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• HUMBOLDT HISTORY: Why Some Early Settlers Wanted a Canal From the Eel River to the Bay So Badly, Why Others Were Indifferent, and Why it Never Came to Be

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That prosperous times tend to foster and beget new enterprises stands as a commonly accepted truism of economic life. The years 1853 and 1854 were such a time for Humboldt County, and especially so for the bay area.

Sawmills were being opened at an unprecedented rate along the Eureka waterfront, with nine of these in full operation by the fall of 1854. Some 200 independent loggers whose capital investment in their logging operations was valued in excess of $400,000 were supplying the mills with the required logs, among which were to be found the first redwoods for conversion into commercial lumber. The mill equipment, and especially the saws, had not been large enough to cope with the giant virgin redwood saw logs until well into 1854.

The buoyant mood of the period was effectively sized up by the following newspaper assessment of business conditions prevailing during the late fall of 1854.

There is at the present time more animation in every department of business than we have ever before witnessed on the Bay.

Until about 1854 most of the logging took place in the immediate vicinity of the bay, the loggers availing themselves of the almost ubiquitous bay sloughs as well as the several small streams running into the bay to convey the saw timber to the mills.

The Times considered these same sloughs important enough to suggest petitioning the Legislature to declare them to be navigable waters in order to prevent anyone from willfully obstructing traffic therein.

And small wonder, for the remaining transportation picture did not give cause for rejoicing. The twenty miles of railroad operating in the bay environs by early 1855 were engaged almost exclusively in bringing lumber from the mills to the loading docks, possibly also for hauling incoming shipments of supplies back to town. Although there were some roads, these deteriorated into impassable quagmires during the winter rains, and as far as a permanent wagon road between the two principal bay towns, Arcata and Eureka, was concerned, none existed until the late 1850’s. Anyone wishing to travel overland between Arcata and Eureka during the first decade of their existence had an arduous journey of some fifteen miles confronting him, whereas, via the bay, it was only half that distance with regularly scheduled boat transportation available most of the time. Thus water was the prime mover during these early years and would remain so for the immediate bay area for some time to come, especially as the logging operations receded from the shores of the bay and spread into the prime redwood stands along the foothills and rivers north and south of the bay.

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The proposal to connect the Eel and Mad with the bay via canals was shortly followed by another allusion to the excellent prospects for water transportation afforded by these streams. This time the Times writer again pointed out the fine stands of timber lining both rivers and saw no difficulty in conveying the logs to the mills for “both are excellent streams for rafting, at least so say the ‘down-easters!’”

Apparently several of these “downeasters” together with other residents of the lower reaches of the Mad River had already arrived at a similar conclusion independently. On January 10, 1854, a Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal Company was incorporated …

for the purpose of taking the Water of Mad River in a Canal in order to open a communication between Mad River and a certain Slough well known to the Subscribers & leading into Humboldt Bay for the purpose of floating timber from Mad River into Humboldt Bay & for such other purposes as the same may be deemed practicable and profitable.

By December of the same year the proposed canal was completed, and at that time it was thought that “the canal will take almost the entire stream and as there is considerable fall along the line it will become the permanent bed.”

Now that we have our first operative canal let us take a closer look at some of the enterprising individuals responsible for this ambitious project. Two of the three initial directors, Messrs. Elzy Daly and Albert G. Handy, hailed from Ohio, and we can safely assume that they were cognizant of the commercial impact of canal transportation in that part of the country. No trace remains of the third original director, Ephraim Moore. Elzy Daly was also president of the company and James W. Daly, possibly related, held the combined offices of treasurer and secretary. By late fall of 1854, when the opening of the canal was noted by the local paper, another eastern party was prominently associated with the canal: Jed C. Butler from Vermont, who gave the enterprise a more pronounced “down-eastern” character.

Messrs. Butler, E. and J.W. Daly and Handy appear to have resided in or near Union as early as 1853 and all were landowners with holdings in the proximity of the canal by 1854. Thus the principals were all residents of Union and men of property who sought to open up the timber resources of the Mad River by means of the Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal. We have no cost estimates, but the issuance of 28 shares of capital stock “not to exceed three thousand dollars” on January 10, 1854, gives us some hint as to what the anticipated outlay for the construction of the canal was.

Curiously enough, no contemporary account of the construction or description of the canal could be found, albeit with the aid of an extant map of the times, plus some later descriptions, a composite approximation is feasible. As was the case with the proposed Eel River canal, the area where the river and the bay were separated by the shortest distance was chosen for the site, the declared intent of the builders being to divert the Mad River via the canal and a “certain Slough well known to the Subscribers and leading into Humboldt.”

The slough in question was the present day Mad River Slough, the northwesternmost of the bay sloughs, which at its extremity came to within approximately one half mile of the Mad River at a location nearly one mile upstream from where it flowed into the ocean. We can find no reliable information on the dimensions of the canal, and can only speculate that given the intended purpose of floating logs and the relatively low capitalization a rather shallow (say six feet at the most) and narrow (perhaps double its depth, or twelve feet) would seem reasonable.

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Nearly four years passed before the canal was utilized in sufficient quantity for the local press to take note. A certain logger named Lakin brought a large raft of logs into the bay via the canal sometime during the spring of 1858, and the article reporting the event closed on a note of optimism and encouragement: “There is fine timber on Mad River, and this canal may yet prove to be valuable property.”

It is highly improbable that the canal was not used during the first four years of its existence, and the rather categorical “has never been used” of the above report must be taken “cum granum salis.” The mere presence of such a waterway surely would have encouraged at least a modicum of use, if for no other reason than the fact that the canal represented the only direct navigable route from the Mad River Valley to the bay. For example, during February 1858 it was reported that logs had been cut upriver on the Mad with the intention of floating them “through Daily and Butler’s canal.” Canoes and other small boats regularly plied the waters of the Mad River and these small craft must have availed themselves of the canal to gain direct access to the bay. Such commonplaces as the passage of a canoe or a few solitary logs through the canal seldom reached the printed page, for much as today, they were not newsworthy enough: they lacked quantity, substance and possibly notoriety.

As to the relatively low incidence of use of the canal there comes to mind the possibility of excessive toll fees discouraging even such incidental use alluded to above, but unfortunately we lack evidence of such a practice. What we do know for certain is that a serious slump occurred in the local lumber industry caused by overproduction. The concomitant glut of the San Francisco lumber market and a general business depression in San Francisco seriously affected the Humboldt lumber industry. The lack of demand for local lumber products was especially noticeable during early 1855, when production dropped to less than half of the 1854 output.

During the late fifties and during most of the following decade the Indian problem grew to such ominous proportions that not only did it slow the influx of new settlers to the vacant public lands, but many of the older, established pioneers had to abandon their isolated settlements for the better protected and more populous bay area communities. Of immediate interest is this passage from Owen Coy’s history of the Humboldt Bay region, 1850-1875:

Arcata felt the effect of the Indian wars more than any of the other bay towns, for the hostility of the Redwood and Mad River tribes often brought the scenes of bloodshed dangerously near, the brick store of A. Jacoby being more than once used as a place of refuge for the women and children of the place.

Thus the young canal enterprise appears to have been beset by vicissitudes almost from its beginning, what with the depression of the lumber trade directly affecting its main source of anticipated income; the volume of logs passing through it on their way from the Mad to the bay mills. Just as the lumber business began to pick up again the Indian hostilities cast their pall over the lower and middle reaches of the Mad River watershed — the area where most of the saw timber that was to float through the canal was presumably expected to come from.

Among the various other possible elements contributing to the early difficulties of the canal, the frequently irresistible attraction of the mines for the less sedentary settlers of the bay area cannot be discounted. Many potential homesteaders succumbed to the often heard cry of “gold” during the first decade of the county’s existence. Possibly, Messrs. Moore and Joseph W. Daly were among them, for no local records exist for them beyond 1854.

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Curiously enough shortly after the completion of the Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal another canal proposal was made public, the purported purpose was to provide water power for the operation of several saw and flour mills.

The Times of Jan. 6,1855, reported:

Another resource which I deem of more importance than any other, is the water power which can be made available at comparatively but little expense. It has been ascertained, by ‘actual measurement,’ that in cutting a canal from Pattewott (Mad) River to the Bay, south of the present one, in a distance of three miles, by putting in a single dam, a fall of sixty feet could be obtained, which will afford the greatest sufficiency of power for six saw and flouring mills, each with a ten foot fall. The entire cost of the canal, dam and six mills, would not exceed one hundred thousand dollars. That it would be one of the safest investments in California, no one who is acquainted with the immense timbered resources through which the canal and river pass, will for a moment question.

It seems our correspondent’s optimism was unfounded; there were no takers, and little wonder when one considers that $100,000 was a large amount of capital even for normal times. What foolhardy investor would have risked such a sum during the beginning of a serious depression? Thus this particular canal suggestion could be seen to represent the last ripple of that great wave of enterprise that had engulfed the county during 1853-1854, another paper canal to muse and speculate about and to place in the “I wonder what it would have been like” file.

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The one other canal project of this period that bears mentioning is perhaps the least ambitious of all, which probably in great measure contributed to its singular success. The farmers situated on the bottomlands east of the canal that connected the Mad River and the bay were suffering frequent inundations during the winter months, and it was thought that by straightening the river some distance to the east, where it made a “huge bend” which forced the river over its banks during high water, the flooding could be prevented or at least reduced to a relatively harmless level.

Animated with high hopes the farmers of the affected area banded together, with the aid of some Arcata merchants, and the Times of Nov. 25, 1865, reported:

… a canal was cut across the neck of this land of sufficient capacity to receive a considerable portion of the waters of the river, thus conveying them below the point through which they usually made their way to the prairies.

A freshet during the late fall of 1865 put this modest canal to its first test, and it was declared a “complete success” for the rate of flow of the river had been increased measurably by straightening its channel via the canal. Other benefits noted were an increase in depth and a widening of the riverbed from forty to sixty feet which must have benefited the loggers in their efforts to float timber downstream, in addition to achieving the primary purpose of flood prevention.

Thus we approach the end of the first quarter century of canal building on the Mad River. Perhaps the most accurate indicator of the fortunes of the major canal scheme during this period is that on May 5, 1869, J.C. Butler, one of the early participants in the Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal Company, who had since moved to Orleans and apparently had acquired half interest in the company by that date, sold his half interest to John A. Hanna for the sum of $300. When one recalls that the original capitalization of said concern was $3,000 it quickly becomes obvious that the initial 25 years of the major canal projecion on the Mad River were anything but a financial success, and whatever high hopes the original entrepreneurs entertained were not realized during this period.

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During the early 1870’s, after a period of stagnation and neglect, the ownership of the first Mad River canal passed from the hands of Arcata residents and at least one absentee owner to become an entirely Eureka-based operation. The combined factors of necessary improvements and change of ownership prompted a new incorporation of the Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal Company on January 24, 1871.

A new spirit of enterprise emanates from the articles of incorporation of this new venture and one gains the impression that this was to be a much more ambitious project than the initial canal of 1854, especially since the stated purpose of the Eureka proprietors was to construct a canal “for the transportation of freight and passengers” between Mad River and Humboldt Bay. The enterprising and locally well-known John Vance, who was soon to build a railroad and lumber mill on the Mad River, and who owned a considerable amount of timberland in the Mad River watershed, was associated with the enterprise and served as one of the first three trustees of the company.

We can gain some idea of the improvements undertaken by the new owners from the following description of the canal which appeared in the West Coast Signal during the spring of 1873:

The canal has been enlarged sufficiently to permit the largest bay craft to pass through it into the river, three quarters of a mile from the mouth and one and a half miles up the river from tide water, affording a good outlet for produce and logs.

As was the case with the original canal, the volume of logs and other goods passing through in either direction initially did not amount to any economically significant total during the period immediately following modernization, for not until 1874 does the local press take more than cursory notice of its existence. During that year there appeared a very informative account in the Times describing the journey of some logs of sawtimber down the Mad River, through the canal and into the bay, and as the following passage therefrom clearly indicates, the cutting of logs was moving up river and the haul to the lumber mills on the bay was no longer the short trip of an earlier day.

After the logs are thrown into the river they will have to be floated about six and a half miles to the mouth of the canal which leads from the river into the bay. This canal is about a half a mile in length. The rafting ground is about a mile and a half from the canal in a slough of the bay; and the whole distance from the landing to the city of Eureka is about twenty miles.

The same correspondent relates that the party engaged in this particular logging operation put approximately a million feet of logs into the river during the previous year from a site closer to the mouth of the river than the present one. In the ongoing operation they were averaging 20,000 feet per day, with the maximum daily cut amounting to some 30,000 feet. There were already some 700,000 feet in the river — the result of 32 days of hauling — and another 800,000 feet cut and ready to be dumped into the river. Altogether this amounted to a respectable cut of timber and a sizable improvement over the previous year’s output.

As the volume of logs floated down the Mad River increased, the long-standing need for a boom strong enough to withstand the great force of logs and debris that were swept downstream during the annual winter and spring freshets became ever more apparent. For example, the author of the article just alluded to was a strong advocate of a permanent boom, and he pointed out the inadequacies of the succession of makeshift structures employed down through the early seventies.

Among the recent victims of this glaring lack of proper facilities were Messrs. Jackman and McCann, who lost some 150,000 feet of the one million feet total of logs cut and run downstream during 1873. Our correspondent concluded that

…the only seeming thing needed for successful logging on Mad River is a boom of sufficient strength to withstand the weight of the logs and the driftwood when they come down the stream in high water.

During the late fall of 1874 these same hapless loggers lost another half million feet of logs which were carried out to sea when another hastily constructed boom failed to hold. Although a substantial portion of the lost timber was beached and eventually recovered from the sands below the mouth of the Mad, the margin of profit must surely have dropped precipitously by the time this particular consignment of logs had been transported back into the river and thence floated via the canal to the several bay mills.

The above misfortunes are by no means isolated instances; they were unfortunately an all too common occurrence, and not only on the Mad River. There were occasions especially during high tides when heavy rains would send freshets down the various streams emptying into the hay that would sweep away booms intended to gather and hold logs for rafting to the mills. At times some logs could be salvaged, but again at great cost, and of course the booms had to be rebuilt.

Thus nature proved to be a fickle partner for logger and canal owner, for the winter rains were needed to raise the water level in the streams to a height adequate to permit floating of logs from the usually shallow upper reaches of the streams to deeper water, yet during years of excessive or even heavy rainfall the great rush of water hurling downstream and carrying all before it would frequently take an entire season’s cutting out to sea, with the logger incurring a total loss for those years.

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When the Mad River Boom and Land Company finally did erect a more permanent structure during the summer and early fall of 1877, time was already running out for the canal. Technological improvements in the sawing of timber at the major bay mills had increased the cutting rate to the point where the supply of logs coming to the mills via water no longer sufficed. Increasingly the mills either moved directly to the source of sawtimber, as did John Vance for example, or they became more dependent on the railroads for their regular supply of logs. By the following decade the railroads had become the single important mode of transportation for the lumber industry.

But there were other factors that contributed to the canal’s demise during the 1870s and ‘80s and we must at least touch on two of the more important of these in order to gain a better perspective from which to view the peculiar interplay of forces which finally sealed the fate of the Mad River Canal.

As the logging operations moved upstream during this period and the volume of logs cut and floated downstream increased, the force generated by high water during the winter and spring rains would cause the logs in the river to seriously erode the stream banks during their passage downstream. The resultant damage occasioned numerous complaints by farmers and ranchers with holdings along the streambed.

Another recurring objection to the canal was that much of the debris swept downstream by the logs and water made its way into the bay via the canal and was rapidly filling up the shipping channels of the north bay. As early as 1883, the Army Corps of Engineers reported considerable amounts of madrone driftwood imbedded in the clay dredged from the Arcata channel, and the point was made that frequent dredging was the only solution to keeping the channel open, especially since the water in that part of the bay tended to be heavily charged with sediment.

The above report contained some serious reservations concerning the wisdom of further improvement of the upper bay shipping channels, especially in view of the increasing use of railroads to haul manufactured lumber to the deep-water facilities of the south bay.

In sum, the report said:

The tendency of filling up the channels and growth of the flats in the bay has been observed and will increase with the denuding of the timberlands. Therefore the shipping point of all the lumber will be transferred and concentrated in the lower part of the bay along the main channel.

Arcata became especially aggravated by the threat that sedimentation posed to its already shallow shipping channel. The Arcata Union for the period 1886-1888 reflected that town’s sentiments concerning the canal most candidly, at times, in a highly effective fashion, such as in the following excerpt:

That canal is a nuisance, and has been for the past 30 years. As a commercial enterprise it has always been a failure. It has never benefitted anyone. Its intended use for logging purposes has worked a serious injury to the bed of the Mad River by floating logs down that stream. Farmers in the immediate vicinity have been ruined by it and all the channels in the bay have felt the effects of the debris dumped in them from Mad River.

Local opposition to the canal finally reached such an intensity during the late 1880’s that the Eureka Board of Harbor commissioners agreed to a permanent closing of the Mad River Canal in 1888.

With the closing of the canal some thirty-four years of fitful operation of the Mad River facility officially terminated. However, the old canal channel that once connected the river and the bay slough and was now separated from the river by a levee failed to heed the official decision and continued to haunt the farmers and ranchers of the bottomlands during periods of heavy rainfall when the force of the water would occasionally break the levee and flow into the bay as of yore.

There remained a small but staunch group of local canal enthusiasts who surfaced periodically during the ensuing decades to admonish the upper bay residents for giving the canal short shrift. Among these could be found the landowners situated below the erstwhile canal on the Mad River who claimed that the closure caused the logs and debris now flowing out to sea to damage their lands.

But perhaps the most fitting tribute to the abiding interest the notion of canal transportation held for the bay area is contained in an item appearing in 1911, where a group of lumbermen made a strong argument for a new canal by pointing out how the flow of the Mad River through the bay would scour out and deepen the northern end of the bay. Some farmers joined in by indicating that they could profit from the ensuing cheaper means of transporting their goods to Eureka and there was even talk to the effect that the oyster beds would flourish as a direct consequence of the fresh water flush.

The newly proposed canal was to be one of the lock variety to enable proper control of the flow of water during all seasons. And thereby hangs a tale, for one is naturally led to speculate how different local canal history might have been if more capital and engineering knowledge had been applied when the first canal was dug back in 1854.

Needless to say, the proposal in question remained an idle pipe dream, for the railroad thoroughly dominated the local transportation picture by this time, and with progress in road building and the development of the internal combustion engine the railroad in turn was soon to face the challenge of the truck. Thus these sentiments are mere ripples on the steadily onward flowing river of time, unable to alter its course, in this case the official closing of the Mad River Canal in 1888.

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