From Boom to Bust... And Back: Miners, Drillers, Fishers

Welcome to part 2 of our blog series on early industries of Humboldt County! This week, we'll be taking a closer look at the earliest industries in the county-natural resource extraction. These are the industries that initially brought settlers to the region.

In 1849, shouts of “Eureka!” could be heard along streams and in mines across California. Gold was discovered in the Trinities by adventurous land-travelers a year earlier and it would only be about a year after the Josiah Gregg expedition landed in Humboldt Bay in 1849 until a small town on the bay would take “Eureka” as its namesake.  

A town sprung up alongside the bay, serving as a landing point for newcomers arriving by ship. Eureka wasn’t alone, however: Bucksport and Arcata (then called Union or Union Town) established themselves as landing points where miners could stock up and head north to the Trinities to strike it rich- at least that was their plan.

At these landing points, port towns like early Eureka, the waterfront developed in a wildly colorful locale, stocked to the brim with saloons, supply stores, docks, and gambling halls. These port towns supplied newcoming miners with everything they needed (and didn’t need) at a high cost. Once they were stocked, the miners could start the journey to the goldfields located along the Trinity and Klamath Rivers. Some eager miners also tried to pull gold flakes from beach sand en masse, most notably Gold Bluffs Beach in the present day Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Those efforts failed- but the name stuck.

Early mining consisted of gold panning, the stereotypical miner crouched by a river running sand through water in a pan to pick out the gold within. After the easily accessible gold was mostly harvested, hydraulic mining took over, employing formerly solo miners into mining companies, which could afford the expensive equipment required. The process of hydraulic mining, created during the Gold Rush in California, consisted of shooting large quantities of highly pressurized water at hillsides, releasing gravel which was then sifted through to find the gold within. The process led to high levels of gold being harvested as more gravel was processed by fewer people, but the process also led to the demolition of whole hills, an increase in rivers filling with sediment causing flooding, changes in river courses, and irreparable landscape damage. On the Klamath River, the flooding of sediment impacted the river’s legendary salmon runs as well.

Mining was carried out by people from around the world who worked, oftentimes uneasily, side by side. Chinese miners were employed in the lowest paid, most menial jobs, becoming an integral part of the mining history across California and in Humboldt County. While they were detested by a large majority of other workers, they worked hard, rarely were sick (due to boiling their water for tea and rice and rarely drinking alcohol), and followed directions. They were employed digging water ditches in mining centers like Trinity Center, where 200-500 Chinese were employed at Coffee Creek Ditch.  

Early settlers to the area did log the area immediately adjacent to Humboldt Bay in order to build their homes, however, early logging efforts focused on smaller trees, as tools brought from the East were built to handle smaller trees. Tanoak was popular in many areas, with the bark used to tan livestock hides. Bundles of this bark were stacked onto carts and carried by wagon trains along early roads in Humboldt county to port towns for export. Logging tools that traveled to Humboldt county with immigrants and merchants were not designed for the redwood trees of unusual size in Humboldt County- in the occasion that a large tree or stump had to be removed, loggers would drill holes into the tree, pack it with dynamite, and blow up the tree. It was a matter of time until advancements were made to capitalize on the giant trees and endless forests. Innovations, management expertise, and luck under the guidance of John Dolbeer, William Carson, and other enterprising men led to the construction of mills around Humboldt Bay. New inventions and technologies invented in Humboldt County like the double band saw, Steam Donkey, and Bull Donkey revolutionized the logging industry on the whole and allowed logging companies to speed up all parts of logging and milling, leading to more trees processed at lower costs. Logging companies forayed into the shipbuilding industry as well, to reduce their shipping costs by operating their own ships built from their own timber. With the addition of railroads locally and railroads later connecting Humboldt County to markets in San Francisco, the local and international markets boomed with redwood.

One often overlooked and short lived industry was oil drilling. Oil in Humboldt County was found as early as 1857 but was overshadowed by the rush to the gold mines, which offered the tantalizing chance of making a lot of money with low overhead. It wasn’t until the 1860s that oil was becoming nationally valuable, warranting locals to begin investigating the possibility of drilling for oil in the area.

The story goes that Petrolia, as the area was now known, had oil that was such high quality, it needed little to no refining, making it a potential goldmine for drillers. It wouldn’t be a quick, cheap, or easy process though. Oil drilling requires a large investment in capital to purchase supplies and construct the infrastructure needed to drill. Humboldt County may have been rich in resources, but not money-or wealthy investors. Access to coastal, southern Humboldt County was difficult at best and impossible at worst, making it nearly impossible for the industrial supplies needed to construct and maintain the oil drills to get to Humboldt County. Transporting the oil out of rural southern Humboldt was also a challenge. Certain ships could get to the area, but as the steamship became a more popular mode of transportation, many companies refused to ship oil due to its flammability. 

A backup option was to attach barrels of oil to the sides of mules and send them on overland routes, but it was costly, inefficient, and dangerous. Drilling season was also limited due to rainfall flooding the oil wells. Other regions that drilled for oil were able to out-compete Humboldt County oil, bringing the short-lived oil industry in Humboldt County to an end in 1866. Later attempts were made to revive the industry, but none succeeded due to similar issues, namely cost and transportation.

Fishing became a popular industry as settlers established claims and began building their lives along the rivers of Humboldt County. In the first commercial fishing season on the Eel River in 1853, 250,000 pounds of salmon were harvested. There were no limits on take, so people strung nets across the river and hitched horses to the nets to harvest incredible amounts of fish. Companies formed to package and process the fish, which was transported around the country. Whaling was of interest around the Humboldt Bay area, with records showing the Captain H.H. Buhne owned a whaling ship and would go whaling on occasion. Whaling, however, would peak in popularity in the 1920s and 1930s.  

The natural abundance of the region that became Humboldt County attracted early settlers to the region, tying the early history of the county to the larger history of California and the West as a whole. The towns themselves boomed and busted with the economies, but people began to settle in, starting their families and settling into industries like agriculture, which included farming and raising livestock. We’ll look more into these industries in our next post!