The Lumberjacks Who Felled California’s Giant Redwoods
This series of photos from the 1915-era capture lumberjacks
working among the redwoods in Humboldt County, California, when tree
logging was at its peak. The photos are part of the Humboldt State
University Library Special Collections, a series of pictures from
northwest California from the 1880s through the 1920s by Swedish
photographer A.W. Ericson.
When Euro-Americans swept westward in
the 1800s, they needed raw material for their homes and lives.
Commercial logging followed the expansion of America as companies
struggled to keep up with the furious pace of progress. Timber
harvesting quickly became the top manufacturing industry in the west.
When
gold was discovered in north-western California in 1850, thousands
crowded the remote redwood region in search of riches and new lives.
Failing in efforts to strike it rich in gold, these men turned toward
harvesting the giant trees for booming development in San Francisco and
other places on the West Coast. These trees are the tallest and one of
the most massive tree species on Earth. The size of the huge trees made
them prized timber, as redwood became known for its durability and
workability. By 1853, nine sawmills were at work in Eureka, a gold boom
town established three years prior due to the gold boom. At that period
of time, redwood forest covered more than 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2) of
the California coast.
The loggers used axes,
saws, and other early methods of bringing the trees down. Rapidly
improving technology in the 20th century allowed more trees to be
harvested in less time. Transportation also caught up to the task of
moving the massive logs. Railways started replacing horses and oxen.
Land fraud was common, as acres of prime redwood forests were
transferred from the public domain to private industry. Although some of
the perpetrators were caught, many thousands of acres of land were lost
in land swindles.
After many decades of unobstructed clear-cut
logging, serious efforts toward conservation began. In 1918, the
Save-the-Redwoods League was founded to preserve remaining old-growth
redwoods, and their work resulted in the establishment of Prairie Creek,
Del Norte Coast, and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Parks among others.
By the time Redwood National Park was created in 1968, nearly 90% of the
original redwood trees had been logged.
Today, the Redwood
National and State Parks combined contain only 133,000 acres (540 km2)
of redwood forest. In addition to the redwood forests, the parks
preserve other indigenous flora, fauna, grassland prairie, cultural
resources, portions of rivers and other streams, and 37 miles (60 km) of
pristine coastline.
