastened onto logs up to 200 feet away. Logs could thus be mechanically manipulated over rough or steep terrain for a considerable distance. Within a few years, Dolbeer’s donkeys were modified so that the most sophisticated ones, using steel cables, could haul in logs at a distance of 2,000 feet. Specialized crews operated the donkeys and attached ropes and cables to the logs. The donkeys did not obviate the need for skid roads and bull teams, but made hauling logs to skid roads infinitely easier.

As with logging, the multiplicity of milling work processes and job classifications were not substantially altered by the continuous introduction of more efficient and adaptable saw machinery. By the 1860s, most sawmilling was done by steam-powered double circular saws, with a third and fourth saw employed in some mills by the 1870s. Logs often had to be cut or split into smaller sections by Mulay or sash saws before being fed into the circular saws. By the 1880s, however, almost all logs could be floated directly into a small channel that led from the mill pond to the sawing assembly line. The log was placed on a slip carriage and perfectly aligned by a “carriage setter” before it was drawn into the sawing blades. The sawyer, the supervisor of the whole milling process, was responsible for calculating how many board feet of lumber a log would produce and for ensuring that the cut would produce finished lumber that conformed to the size and quality specifications of a particular order and at the same time minimized waste. When the log had passed through the circular saws (or the band saws that superseded them by the late nineteenth century), a number of rough large boards emerged, their width determined by the diameter of the log. These boards might be 5 to 6 feet wide. The edgerman’s task was to cut the boards down to narrower widths according to the specific order. The sheets of wood were placed on roller-topped tables and cut with a circular saw. A trimmer then used a circular saw to cut the boards to the requisite length. The processed lumber was next passed down roller-topped tables to be sorted and graded. The carriage pullers, sawyers, edgers, and trimmers were supported by a host of ancillary personnel such as filers, who constantly sharpened the saw blades, engineers, firemen, log pullers, tallymen, blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, and a large number of common laborers. In the late nineteenth century, the average lumber mill in the redwood region employed about 50 workers.⁴⁸

Working and Living Conditions

Wages in the California redwood lumber industry were among the highest of any lumbering region in North America and far exceeded those paid in the eastern United States and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. In California, wage levels ranged from $26 a month for a common laborer to $150 for a teamster or foreman; in the East, wages for lumber workers varied from $15 to a high of $30 a month.⁴⁹ Although a skilled worker might earn upward of $100 a month, most lumber workers earned considerably less. The Dolbeer and Carson Company reportedly paid the highest wages in Humboldt County; in 1887 and 1888, most of the company’s workers earned between $40 and $70 a month. In 1887, 169 of 221 were in this wage bracket, and in 1888, 121 of 164. In the same two years, only 7 workers earned $100 a month or more.⁵⁰ Humboldt County lumber workers were usually paid in cash on a regular monthly basis. This was unlike many other lumbering regions in the United States where workers were often paid partially in scrip, and sometimes at three-month intervals or in a lump sum at the end of the logging season. The lumber workers’ place in the occupational hierarchy was not the only determinant of their wages. Wages fluctuated according to the general state of the industry. During the depressions of the late 1870s and mid-1890s, wages fell by as much as 50 percent for some Humboldt lumber workers. There were also significant differences in wage rates between lumber concerns.⁵¹ Finally, seasonal and market factors influenced the length of the logging season and mill operations and thus affected the workers’ total earnings. Typically, a logger and a mill hand worked eight months a year.⁵²

During the rainy season, some Humboldt County lumber workers made a living doing odd jobs. Contracting to make shingle bolts was one of the more common pursuits. But only a minority were able to pick up these jobs. Some lumber workers idled away the winter months, the family and better-off men in their own homes, while others flocked to Eureka and eked out an existence at one of the many boardinghouses. A significant proportion of lumber workers left the county for other parts of the state. The majority almost certainly went to San Francisco, the nearest major city, to try to obtain casual labor. The Humboldt Times stated that “men working at the several mills and camps are usually retained year after year,” and added that “many instances are known in this county where laborers have worked for the same concern 15 to 25 years.”⁵³ The dearth of company records makes this assertion hard to test. Payroll records of the Dolbeer and Carson Company for 1887 and 1888, however, indicate that labor turnover among woodsmen was high. The company employed 302 woodsmen in the two-year period, but only 81 of them worked in both years.⁵⁴ But a host of newspaper reports, recollective accounts, and the will of William Carson suggest that many lumber concerns had a core of workers employed by a company for many years. They were likely to be the more skilled workers and to work in the mills.

Until 1890, millmen and woodsmen in Humboldt County worked a twelve-hour day. Mill workers obtained the ten-hour day in 1890, but the twelve-hour day persisted in logging well into the twentieth century. The lumber worker usually began work at 6:00 A.M. and worked until 6:00 P.M., with not much more than a fifteen-minute break for lunch at noon. Dinner was served around 7:00 P.M.⁵⁵ For many lumber workers, the only redeeming feature of camp life was the cookhouse. They regarded large quantities of good-quality food almost as their birthright. Psychologically, a hearty meal was some compensation for a gruelling day’s work; physiologically, it was essential to workers who often expended 9,000 calories a day. Lumber capitalists were not nutritionists, but common sense and their own experience of the work made them aware of the demands of the occupation. Good food was almost as important as wages in attracting and retaining a crew, and employers could exercise greater control over food quality than general wage levels. The premium on good food was so high that the cook was one of the best-paid workers in camp. By the late nineteenth century, larger companies operated their own vegetable gardens, ranches, slaughterhouses, and dairies.⁵⁶

A lumber worker’s food was almost the only feature of his living conditions that was satisfactory. Housing and sanitary conditions at most camps were rudimentary until the 1920s. Between 1850 and 1880, when lumbering operations took place close to Eureka and Arcata, most lumber workers lived in boardinghouses or rented rooms. The dispersion of the Humboldt County lumber industry forced many workers to leave town and live in primitive dwellings in the forest. In the 1880s, the Pacific Lumber Company, located at Scotia, 30 miles southeast of Eureka, led the way in building company housing. The first bunkhouses, constructed in 1884, were about 10 feet square with a hole in the middle of the roof to vent the smoke from the fire in the middle of the cabin floor. By 1887, the company had a boardinghouse 1,000 feet from the mill, measuring 40 by 100 feet, which was described as having “every convenience for 300 men.” There were also 102 houses that were approximately 16 by 20 feet in size. Half were occupied by married men and the remainder by single men, six to a cabin.⁵⁷ Until the 1920s, most cabins were without any sanitary facilities except, in some instances, piped water. The cabins were not usually lighted by electricity, and the men provided their own bedding.

Lumber workers had limited recreational time during the work week. After a hard day’s work and a large meal, most men retired to their cabins and boardinghouses. Here some of them played cards or chatted and smoked before bedding down to await the 5:00 A.M. whistle. The rudimentary forest camps provided few social amenities until they began to evolve into full-fledged company towns in the early twentieth century. On weekends, many men attempted to make up for their drab weekday existence. By the 1880s, the large lumber companies ran excursion trains to Eureka on Saturday evenings and Sundays. Most lumber workers went to town to enjoy the conveniences afforded by Eureka’s red-light district or its saloons. In 1896, there were 77 licensed saloons in the county,⁵⁸ most of them in Eureka, and by 1904 there were 63 retail liquor dealers in Eureka (a city of 11,000 residents), or one dealer per 175 people.⁵⁹ Undoubtedly, many saloons in Eureka depended on the patronage of visiting lumber workers. Saloons were one of the first social facilities provided by lumber employers as the logging camps developed into company towns. The Pacific Lumber Company built its first saloon in 1888, primarily because it wanted some control over the quantity and quality of liquor consumed by its workers; rarely did the company have to deal with men who were too intoxicated to work the next day.⁶⁰ During the early twentieth century, some companies made liquor less accessible, but this was mainly the result of an increasingly militant local temperance movement and the desire of some lumber operators to elevate the moral order of their company towns.

Not all men participated in sexual and alcoholic debauches on weekends; some virtuously tended gardens allotted them by the company. By 1892, most Scotia residents had gardens. Other workers took the train to Eureka and other townships to visit their families. Approximately a third of woodsmen and millmen were married.⁶¹ A few attended church or listened to the sermon of an itinerant preacher. Sometimes the Women’s Christian Temperance Union ventured bravely into the lumber camps and towns, but these missionaries made little impact. As Stewart Holbrook succinctly put it, “what a man wanted came in bottles and corsets.”⁶² Some companies provided picnicking facilities and occasionally put on a dance. Beginning in 1879, lumber employer John Vance sponsored an annual picnic for employees and Humboldt County schoolchildren. Most lumber concerns closed down for a few days during the Fourth of July celebrations and often provided financial backing for the annual ritual. On July 4, 1896, the Pacific Lumber Company sponsored a picnic that attracted 3,500 people.⁶³ But, with few exceptions, not until the 1910s did lumber companies make a concerted effort to orchestrate the leisure time of their employees by establishing churches, Sunday schools, libraries, fraternal societies, theaters, movie houses, and baseball teams.

The lives of most redwood lumber workers were unenviable. Their work was physically demanding and dangerous.⁶⁴ The Humboldt County voting registers of the 1890s provide graphic testimony to the hazards of working in the lumber industry. A large number of lumber workers on the register are identified as having lost a finger or limb or being seriously maimed. The lumber workers’ day was as long as that of most unskilled workers, and their earnings were just as irregular. They also worked in an industry that imposed severe constraints on their social space. The isolated locales in which they lived and worked not only separated them from families and the amenities available in Eureka and Arcata but also subjected their lives outside the workplace to the constant surveillance of employers. The activities of any malcontent were easy to monitor in a logging camp or company town. Even a worker who lived in Eureka or Arcata was hardly invisible in a small town where most employers knew their workers and neighbors by name. Employers in the redwood region could not always agree on price and output schedules, but they cooperated in blacklisting troublemakers. The lumber-dependent economy of northernmost California left most workers with few alternative job opportunities. Agriculture was the other major source of employment in the region, but few lumber workers possessed the necessary combination of land, capital, and expertise to engage in farming.

The company town or single-industry setting gave employers immense power and was a major factor in restraining strikes and trade unionism, in Humboldt County and other lumbering regions across the United States.⁶⁵ The first recorded strikes of lumber workers occurred in Pennsylvania in 1872 and in Humboldt County in 1881. Other factors that limited strike activity and the establishment of stable trade unions included a transient labor force, the highly cyclical nature of the lumber market, and the ease with which unskilled lumber workers could be replaced. Logistically, the problems of organizing workers dispersed over a wide area, often in remote locations, were formidable. Although working and living conditions were poor, technological changes in logging and milling did not result in a significant degree of “de-skilling.” Furthermore, in Humboldt County, wage levels and living conditions were better than lumber workers had experienced in Canada and the northeastern United States. Finally, the paternalism of lumber employers toward their workers and the community, or at least the perception of it, also helped to mitigate conflict.

This is not to say that all lumber workers passively accepted their lot. Small-scale, spontaneous strikes or walkouts were not uncommon in Humboldt County. Two issues, food and foremen, caused most of the stoppages. Lumber workers struck because they wanted a cook or a foreman fired or retained and believed they had prerogatives in these areas. During Humboldt’s first strike in 1881, John Vance quickly appeased his workers by firing the cook; lumber employers generally yielded on questions of food and foremen.⁶⁶ On these and other issues, lumber workers were more likely to “strike with their feet” by leaving camp in search of better conditions. The success of this tactic, however, depended on the state of the labor market.

By the mid-1880s, lumber workers in Humboldt County and elsewhere in the United States believed that any improvement in wages and working conditions would require the creation of unions, and thousands of lumber workers from Maine to California joined the Knights of Labor. In Humboldt County, however, almost ten years before the Knights emerged to represent them, lumber workers, farmers, artisans, and small businessmen united to express their discontent by supporting a succession of dissident third-party political movements. To the extent that the pioneers of Humboldt and other California counties expected to find a land of boundless opportunity and rough equality in the Golden State, they were to be sorely disappointed. Within a decade of the gold rush, disparities in both economic and political power were as marked as they were in the eastern communities from which they had come.⁶⁷ Workers and farmers in Humboldt County and elsewhere in California believed that the cherished American republic was threatened by corruption and a dangerous concentration of economic and political power. A series of events at the local, state, and national levels after the Civil War reinforced this perception and led to the founding of branches of the California Workingmen’s party in almost every county during the late 1870s. To many lumber workers, farmers, and artisans there was a close link between the defects in their political system and the widely fluctuating levels of wages and remuneration they received. They turned first to the ballot box to try to remedy these problems.