The car is long.

Really long.

The whole thing is a javelin, a narrow wedge that rides on foot-wide tires in the back and skinny little wheels in the front. The driver’s seat is a foxhole. The exposed engine lives as a permanent rear passenger and drinks nothing but grain alcohol.

Its torque? Practically instantaneous. The handling? Not good, but that doesn’t really matter because it only goes straight. But just how fast can the thing go?

It’s slower than a Prius.

Despite its aerodynamic stylings, the so-called Alcohol Abuse II only spits out around five horsepower and tops out at 85 miles an hour. It’s a junior dragster — a baby brother to the fire-eating V-8s that can rip through a quarter mile in less than 10 seconds —but it’s still a nasty little thing that can whip some heads back pretty hard.

Alcohol Abuse II is the shared love between Grant and Dax Williamson, a Eureka-based father and son duo that race junior drag events from the Samoa Drag Strip to Las Vegas. There’s a deep field of junior drag racers in Humboldt, ranging in age from as young as 8 to as old as 17. Races are an eighth of a mile long. The rules are a little complicated — for safety and to prevent winners from only being kids with parents who can afford to dump money into the cars, racers aged 13 and up can’t make the run in under 7.9 seconds under the National Hot Rod Association rules, and younger drivers have to go even slower. Drivers race in head-to-head matchups. False starts (called “red-lighting” in drag racing) are disqualifications. Racers compete for points, and the season runs from April to September.

Junior drag isn’t most racers’ first motorsport. Grant Williamson, 15, has been auto racing in some form or another practically since he could walk. He started on go-karts when he was 8. When he was 13, he had an opportunity to sit in a junior drag car at a racing event. He was captivated. Soon after, Grant and Dax drove to Canada and bought their first dragster.

Twelve-year-old Jeremy Johnson’s gateway was through his father Matt, a lifelong auto enthusiast who owns a heavily modified Honda Civic that makes 1,500 horsepower. Jeremy started racing dirt bikes when he was 4, and when he was 8 he tried a junior dragster for the first time.

All three of his younger brothers also race; Jeremy and his 9-year-old brother Logan went head-to-head several times last season. Jeremy won most of the matchups, but Logan snatched victory from his jaws in the final round of a competition once.

“I was very confident,” Logan said. “So I beat Jeremy, and he got really mad.”

For Isabella Fuentes-Zittel, 15, this season’s top overall scorer at the Samoa Drag Strip, the start of her fascination was just as simple — all it took was a rip down the track in a family friend’s junior dragster and she wanted in. But the Fuentes-Zittels are not a racing family, and did not have the $8,000 to spend on a car plus the money for safety gear. Isabella had to raise the money herself, going around Eureka to get sponsorships.

“I had to make this whole list, this pitch of what I was going to say,” Isabella said. “I remember sitting in the living room, having my mom help me write it down, and I’m like ‘I can’t do this, Mom, I can’t do this!’ I was in tears. I would have panic attacks before going into the places, like, ‘Dad, help me, I can’t do this.’ And then I just did it, got it done, got it over with. It was rough, but we got through it…[what made it bearable was] the thought of being able to drive the car. I would just replay the moment of me going doing the track and think, ‘It’s all worth it.’”

Her dad Todd laughed. “She’s addicted and she doesn’t even know it.”

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Drivers and their parents spend hours tightening bolts, replacing gaskets, changing fluids, swapping engines, installing clutches — the cars are babied, carried hundreds of miles in trailers full of tools and spare parts, before being forced to work harder than any single-cylinder engine should have to. Racers spend hours and hours maintaining the cars, traveling, sharpening their reaction times until the space between the go-light turning green and the accelerator being slammed into the carbon fiber frame measures only two-one hundredths of a second. The time investment adds up. Every parent said their children do well in school and make sure they know it’s their top priority, but for a couple of them the allure of professional drag racing outweighs all else. The Williamsons spent 26 weeks out of the last year on the road traveling.

“This is probably the biggest commitment I have as a 15 year old,” Grant Williamson said. “Even my job — still a big commitment, but this is probably the biggest thing, because this will really lead to my future and possibly a million-dollar paycheck.”

Isabella Fuentes-Zittel is dual-enrolled in community college and her high school and isn’t concerned about what she’ll do when she ages out of junior drag, though she does admit that it can be difficult to find time to do school and compete and maintain the car.

There’s camaraderie in the pits and on the bleachers between parents too, who get time to spend with their kids and chances to watch them win races.

“My car racing has always been a passion for me in my life,” Matt Johnson said. “And I’ve done eight seconds in the quarter mile at 175 miles an hour. It’s super freaking cool. But I’ve never felt as good as I feel when any one of those boys wins a race. And it could be a regular race, nothing special, and it’s still the coolest freaking thing in the world for me. It’s just those proud dad moments, and I get to have them pretty often.”

Many of them are also active participants in the process. Part of the byzantine scoring system is guessing how fast a car will run the race, but many parents assume that responsibility, considering factors like wind speed, air density, humidity, temperature, and any other million factors before “dialing it in.”

All the parents mentioned how grateful they were that so many other parents were so supportive of each other. When a part fails, another is always willing to give it to them, even when their kids are competing against one another.

“They’re all helpful parents out there,” Dax Williamson said. “If they see you need help — and we’ve lent out parts to other kids — then we’re going to race! Let’s have a good time, but let’s also have a good race. Let’s not win because you’re broken.”

“If you’re racing my kid and you need a motor, I’ll pull the motor off one of my other cars and give it to you,” Matt Johnson said. “And it’s happened for me. It’s happened for other parents. I’ve helped put motors and cars in between rounds that somebody gave them out of their car or trailer, just so they can make the next round.”

But none of this answers why any of them do it in the first place. Of course, it feels awesome to go fast and meet other people that also like to go fast, but there’s more to it than that for a lot of competitors.

“After racing, I was getting — not ego, but just happiness and confidence and the [knowledge] that I can do it,” Isabella said. “And then I get first place, and I’m like, ‘I can definitely do this. I can basically do anything.’ If only the girl who was driving and getting third could see me, her mind would probably blow up.”

Geynna Buffington knew she had little time to become pregnant once she was released from prison at age 40. For over a year, she tried to have a baby. She didn’t know pregnancy would be unlikely because of a procedure she had nearly a decade earlier.

In 1998, while Buffington was incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, she underwent an “endometrial ablation” in order to treat what a prison doctor had told her was an abnormal pap smear. The procedure destroys the uterine lining and should not be done for people who have any desire for future childbearing, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

But Buffington was not told how the procedure would affect her fertility.

“That is so humanly low for someone to make the decision that I don’t deserve to have children because I’m incarcerated,” said Buffington, 58. “I would have been a great mom.”

Buffington this month finally received recognition that the state robbed her of her reproductive freedom. Securing that acknowledgment came only after a long court battle to make her eligible for California’s historic reparations program for people who were forcibly sterilized while in state prisons, state-run hospitals and homes.

Her case could have wide-ranging implications for other people who were sterilized by the state and whose applications for the 2021 reparations program were rejected by the California Victim Compensation Board on technicalities.

The board four times denied Buffington’s applications for a $35,000 reparations payment, writing that ablations don’t qualify as sterilizations under the law because the procedure “was performed to treat her underlying medical condition” and “does not eliminate fertility.”

That all changed when an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled earlier this year that the compensation board wrongfully denied her reparations, stating that “informed consent is a linchpin of the statute.”

In another signal that the program hasn’t lived up to its promise, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 30 signed a law that gives survivors who were previously denied until Jan. 1 to file an appeal. The compensation board has an additional 15 months to consider those appeals and process applications. The program, which was slated to conclude last month, will now end in January 2026.

The compensation board is a state agency that collects restitution and works to compensate victims of crime. It’s overseen by three members: State Controller Malia Cohen; Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton; and a representative from Newsom’s cabinet, Government Operations Secretary Amy Tong.

The agency told CalMatters via an email that its executive officer, Lynda Gledhill, “is unable to give an interview regarding this particular matter as it is pending litigation.”

The email also noted that the agency was “sending letters to all claimants who had documentation available and received denials informing them of their ability to request an additional review of their denial.”

Thousands forcibly sterilized in California institutions

Starting in the early 1900s, more than 20,000 people – disproportionately poor women, people of color and people with disabilities – were involuntarily sterilized in state-run homes and hospitals under California’s eugenics laws. Those laws were repealed in 1979, but the practice continued. A 2014 state audit found that at least 794 people in state prisons underwent various medical procedures that “could have resulted in sterilization” between 2005 and 2013.

The most recent wave of sterilizations were connected to James Heinrich, a doctor who worked at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla. According to state prison medical records obtained by KQED, Heinrich ordered at least 80 ablations between 2006 and 2012. He did not perform the procedure on Buffington.

In 2013, The Center for Investigative Reporting, which first reported the sterilizations, quoted him saying that the state wasn’t paying doctors a significant amount of money for the sterilizations “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

The government agency that oversees prison health care, in a 2014 memo obtained by CalMatters through the California Public Records Act, acknowledged that ablations and dozens of other procedures had “the potential for sterilization or diminished capacity for future conception.” Those procedures, the memo stated, must go through a heightened level of review “effective immediately.” It was sent to top prison health care officials just three months before the state concluded its audit on forced sterilization in California prisons.

“They knew we were coming,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, the former state senator who requested the state audit. “I think that memo was clearly in response to either what they knew was going on, or what they needed to do in order to assure that they were covering their rear ends and make sure the doctors and providers understood that indeed, consent was required in advance.”

California in 2021 passed a reparations law carried by Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo to “acknowledge the wrongful sterilization of thousands of vulnerable people,” according to the legislation.

Since then, more than 75% of applicants were denied reparations, according to the compensation board.

Among the applicants who volunteered their demographic information, the majority self-identified as Black or African American. The compensation board approved payments to just 118 applicants as of Oct. 4. KQED and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program previously spoke with six people who had ablations and whose applications were denied by the compensation board. At least four of the ablations were ordered by Heinrich.

Carrillo, a Los Angeles Democrat, acknowledged the rejections and delays during a hearing in August. “For all of the survivors and individuals that still have a pending case: know that you are heard, you are seen, the compensation board cares about what happened to you at a state institution where you have been denied the opportunity to be a parent, to be a mother – that should have been your choice…the compensation board is doing everything it possibly can to ensure that you have an answer to your appeal.”

‘Sterilization is unambiguous’

Assemblymember Wendy Carillo speaks to the crowd gathered for the Child Care Providers United Rally at the state Capitol in Sacramento on June 15, 2023. Photo by Julie A Hotz for CalMatters

After the compensation board’s fourth denial of Buffington’s application for reparations, her attorneys, WookSun Hong and John Moore, filed a petition in Alameda County Superior Court arguing that the board’s decision was not based on the law or science. She is one of four survivors to sue the compensation board.

Included in Buffington’s petition was a declaration from Cynthia Chandler, an attorney who helped draft the law and who now works for Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price.

“We collectively and deliberately chose NOT to define or limit the methods of sterilization under which survivors could qualify for compensation as we appreciated that there are many different methods by which reproductive capacity can be destroyed and we did not want to inadvertently exclude a qualifying class from recovery under the compensation program,” wrote Chandler.

“That was a terrible thing that happened to us. And it doesn’t deserve to be overlooked.”
— Geynna Buffington

Judge Michael Markman on June 25 ruled that the compensation board abused its discretion and interpreted the reparations law too narrowly. He found that an endometrial ablation meets the requirement for compensation because there was no evidence that Buffington gave her informed consent prior to undergoing the procedure.

Additionally, Markman wrote that the online medical source the compensation board relied on to support its justification for Buffington’s denials did “not suggest that fertility is maintained after the procedure.”

He ordered the compensation board to reconsider Buffington’s application “without mistakes of law.” Roughly two months later, the compensation board approved her application.

“The court determined that ‘sterilization’ is unambiguous and is the permanent inability to reproduce,” the compensation board wrote in its decision to release the money. “The court sided with Geynna B. and determined that all procedures that result in sterilization are barred where there is lack of informed consent.”

Last week — four months after the Alameda court ruling in her favor — she received her payment.

“I felt like some justice was being done – that I was being seen,” Buffington said. “That was a terrible thing that happened to us. And it doesn’t deserve to be overlooked.”

Advocates for the survivors commended the court decision and said it’s a first step to opening the door for relief for others who were denied.

“This ruling indicates the need for wide sweeping justice that was not met,” Chandler said.

Will the board release reparations to others?

Today, Buffington works as a certified peer support specialist for people in recovery and an assistant director at Footprints Around the World Inc., a nonprofit organization that serves homeless and low-income families in Los Angeles. She plans to put away the money she received in reparations for her retirement.

“This is one of the cases where an underprivileged person who doesn’t have anything was prejudiced and treated like a number and then set aside,” said Hong, one of her attorneys. “To me, it’s significant that a government agency acknowledged their mistake, but it’s also sad that it took a court order to rectify their mistake.”

“They were hellbent on denying this claim, I believe, because they know they have failed an entire class of people.”
— Attorney Cynthia Chandler, who helped draft the law

Chandler said she’s glad that the court put “a monkey wrench” in the compensation board’s process.

“They were hellbent on denying this claim, I believe, because they know they have failed an entire class of people,” she said. “I hope that this ruling provides some level of precedent to force the compensation board to be accountable.”

The compensation board has not said how it plans to apply the court order to other survivors who were wrongfully denied reparations. Without a new policy in place, advocates have expressed concern that survivors could continue to face barriers to receiving compensation, including time, money and legal resources.

“I’m anxious to know what this means for the hundreds of other survivors who were denied because the state said that the procedure they had was not sterilizing,” said Jennifer James, an associate professor of sociology at UC San Francisco and member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who has assisted survivors with their applications. “I hope that the compensation board will proactively change their decisions and award them compensation so that they don’t have to seek legal support.”

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Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow. She began this reporting with KQED and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

PREVIOUSLY:

• PASTOR BETHANY: Jonah Escaped the Whale, But the Point of the Story is What He Escaped After That

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Wow, you’ve been through some hard stuff, haven’t you? Loss seems to follow you, or maybe it’s that one loss that seems to define you, mapping your path through grief or blame or resentment. “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life, and we will call it fate,” psychologist Carl Jung once wrote.

A lot of us do this often – make the big fish of our life into our entire storyline (as I mused in last week’s post on the biblical book of Jonah). Sometimes this big fish becomes everything for us, and all we can see. But sometimes it can also become a turning point. Sometimes venturing into the big fish, that depth of insurmountable loss, is what invited change.

I’ve found it’s often in those deepest places, way down to the bottom of myself, that I realize God has been with me the whole time – at the bottom of the barrel and the end of my rope. When I’m in a place of desperation, there’s nowhere left to turn but to God.

Jonah found God in the deep, when everything else was gone. The Hebrew word, yarad, is used three times in this chapter of Jonah. It means to go down or to sink. It’s like the writer wants us to visualize sinking. Sinking can be something that happens to us and it can also be something that we allow to happen to us. Sometimes we sink to avoid reality and responsibility, and sometimes we sink because we’ve been pushed down.

Jonah sank to avoid. He got on that ship to avoid what he was asked to do: to warn Nineveh. But as he sailed away from the direction he was supposed to go, the wind and the waves became so destructive that the sailors began throwing their livelihood and financial well-being overboard just to survive. And Jonah responds by totally avoiding all the communal emotional turmoil and fear by sinking below deck. As these sailors were struggling and shouting and praying, Jonah says, “Peace out” and sinks to the bottom of the ship to sleep it off.

Sometimes when life feels like it’s too much because of our own choices — the million little harmful decisions that have grown into a huge storm — it feels easier to numb and avoid and ignore the chaos we’ve created around ourselves, like we’re sinking to the bottom and going to sleep so we can avoid the destruction we’ve caused. And our people, those we love and those we might not even know, currently live through and feel the consequences of our choices while we sleep it off.

I’ve found that once I realize the destruction my choices have caused, there’s this temptation to believe I’m worthless or no good. Instead of seeking forgiveness or admitting wrongs, some people tend to deflect and choose not to take responsibility, which is what Jonah does after the sailors discover the storm was his fault. He simply tells them the good Sunday School answer that he worships the God of heaven who made the sea and dry land, like he’s spouting off John 3:16 from memory but has never taken it to heart.

Jonah knows the right words to say but they seem to mean nothing to him.

And he says, “Fine, throw me overboard because I’m no good and worthless.” Not, “I shouldn’t have brought you into this and I’m sorry for the harm I’ve caused you.”

So they throw him overboard and this big fish swallows Jonah and becomes his temporary home.

(I know, I know. Why would anyone believe such a far-fetched story? You might not. No big deal! But there’s a type of wisdom we can apply from ancient stories written thousands of years ago).

I see the big fish as an act of grace and mercy. God didn’t have to rescue Jonah or even need to empower this whiny, self-absorbed, small-minded man to accomplish anything. And I don’t think God was surprised by Jonah going the opposite direction — to jump overboard, to sink below and do anything it took to avoid this invitation.

For three days and nights, I imagine Jonah sitting in his thoughts and replaying his life like a movie. Jonah’s life wasn’t this tiny snapshot we get here. His life contained loss, death, rejection, infidelity, falling in love, disappointment, abuse, weddings and celebrations, hangovers, embarrassing moments, dread and fear, arguments, worship, prayer, dinner parties – you know, everything your life contains.

Over three days he thought about his life and he began to wake up to what was instead of what wasn’t. He’d been sleepwalking through his life, simply existing in his relationships, in his faith, in his work.

If you got alone for three days and nights with only your thoughts and prayers, what would you wake up to? Have you been slogging through your relationships? Numbing out through mindless scrolling? Being physically present but not actually connected? What might your unconscious becoming conscious show you if you sat in the lonely silence for a while?

(You are beloved.)

I don’t know why that loss has demanded so much from you these years, but I do know it’s not your whole story, and to sink into numbing sleep to avoid that storm isn’t helping anymore. But it can be in those dark places of loss, the ones at the end of your rope, where Love and grace meets you and wakes you up to re-engage your life once again.

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Bethany Cseh is a pastor at Arcata United Methodist Church and Catalyst Church. Follow her on Instagram.

I’d like to mention first that I write this coming from a place of privilege, as my husband, dog and myself are safe, and our home was spared from the destruction of Hurricane Helene. My business is also not damaged, but because Western North Carolina is mostly out of power, and there is no running water for potentially months, I am out of work indefinitely. Officials have said even when the water is turned back on, the water is so contaminated we may not be able to shower or drink it. There were many factories that were washed away by the rushing waters, including a plastics manufacturer, so the mud that is leftover in towns and buildings is full of chemicals. 

It’s hard to explain this catastrophic situation to my fellow Humboldt folks, or anyone who doesn’t live in the South East. My whole family lives in Eureka, and most of my best friends as well, so I’ll try to use examples I gave them. Imagine you live up on Humboldt Hill, up Fickle Hill, or Kneeland. You come down the hill into town and all you see is brown rushing water and the roofs of buildings. Eureka is gone. Arcata is gone. Then you learn Blue Lake, Willow Creek, Fortuna, and Ferndale have also been wiped out. I’ve lived in Asheville, NC for 8 years now, and one of the many reasons I fell in love with it is because it reminds me of Humboldt. We are full of locally owned businesses, art galleries, breweries, really special restaurants and shops. Surrounded by forests and hiking trails. A lot of Asheville and the surrounding towns have areas just like Old Town or the Arcata Plaza, and they are now rubble. I heard one business owner say in 2004 when we had a bad flood, the water came up to the steps of her business, this time it was up to the ceiling. 

But Asheville is not coastal, we are at 2,100 feet elevation in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hundreds of miles away from the ocean. We are not known to be affected by hurricanes, nor do we get other natural disasters like forest fires, earthquakes, or tornados. This was all extremely unexpected and we were not properly told how to prepare like how Florida would be during a hurricane. Parts of North Carolina got up to 30 inches of rain dumped on us in a matter of days, even before the hurricane actually hit us. Since we are a hilly and mountainous terrain, the water funneled into our valleys and rivers and streams. Many of our rivers run right through town, including The French Broad and Swannanoa River. Once these started to overflow, the water began to rush into neighborhoods within minutes.

When we woke up Friday, Sept. 27, we were without power and our phones were not working. Our neighborhood had downed trees and power lines but again, we are up on a hill away from the water so we just thought we had had a bad wind storm. Historic Biltmore Village is at the bottom of our neighborhood, once we walked down there we realized what was really going on. I could only see the roofs of my favorite vintage stores, a food truck we frequent was floating away alongside a semi truck and propane tanks, our friend’s apartment building was surrounded by rushing water up to the second floor with people stuck on their balconies. A group of us stood by the water’s edge and heard someone yelling “help” over and over and we couldn’t tell where it was coming from. 

The scene I’m describing happened all over Asheville, but also our surrounding towns in Appalachia like Marshall, Black Mountain, Hot Springs, and Burnsville to name a few. Wonderful, vibrant, community-driven places that literally look like they got bombed. One of our major highways heading out of town collapsed. Many roads have washed away that lead to rural areas so emergency vehicles cannot get there. We have pack mules bringing in supplies and incredible humans hiking to check on missing people. Thats the amazing thing we are all witnessing is the community coming together to save each other, it’s so hopeful during this deeply devastating time. And I can say I’m actually thankful for social media right now, everyone is sharing information via Instagram, including our city officials. Now that there is limited internet in some places, there are Instagram posts and stories daily updating town supply needs, drinking water and medic tent locations, what fire department has wifi, how to apply for disaster relief unemployment, missing persons, etc. It’s how my friends have been able to tell each other “I’M SAFE!” when our phones didn’t work for days. Through all the suffering Asheville is very lucky to have some of these resources, but many more people in surrounding areas are stuck out in nooks and crannies, with zero contact, waiting to be rescued. 

I really appreciate you for reading this. We are all desperate for more outreach. I don’t think the rest of the country is really understanding the severity, this is the second worst hurricane in the nation’s history after Katrina. If you are able to donate, here are some local grassroots organizations that have been on the ground absolutely killing it since day one: 

BeLoved Asheville
Venmo: @BeLoved-Asheville
Paypal: BeLovedAsheville
Cashapp: $BeLovedAsheville

Mountain Mule Packers
Venmo: @mountainmulepackers 

Asheville Survival
Venmo: @AppMedSolid

(Asheville is spelled with two e’s, avoid scammers!)

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Standing at a property high above Redwood Creek, overlooking the lush green valley surrounding the small, unincorporated community of Orick, Ron Barlow points to a farmhouse on the south side of town that’s been in his family for generations. 

Ron Barlow. | Submitted.

“I grew up on that ranch,” he says. “I’m third generation, and now with my grandkids, we’ve had five generations of people on this farm. That’s generations of people working this land and making sure these fields and the cattle are taken care of. And if the creek overtops the levee, it’s not just a few people that will be affected. This is my home, and the herd of sheep out there and the cows having their babies, this is their home, too.”

The levee system that runs through the heart of Orick consists of two earthen levees that flank each side of Redwood Creek. Over the years, the main channel has become impaired by vegetation and sediment deposits that restrict the channel’s capacity and increase local flood risk.

Over the last three decades, Barlow has written countless letters and convened dozens of meetings with county, state and federal officials on behalf of the Orick Community Services District (CSD) Board of Directors, which he chairs, to sound the alarm over ongoing maintenance issues with the Redwood Creek levee system. If the levee isn’t repaired – and soon – Barlow fears the creek will breach the levees and decimate the struggling community.

At the beginning of this year, during one of the worst storms of the season, Barlow and a few others walked along a section of the levee behind the Shoreline Market to look for any “bad spots” that could cause the levee to fail. “Redwood Creek came within about four feet of overtopping [the levee],” he said. “I’m going to tell you, if there had been snow in the mountains, Orick would not be here today. Or one-half of it, at least.”

As the agency responsible for levee maintenance, the County of Humboldt periodically removes sediment and vegetation from Redwood Creek to increase the channel’s capacity. However, it’s been about 10 years since any substantial maintenance occurred. 

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Barlow said. “People tell me that I’m way too passionate about these levees, but that’s what keeps our little community here. Highway 101 running through town and those levees – that’s why Orick is still here.”

At the Orick Community Hall a few hours earlier, we stood around a table neatly lined with manila folders full of old newspaper clippings, Xeroxed letters to elected officials, county staff reports, signed petitions and federal documents dating back to the late 1960s.

“The condition of the Redwood Creek channel has become a big concern to those of us living in the Redwood Creek Valley,” reads a Sept. 15, 1997 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that constructed the levee system in the mid-1960s. “We feel our homes and ranches could be in jeopardy.”

Another letter, from Oct. 5, 2004, asked for Congressman Mike Thompson’s help in addressing “a most serious situation” in Orick. “At this time, we have gained nothing in the efforts to protect our families, farms and businesses from flooding,” the letter says. “The capacity of the levee has dropped from the original 250-year flood down to a mere 50-year flood. There is a lot at stake here in Orick. Many of us have witnessed the floods prior to the levee being built to protect us, and remember the heartbreak and devastation.”

A petition attached to the letter (signed by about two dozen Orick residents) urges the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to uphold the county’s duty to maintain the levee, as stipulated in the operation and maintenance manual for the Redwood Creek Local Flood Protection Project. “The county supervisors need to recognize this situation is very serious, and immediate attention is essential before another winter season is upon us,” the 20-year-old petition states.

Each letter depicts an increasingly desperate situation in Orick, one that persists today. 

“The levees are the main thing,” Barlow explained, “but there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Our volunteer fire department is struggling. We work hard to secure funding but it’s difficult to keep it all going. We’re patting people on the back, saying come on, come on, we’ve got to do this, but I sometimes wonder, when do I bail off this boat?”

Orick’s heyday has long since passed, but Barlow is a firm believer that a little investment could go a long way for the economically depressed community and its 300-odd residents. The interest is there, but it’s slow going. 

Last year, the Yurok Tribe received a $6 million grant to build a “state-of-the-art” fuel mart, laundromat and tribal office on the footprint of the aging Shoreline Market. The Orick CSD was recently awarded $900,000 in federal grant funds to build a solar-powered microgrid to provide reliable power for critical infrastructure for the volunteer fire department, the community hall, the water pumping station and the grocery store. The county is also working with the Orick CSD to improve its water and wastewater infrastructure.

“It’s slowly coming along, but we have a lot going on in this small community,” Barlow said, readily adding that the Roosevelt Base Camp hotel was recently renovated and a new food truck is selling wood-fired pizza. “That said, our main asset is the levee system. And without that, there’s no need for us to even be here.”

However, the core of this complex issue isn’t maintaining the levee system. It’s the fact that the levees were built at all.

A History of Floods

Humboldt County is no stranger to torrential rain and inundated rivers, but after the unprecedented floods of 1955 and 1964 – both declared 1,000-year flood events, meaning there is a 1 in 1,000 chance of a similar flood occurring in any given year – devastated the region, local and federal officials agreed that it was time to intervene.

“At that time, Orick had a lot of dairies and a booming timber industry, so the Army Corps of Engineers came to the conclusion that it was in the federal government’s interest to build a levee at Redwood Creek,” Hank Seemann, the county’s deputy director of environmental services, told the Outpost during a phone interview. “As you can imagine, the Board of Supervisors was probably very willing to make that deal because of the loss that everyone had experienced during the 1964 flood. So the county agreed to operate and maintain the levee after it was constructed.”

In 1966, the Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the Redwood Creek Flood Control Project, a system of two earthen levees that run along the lower 3.4 miles of Redwood Creek, all the way out to the estuary. The levee was certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide 250 years of flood protection withstand a 250-year flood event along Redwood Creek. When construction wrapped up in 1968, the Army Corps turned over maintenance responsibilities, including “periodic” sediment and vegetation removal, to the Humboldt County Department of Public Works.

But just a few years after the levee system was constructed, Redwood Creek became impaired by large sediment deposits, dramatically reducing flood capacity. Eventually, the channel became overrun with vegetation.

The county went in and cleared the channel of sediment and vegetation in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, though it’s not clear how much material was removed at that time.

“In 1987 and 1988, over 200,000 cubic yards of sediment were removed to provide construction material for a major state highway project,” according to a 2019 letter to the Army Corps of Engineers signed by Seemann. “Humboldt County initiated a program of nearly annual treatments in the mid-1990s. Sediment was removed between 1996 and 2000 and between 2004 and 2010, in volumes ranging from approximately 2,700 cubic yards to 41,000 cubic yards per year.”

When the flood control project was constructed in the 1960s, the county didn’t know the channel and the estuary would fill up with sediment so quickly. The project’s design is a big part of the problem. 

“Literally, the first winter after it was constructed, there were observations of gravel deposits within the levee embankments,” Seemann said. “What that tells us is that the original geometry with having a lowered and flat channel bottom is just not sustainable, and it’s not consistent with a watershed that generates and conveys sediment. … It wasn’t that the design was inherently unstable, but it didn’t achieve the equilibrium that they envisioned, which reduced the capacity of the levee system.”

The levee was built to withstand floodwaters up to 77,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), which is about 40 percent more than the 1964 flood, according to the project manual. A hydraulic analysis from 2014 – the most recent analysis on file – determined that accumulated sediment had diminished the channel’s capacity by as much as 25,000 CFS, reducing flood protections for Orick residents and critical habitat for threatened salmonids. 

A study from the Army Corps of Engineers estimated that 430,000 cubic yards of sediment – 93 percent of the “original excavation volume” – would need to be removed from the channel to restore 250-year flood protection. Doing so would cost the county over $4 million, Seemann said, and it’s difficult to justify a project of that scale when it just doesn’t last. 

“A massive amount of sediment was removed from the channel in the 1980s to help build the bypass road for Redwood National Park … but the area they excavated filled in over the next several years,” he said. “So, what that tells us is you can do some sediment removal, but it won’t last long.”

Another option: The Army Corps of Engineers could come in and raise the levee to increase capacity in the channel. However, that option would be even more expensive – somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million.

“We have to work within a benefit-cost ratio – the benefits need to outweigh the cost,” Seemann continued. “The concept of a major levee improvement project, it’s just, it’s hard to see how that could pencil out. … It’s not an urgent situation. There isn’t an imminent risk, so it makes it even more difficult to justify. … If there was a 50 percent chance that the levees would be overtopped or compromised, that would justify urgent action to either repair the levees or work on trying to relocate the town. However, we’re not at that point.”

Well, what about vegetation removal? 

Over the years, Redwood Creek has become overgrown with vegetation – mostly fast-growing alder and willow trees – reducing the channel’s ability to move floodwaters.  Trees growing in the channel can slow flows and  “enhance deposition,” making it easier for sediment to accumulate along the creek bed and tree roots. However, overgrown vegetation is only considered to be a “contributing factor” to the levee’s ongoing issues, Seemann said.

“It’s hard to really quantify the effect of vegetation,” he explained. “It adds roughness or friction to the flow … that can encourage more sediment to deposit. … I mean, when Redwood Creek really rips, the vegetation – a lot of those willows and alders – kind of bend down and get ripped away. Not all of them, but that does happen during high flows.”

In those first few decades after the levees were built, county staff and chainsaw-wielding locals would just go in and cut back overgrown trees. Now, that type of work requires a federally-issued permit because Redwood Creek provides critical habitat for several salmonid species, including federally listed coho salmon.

“This is where it gets confusing with the Army Corps of Engineers,” Seemann explained. “They’re still involved with the levees because it’s considered a federal levee system. So they’ll do periodic inspections and … support the county in maintaining the levee, but they also have a regulatory role. If there’s an activity that requires a permit through the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps’ regulatory branch administers those permits. If the Endangered Species Act is involved, they have to refer that permit application to the National Marine Fisheries Service or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, depending on what species are involved.”

When the county applied for a permit in 2000 to remove sediment and vegetation from Redwood Creek, the Army Corps forwarded the application to the National Marine Fisheries Service (aka NOAA Fisheries) for environmental review, which usually takes about 90 days, according to Seemann. The permit wasn’t issued until 2004.

“It took three and a half years to issue the draft biological opinion, which is far beyond the timeframe for these documents,” Seemann said. “With an extension, they can go to 135 days, but they blew through that timeline, too.”

In its biological opinion, NOAA Fisheries “blindsided” the county with a determination that its plans to remove sediment and vegetation from Redwood Creek would jeopardize threatened salmonid species. NOAA Fisheries issued a counter-proposal that asked the county to pursue estuary restoration first.

“So, we had discussions about that over the course of two and a half years, and we concluded that we couldn’t accept their proposal,” Seemann said. “There’s no way we could commit to that because that’s a huge, multi-million-dollar endeavor.”

Restoring the Redwood Creek Estuary

When the levee system was constructed in the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t evaluate how it would impact the Redwood Creek estuary and its ecosystems, at least not to the degree it would have in 2024. 

“Today, I think the Army Corps of Engineers would have a different perspective on levees and their suitability within the floodplain,” Seemann said. “After the 1960s, the Army Corps essentially got out of the levee-building business … because there’s an awareness that levees come with tradeoffs. Whether [levees] are suitable in a floodplain is a bigger question today than it was considered back then.”

The levees were built before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the nation’s first major environmental law, was enacted in 1970. The landmark legislation,  often called the “Magna Carta” of Federal environmental laws, requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their actions. The Clean Water Act (CWA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) were signed into law just a few years later. 

Leslie Wolff, a local hydrologist with NOAA Fisheries, told the Outpost that the levee design “would have never made it through those environmental laws.” Moreover, Wolff said the Army Corps of Engineers no longer designs levees to meet a 250-year flood event, making it less likely that the levee system would ever be fully restored. 

“I want to stress that NOAA Fisheries wants to focus on solutions to these long-standing issues for fish and for communities,” she continued. “We understand issues surrounding public safety, and we would never want to promote anything that does not result in public safety. … With that said, our charge is under the ESA, and we have these fish that are barely hanging on.”

If you look at an aerial view of the Redwood Creek estuary, you can see where the levee system cut off a large meander on the south side of the main channel. Doing so not only reduced the size of the estuary, it also impaired its ecological function.

“[The levees] have destroyed estuary habitat,” Mary Burke, California Trout’s North Coast regional manager, told the Outpost. “[The flood control project] fundamentally disconnected the river from its ability to slow, spread and connect to wetlands and form a lagoon, which was historically there. The levees even cut off a large left meander that used to go around an island. This whole rich dynamic of an estuary, which connects to freshwater coming from the hillslopes, is just cut off because of the levees.”

Burke became familiar with the Redwood Creek watershed when she started working on a project to restore Prairie Creek, a tributary of Redwood Creek located about 3.5 miles upstream from the estuary. The Prairie Creek Restoration Project, which broke ground in 2021, centers around the former site of the Orick Sawmill – ‘O Rew in the Yurok language – a 125-acre property at the gateway of Redwood National and State Parks. The project aims to enhance aquatic habitat and floodplain connectivity in the Prairie Creek watershed.

However, if Redwood Creek’s estuary isn’t restored, the Prairie Creek project and goals for salmonid recovery would be “less successful overall,” according to Leonel Arguello, deputy superintendent for Redwood National and State Parks.  

“A restored Redwood Creek estuary can provide anadromous salmonids with optimal habitat for growth and marine acclimation, increase riparian cover, create off-channel habitat, lower water temperatures, and decrease predation,” Arguello told the Outpost. “Fully restored hillslopes upstream of Orick in Redwood National and State Parks and restoration of the Redwood Creek estuary is critical to the overall goal of improving opportunity for salmonid recovery.”

For the last decade, Arguello, Burke and Wolff have been working with the Army Corps of Engineers, the County of Humboldt, the Yurok Tribe and local landowners to form a collaborative focused on restoration efforts and “win-win” solutions for everyone involved, but it hasn’t been easy. Naturally, everyone involved has their own set of priorities. 

“You know, you have state lands, you have a federal project, and then you even have a local agency – in this case, Humboldt County – and you have to figure out how to get all alignment across the agencies, as well as landowners and all the various interests,” Burke said, adding that there will always be tensions when it comes to land and water use. “Through intentional and slow relationship building we were able to tease apart what our shared interests are, and we have advanced to this position where we’re ready to go into a feasibility design process.”

While estuary restoration would largely exclude the portion of the levee system that runs through Orick, restoration efforts are still intrinsically tied to the levees and require federal approval. 

In this case, the collaborative wants to “modify the levee footprint to help restore the estuary and its function,” Wolff said. One way to do that is to go to Congress. Another way is to file a request through the Army Corps of Engineers’ Continuing Authorities Program (CAP) under Section 1135 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1986.

“[T]he County put in a request for a CAP 1135 federal interest determination, and the Army Corps of Engineers determined it is in the federal interest to move forward with the next step, which is the feasibility study,” Wolff explained. “It’s my understanding that the feasibility study is not only the scientific study that develops different design alternatives for levee configuration that will allow for the restoration of the estuary, but it also would take us through the NEPA process.”

That process will probably take about two and a half years, she said. Once that’s complete, the collaborative will finalize the design selected through the NEPA process and apply for various environmental permits to move forward with estuary restoration.

The restoration project is a huge step toward addressing ecological concerns in Redwood Creek. When it’s all said and done, young salmonids will, once again, have access to critical habitat in the estuary and adjacent wetlands. 

However, estuary restoration doesn’t address immediate concerns about the integrity of the levee system.

‘They have to do something’

As the rainy season quickly approaches, Barlow worries that this will be the year the levees fail. Asked to respond to Seemann’s claim that there is no “imminent” flood risk to Orick, Barlow reiterated what happened back in January when Redwood Creek came within just a few feet of overtopping the levee. 

“We may have dodged a bullet during the storm this year, but we’re headed for a mess,” Barlow said. “My concern is that the alders are getting so big that they could uproot and tear the rock face loose. That would really create a problem. … They have to do something.”

The storm that happened in January “definitely caught [the county’s] attention,” Seemann said. “One of the things we realized is that we need better coordination in responding to flood events in terms of notifying emergency responders, being prepared to notify the public and activating emergency services.”

The Humboldt County Office of Emergency Services submitted a grant application to the state Department of Water Resources seeking funding to improve flood monitoring along local levees and update the county’s safety plan. Seemann said the county is also working to improve lines of communication with Orick’s community leaders, the volunteer fire department and other responding agencies.

“Unfortunately, there’s just no way for us to eliminate risk behind a levee, but we can try to understand it and then communicate it and manage it to the extent we can,” Seemann added. “What we can do is improve our readiness for flood events, and that’s in the near-term plan.”

That said, Seemann acknowledged the unfortunate situation surrounding Orick and admitted that federal investments are often “stacked” to benefit cities rather than small, rural communities.

“Orick’s safety is critically important,” he said. “Orick deserves protection and investment just like any other community in Humboldt County. … There’s definitely an awareness that they’re an economically disadvantaged community [with] limited resources and capacity. And it is a priority of mine to try to find ways to work with Orick and help them – not just with the levee, but with improving their wastewater infrastructure and trying to help with other things.”

Hear that howl of joy? It’s because gray wolves are coming home to California. Once extirpated from the state, with the last wolf killed in Lassen County in 1924, wolves have been making a quick recovery in the Golden State. Now, only 13 years since the first wolf came back to our state, the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) reports that 5 out of the 7 gray wolf families in the state have reproduced this year.

Gray wolves are recovering thanks to protections under the Endangered Species Act, but with constant threats to the law and to the listing of wolves under the Act, protections for gray wolves are iffy.

Amaroq Weiss, Senior Wolf Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, joins the EcoNews to celebrate the good news and to talk about the long political history to secure protections for gray wolves.

Author’s note: This story will be understood best if two “housekeeping ” items are cleared up at the outset.

First, the term fishery as used here refers to a single combined entity: the fish resource, its environment, and the people who use the resource. It does not mean hatchery.

Second, this is not a technical paper Much of the local information was found in the works of Humboldt authors Denis Edeline, the late M. A. Parry, Duane Wainwright, and Susie Van Kirk; these authors reported information gleaned from Humboldt County newspapers, principally the Humboldt Times and the Ferndale Enterprise.

The Beginning Years

Eel River salmon have been the Humboldt Bay Region’s premier fish from time immemorial.

Salmon was a major staple of the aboriginal Wiyot Indians’ diet, and when the earliest white settlements were established along the river commercial salmon fishing began almost immediately.

The first extensive commercial salmon fishery on the Eel River was established in 1853 by Jesse Dungan, a successful former gold miner who had bought a 300-acre ranch in the lower Eel River valley. Other commercial salmon fishermen soon followed, often forming partnerships. Pioneer firms fishing the estuary in 1859 included Dungan & Denman, John Mosely, Martin & Plummer, Gilman & Skinner, William Ellery & Bro., Thomas Worth, Parcells & Nicholson, and Dickerman & Miller. They operated from the mouth of the river upstream to the head of tidewater — near the present Fernbridge.

In late October 1859, the editor of The Humboldt Times was immensely impressed when he toured the fish processing establishments by rowboat. The industry employed about a hundred men, he reported, and promised to contribute more than $60,000 to the county’s economy during the coming year — a significant amount considering that the county population totalled about 2,700 at the time, and fishing was a subordinate industry.

The editor saw plenty of fish. As he and his oarsman approached the mouth of the river, where the ocean surf was rolling in, “our eyes were greeted,” he reported, “by the appearance of thousands of huge salmon leaping out of the water, as if suspecting the silent element through which they were so rapidly passing to captivity and death.”

The pioneer fishermen were generally local farmers, or they obtained fishing rights from other farmers. Once structural facilities and equipment were installed and working, fishing became a part-time occupation. The annual fishing season usually lasted only three or four months each year, including time for preparation and clean-up — less when heavy autumn rains made fishing impossible, and sometimes destroyed processing plants. Except for laws in 1855 and 1859 that specified fishing seasons and landowners’ rights, the industry was essentially unregulated at first. Subsequent laws further restricted where and when fishing was permitted, and the mesh size of nets; by 1887 commercial fishermen had to buy licenses. Such laws were rarely enforced, however, because Humboldt County citizens, like those in other California salmon fishing communities, considered state regulation an unwarranted intrusion into a man’s right to fish. An accused violator needed only to plead not guilty and demand a jury trial. Convictions were rare in those early days.

Fish were commonly taken in seines more than 400 feet long and twenty-seven feet wide, which were swept through channels by crews of 10 to 14 men, and drawn ashore with their captured fish along gently sloping stream banks. Teams of horses or mules were commonly used to haul in the nets. Fishing firms were relatively independent, constructing their own storage vats and barrels for packing fish on their property from readily available seasoned spruce lumber. Salt shipped from San Francisco was the principal import of the original salmon processing plants.

These firms shipped their salted fish to San Francisco via circuitous routes around or over Table Bluff to ships loading in Humboldt Bay. Later, many thousands of pounds of fresh and processed salmon were also shipped by steamers such as the Mary D. Hume directly to San Francisco from Port Kenyon, on the Eel estuary.

The Fishery Finds A Broad Market

The Eel River salmon industry — which had quickly become the jewel of the Humboldt fisheries — thrived for many years. A trade journal in San Francisco reported in April 1858 that great quantities of Eel River salmon were being exported to Australia, China, the Sandwich Islands and New York, and sold quickly at good prices. Eel River salmon production in 1857 — 1,200 barrels after excluding a significant quantity sold fresh or smoked — equalled that of the Sacramento River, and far exceeded the combined Columbia River and Vancouver Island production. High production numbers were reported occasionally into the early 1900s; in 1904, for example, 345,800 Eel River salmon and steelhead were taken.

The quality of local salmon was superior as well, ostensibly because the fish were caught in saltwater or within the estuary, and were more readily preserved. Records of exports of Eel River fish to foreign markets did in fact show that the local product commanded $10 or more per barrel, compared with $8 per barrel for Sacramento fish. Some New Yorkers, The Times reported in 1869, found Eel River canned salmon the “most delicious they had ever eaten.”

“Fresh salmon are plenty with us now,” a Times reporter wrote in October 1858, “and the packing establishments are busy putting them up.” His words seemed to encapsulate the glory years of the Eel River commercial fishery, which lasted until about 1890. During that auspicious period, local newspapers reported that “jolly fishermen” were “all at work with a vigor,” gearing up for a good year; facilities were being expanded; new firms were being formed; processing plants were operating at capacity; and the fishery was contributing richly to Humboldt’s economy. Port Kenyon became a promising shipping point for southern Humboldt farmers and fishermen. Although a few bad years were reported as well, and overall decline of the resource was noted during the 1880s, the principal worry of local fishermen was that early rains might cut short the fall season, or floods might wash away their facilities.

Perplexing Numbers

In small print on the margin of A. J. Doolittle’s 1865 Official Township Map of Humboldt County, we find this reference to Eel River salmon; “In the fall of 1851, 20 bbls. [barrels] of salmon were taken in one haul; in 1861, 140 bbls.” The average size was “from 10 to 40 lbs.; largest caught, 65 lbs.” In a cryptic afternote, Doolittle reports; “…yield of 1864, only 200 lbs.” That would have been one barrel or less of salted salmon.

Doolittle’s report lends itself to different interpretations. First, he seems to suggest that the salmon resource was essentially depleted by 1864. If so, he was incorrect, because huge hauls were made in subsequent years. In 1878, for example, one seine captured 4,600 fish in one day. The fishery did become commercially unprofitable, as Doolittle foretold, but not until many years later. Fish buyers and sellers were making money until well into the twentieth century, although they had to survive occasional bad years, and salmon abundance was in general decline.

Second, Doolittle might have been demonstrating the great, often mysterious, variations in salmon numbers experienced from year to year. If so, he was right on target. Salmon abundance — then as now — seems to defy prediction: it tends to rise and fall independently of any single factor affecting salmon survival. Weather, rainfall (in past as well as current years), river and oceanic conditions, numbers of nets in the river, market trends affecting fishing effort, condition of spawning habitat — these were some of the factors that determined the numbers of salmon migrating or taken in a given year.

A few numbers will illustrate this variability: Estimates provided by the Humboldt County Department of Public Works show that between 1857 and 1861, the salmon catch dropped from 44,688 fish to 2,600 — nearly ninety-four percent. Many years later, in 1877, 585,200 fish were taken, more than thirteen times as many as the 1857 base figure; and during many subsequent years, catch figures were well above the 1857 base.

The Canneries Cast A Shadow

Although masked by the puzzling fluctuations of salmon numbers and market behavior, the ebullience of the early years gave way gradually during the 1880s to disturbing reports: declining catches, longer nets with smaller mesh being used, markets being developed for small salmon and “half-pounder” steelhead, commercial fishing operations extending upriver into spawning areas, veteran fishermen quitting the river, and public clamor for increased governmental regulation. Sport and commercial fishermen blamed each other, the Indians, the Chinese, and “renegade whites” for the decline. In 1897, the Times blamed them all: the decline of salmon stocks, in the editor’s view, was “wholly accounted for by the interference of men” who prevented the fish from reaching their spawning grounds.

California Fish Commissioners encouraged the introduction of carp, shad, and other exotic species in waters throughout the northern counties to replace disappearing native fish stocks. Most of all, they touted artificial production as the panacea that would save California salmon, and after much local urging they ultimately built two hatcheries and four egg-taking stations on the Eel River, one of them in 1897 on Price Creek, just upriver from Grizzly Bluff. Ironically, the Price Creek hatchery had to import four million Sacramento River salmon eggs when it opened, because fishermen would not let enough fish get past their nets to reproduce native stocks. (This supplemental source of eggs for Eel River hatcheries “dried up” by 1920, when Sacramento River stocks also became depleted.)

Canneries were the major visible factor that pushed the fishery into a decline from which it would never recover. During their existence on the river, most notably between 1877 and 1889, canneries produced an average of 8,100 cases of canned salmon each year. (A case was forty-eight one-pound cans.) Because it took two pounds of fish in the river to produce one pound in the can, that works out to more than three-quarters of a million pounds of salmon extracted in an average season.

Before canneries became fully established, commercial salmon fishing, as noted above, had been dominated by a handful of seiners — probably never more than eight (and sometimes fewer) during any given year because of the special riverbank conditions required for seining.

The Loleta historian M.A. Parry reported how the canneries changed this picture. Fishermen no longer had to process the fish they caught; they sold them in unlimited numbers directly to the cannery. Gillnetting (ensnaring fish by the gills when they tried to swim through a net), which had been practiced by Indians all along the North Coast since ancient times, and to some extent by immigrant white fishermen on the Eel, soon became the common way to fish. Gillnetting was more cost-effective than seining because one or two fishermen in a boat could handle a gillnet, and gillnets worked where seines could not be used. By 1889 gillnetters were making more money than seiners. By 1913, when seining was outlawed, more than half the season’s catch was taken by the hundred or more gillnetters working the Eel River — and the number of gillnetters soon soared to perhaps 150 after the demise of the seiners. Complete sets of nets, floats, line and mending shuttles and twine were sold at Van Duzer’s general store in Loleta.

Several other factors affected the Eel River commercial fishery as it wound down. First, in 1898 the mild-curing process was developed. This process, in which salmon were preserved by refrigeration after light salting (sometimes utilizing a secret formula called “Preservaline”), found its way to Humboldt fisheries in 1905. Since fish so preserved commanded higher prices than ordinary salted salmon, fishing escalated. Also, from 1916 onward, offshore commercial trolling, as well as salmon fishing within Humboldt Bay, took incalculable numbers of Eel River-bound salmon.

Cutting and widening of main river channels and destruction of spawning habitat caused by Humboldt’s burgeoning lumber industry were undoubtedly a significant factor in the fishery’s general decline also. The “reclamation” of thousands of acres of estuarine marshlands and damming of major sloughs to create farmland, which reduced food supplies for juvenile salmon and steelhead, were other important factors.

These factors were not recognized as threats to the fishery at the time, although one irate Port Kenyon shipper went to court against riparian farmers along the lower river (Robarts v. Russ, et al.), claiming irreparable damage to Eel River navigation.

The Final Decades

Around the turn of the century, as Humboldt’s population continued to expand rapidly and transportation in and out of the county improved, new markets for salmon opened up.

Fresh fish buyers representing San Francisco and Oregon firms set up shop along the Eel River estuary, packing salmon in ice for shipment. These buyers were particularly active when markets for Sacramento and Eel River salmon were glutted. Many of them were former Eel River commercial fishermen who provided boats and nets for fishermen and paid as little as one or two cents a pound for their catches, with a daily limit of 500 pounds per fisherman. Between 1898 and 1913 fishermen attempted several times to unionize and force prices higher. They succeeded to some extent, but salmon numbers continued to fall to the point that fishing at any price was often a losing proposition.

By the 1910s the Eel River commercial salmon fishery was obviously a dying entity: the fish resource was depleted, its environment was seriously damaged, and fishermen were losing money. Thousands of Humboldt citizens petitioned the legislature to close the river to netting and save the remnant salmon runs as a tourist attraction. The expanded California Fish and Game Commission — whose predecessor, the Fish Commission, had traditionally pushed for more stringent controls — opposed such a move, however. It permitted the fishery to stagger along marginally for a few years on the grounds that Eel River salmon were needed to help support the World War I effort. (Intensive hometown lobbying by Humboldt’s commercial fishermen, who practically gave away tons upon tons of fresh salmon to the public, undoubtedly influenced the commission’s decision.) Finally, after years of pressure from sports fishermen and conservationists and beefed-up law enforcement, gill netting on the Eel River was declared illegal, effective January 1, 1922. An insignificant commercial troll fishery was permitted on the lower river during September, October and November for a few years after that.

By 1926 the gillnetting ban and other restrictions on market fishermen — including a new law permitting wardens to employ “dollar-a-year men” empowered to arrest law violators — had effectively terminated the in-river commercial fishery; from that point on, commercial salmon fishing was legally confined to offshore trolling.

With the commercial enterprise thus eliminated, sportfishing for salmon quickly dominated the lower Eel River. Loleta entrepreneurs such as Joe Rose and Rasmus Svendsen bought up commercial fish buyers’ docks and rowboats, and established boat rental services for the hundreds of sportfishermen who trolled their highly polished copper spinners for salmon every fall on the Eel River.

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The story above is from the Summer 1996 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.