Recently I found an article written by my grandfather, James Ballard, telling about his arrival and experiences in Humboldt County. He wrote this account at the request of the Telegraph World on his retirement from the Western Union telegraph service. At the end he remarks that he feels the story is too personal and would not be of interest to outsiders. He never mailed the article. It is published here for the first time.

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Our family came to California in the fall of 1875, arriving in Alameda in the middle of November, where we joined father, who had preceded us about four years, coming from our farm home in New Brunswick, Canada, a few miles from Fort Fairfield, Maine. After a couple of weeks’ stay in Alameda and San Francisco, we boarded a little coast steamer to Eureka, a thriving sawmill town on Humboldt Bay, in the heart of the redwoods.

My father, having spent most of his life lumbering in the woods of New Brunswick and Maine, naturally was attracted to the woods of northern California. In August of the following year, he was accidentally killed in the woods.

I was then a boy of seventeen, the oldest of six children. This meant no more schooling for me. It was up to me to ‘keep the home fires burning’ and the table supplied. The next four years were spent by me in the big sawmills of Eureka, where the work was from six to six. Three of those years I stood each day with my shoulder within a foot or two of three whirling circular saws placed one above the other to enable them to saw the immense redwood logs into boards and timbers. As it was up to the sawyer, the man at the lever, to pile up as many feet of sawed lumber each day as possible in order to hold his job, that meant the two of us who handled every stick of lumber that came from the saw, did not need to have the word “hustle” defined for us.

Mr. and Mrs. James Ballard on their wedding day in 1884.

In the summer of 1880, depression in the lumber business shut the mills down and I found myself without a job. But a job I must have, so I accepted the first to be offered on a farm twenty miles from Eureka. When this job came to an end, I immediately returned to Eureka and was soon offered a job as night clerk in the principal hotel there, The Vance, owned by one of the pioneer mill men and loggers, John Vance.

There I was brought into contact with the telegraph where heretofore I had been no closer than seeing the telegraph poles and wires along the streets and roads, and therefore thought nothing at all about the process of telegraphing. The telegraph office was a small room partitioned off from the hotel office. The clicking of the sounder attracted my attention at once and I began to listen to it, and to watch the operator as I went about my duties in the hotel office. I soon got the opportunity to inspect the instruments closely and soon understood their character and also borrowed a copy of the Journal of the Telegraph from the operator, in which I found some learner’s instruments advertised and also a copy of the telegraph code.

But these instruments were too costly for my means at that time. I saw that the key alone made sounds like the sounder and so I made a wooden key with nails for contact points. With this I practiced every night after midnight when I was mostly alone in the office. Within a year I was able to read everything that came over the wire when I listened. In the meantime I purchased two of the cheap learner sets and got scraps of zinc from the operator and some fruit jars, to set up a battery at home, putting one upstairs and the other down, and teaching my sister, Sara Ballard, the code. She was soon able to send to me.

I advanced from night clerk to day clerk and finally to manager of the hotel. When the owner leased the hotel I immediately secured a job as a telegraph repairman and worked at a repair station sixty miles from Eureka. I spent two years riding the telegraph trail there. Most of my section was over a mountain trail, necessitating the use of a saddle horse. I remember well my delightful experiences in that beautiful mountain country with its many streams filled with trout in the summer and salmon in the winter and the hills alive with game. In winter in that country it rained, not in drops, but in sheets and columns of water driven by wind that no clothes could keep out. I remember my appearance after a thirty-mile trip over the line in such a storm; fording the rushing streams and making long detours on trails around many fords when they became impassable.

A little touch of romance here. When I became marooned between fords on one of the streams, I was forced to seek shelter at a ranch house and there met the girl (Minnie Hunter) who became my wife the next year. Thus the association with the telegraph service led me to her, otherwise I never would have seen her. What is fate?

I remember my encounter with a mountain lion while riding the trail, and my experience as a tenderfoot, with bucking cattle horses that I had to use in riding the line.

Later I was transferred to Eureka as manager of that office where I served 26 years until failing health compelled me to try a smaller office in an effort to recover. Then came my year-and-a-half at Watsonville, Calif., as a result, and my return to the Eureka office and being compelled to retire to outdoor life. I recovered my health and returned to service as an operator in the main Western Union office in San Francisco.

I retired from the service at the age of seventy in 1928. I now pass the time studying economics and sociology … but mostly I study my favorite author … Emanuel Swedenborg, whose works are on the human soul, spiritual world and its spiritual laws of life … Added to this, I work as an amateur painter in oil, in which I sometimes produce pictures which please my friends to whom I present them. Not being a professional with a reputation, I do not try to sell them.

Now having written all this out it seems to me, making due allowance for bias of the author, that it reads well, in fact is quite a story, although it contains but a small part of my life as a telegrapher. I look back on the service with the greatest of pleasure and would gladly do it over again. In fact my whole telegraph service is surrounded by almost a halo of romance. The passing of that wonderful language in which man first communicated with man instantaneously over a long distance with the dot and dash, fills me with regret. The skilled Morse operator at each end seemed to be in such close touch with the personality of his comrade at the other end, that he learned to know him even better than if face to face. For me that language was a living, breathing soul, while the automatic telegraph is like a sixteen-inch gun; deadly efficient but without a soul…

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James Ballard and his wife, Minnie, lived out their retirement days in Oakland near their daughter, Bess, and their son, Ernest and their six grandchildren.