Humboldt County Historical Society

Going Down Below

Though we really lack for nothing here in our remote coastal paradise, a trip to the big city of San Francisco is a welcome adventure, just as it was for early-day Humboldters. An oft-heard utterance here at the turn of the nineteenth century was: "Going Down Below." This, of course, was not a reference to the underworld, but to San Francisco. The hardships of the trip, however, could definitely make it feel like a journey of no return.

Before the railroad united Eureka with San Francisco in 1914, the overland route to the city consisted of rough stage rides interspersed with train travel where available, and took from seventy to ninety hours, with less than ideal lodgings en route. The alternative was the 200-mile sea voyage on small passenger ships, often over stormy seas.

A 1987 Humboldt Historian features a memoir by George Kimball, who made the trip overland in 1908. Kimball recalls that when comparing the two methods of travel, people would cite the irreversibility of stepping aboard ship, for there was "no back door to a steamer." However, says Kimball, on the rocky narrow roads, often along winding cliffs, the back door of a stage or an automobile often opened onto a deadly precipice, making this means of salvation useless. "There were scores and scores of places along the road where an accident could not have been avoided," writes Kimball, "if our driver had gone six inches, or sometimes only three inches, out of the regular beaten track."

Because of the hardships and duration of overland travel, many chose instead to get "down below" by the water route. Here, too, were dangers, including the threat of shipwreck. Stormy seas and heavy fogs were common, and there was no radar to announce unseen obstacles.

One of many shipwrecks that occurred in the "graveyard of the Pacific," as the North Coast passage was known, was that of the Northerner on January 6, 1860. The Northerner struck something near Blunts Reef off Cape Mendocino which tore planking from the ship's bottom. In her book Points of Time, Evelyn McCormick recounts that as the ship began to take in water, all the women except two were placed in the first lifeboat and made it safely to shore. One woman, Miss Gregg, refused to leave her brother and stayed aboard; both were drowned. "One sailor," writes McCormick, "cut a horse loose from its stall and then hung onto the horse as it swam ashore."

Just entering and leaving Humboldt Bay presented a formidable danger. Ben Nichols recalls in a 1960 Humboldt Historian: "I still remember standing at the stern of a ship going out over Humboldt Bar and seeing the sand below the stern just too close to feel comfortable about it."

He also recalls being assigned to a cabin in which a rope ran from ceiling to floor in one corner and constantly groaned and creaked while at sea, making sleep impossible. He later discovered that the rope was attached to the rudder, and marveled that such a vital element of the ship's equipment should have been this seemingly tenuous rope passing through his cabin.

Arriving dockside in San Francisco, however, was spectacular: all the worries and fears of the voyage quickly sank into the background as horse-drawn surreys from the various San Francisco hotels clamored for customers, and all the splendors of the city beckoned. For more on Humboldt history, visit www.humboldthistory.org.