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The humble yet indispensable tugboat once found itself at the center of a spirited, and ultimately deadly, competition: the 1889 “tugboat war” on Humboldt Bay.

For the first seventy years or so of Humboldt’s existence as a Euro-American settlement, its commerce was dependent on the sea. Sailing ships came from ports all over the world to carry away the yield of Humboldt’s lumber mills. Each day a dozen or more sailing vessels arrived and departed from the Bay, while another dozen or more were loading at the docks. Passenger ships came and went weekly.

All these ships, cargo and passenger alike, had to be piloted across the bar into, and out of, Humboldt Bay, and for close to forty years, Captain H. H. Buhne, with his two tugboats, the Mary Ann and the H. H. Buhne, monopolized this lucrative business.

Captain Buhne, who had piloted the trailblazing Laura Virginia over the bar on April 14, 1850, was Humboldt’s premier pilot, and the only choice of tug pilot acceptable to many ship captains.

But in 1889, the Humboldt Lumber Manufacturers Association, made up of various redwood mill owners, undertook to break Buhne’s tugboat monopoly. The Association purchased the tug Ranger and put it under the command of Captain Lauchlin Mackinnon.

In one of his many wonderful Humboldt Historian articles from the 1960s, Wallace E. Martin tells us that Captain Mackinnon was a young man, experienced in square riggers, and regarded as “a brave and capable seaman.”

On July 4, 1889, with the arrival on Humboldt Bay of the Ranger and Captain Mackinnon, the “tugboat war” began. At first Buhne, with two tugs, had the advantage, but the Association soon evened the odds by chartering a second tug, Printer.

When schooners arrived off port, the tugs would head out over the bar and “jockey one another for position to get a hawser aboard first,” writes Martin. Many tug captains greeted these competitive skirmishes with relish and even a reckless single-mindedness, gambling their own lives as well as those aboard the schooners.

On November 16, 1889, the schooner Fidelity, a Humboldt ship with a Humboldt crew, arrived off the bar and was taken in tow by the Association tug Printer. The tide was at the ebb and the seas were rough on the bar. Normally in this situation, a ship would be left outside the bay to await better conditions before it was brought over the bar; indeed, sometimes ships waited as long as a week to come safely into the bay. However, with the tug competition so fierce, “it was almost mandatory that the schooner be brought into port,” writes Martin.

As the Printer crossed the bar with Fidelity in tow, a breaker suddenly struck the ship and capsized it instantly. Her masts broke off and she turned bottom-side up, “a floating coffin for her crew,” says Martin. The Printer’s captain reported that “not a living soul was seen” after the breaker hit the ship.

On Dec. 15, 1889, the tugboat war took an unexpected turn: it moved ashore when Captain Mackinnon accosted Captain Buhne in downtown Eureka. Mackinnon accused Buhne of telling people that a schooner had “bumped on the bar” while being towed across by Mackinnon. Buhne did not deny saying it, and Mackinnon defended his honor by punching Buhne in the nose, knocking him to the sidewalk. Both men were down on the sidewalk when the fight was broken up. What with Captain Buhne being sixty-eight years of age at this time and generally revered for his longtime contributions to the area, the local newspapers took young Mackinnon to task for the incident.

Then, just one month later, on January 19, 1890, young Captain Mackinnon was killed aboard the tug Ranger while bringing in the two-masted schooner J. Eppinger. As the two vessels crossed the bar, a breaker picked up the schooner and threw it forward into the stern of the tug: the schooner’s jib boom struck Mackinnon and crushed him against the wheel.

The death of Captain Mackinnon on top of the losses of the captain and crew of the Fidelity effectively extinguished the tugboat war. Nor would it ever be revived: in March of 1890 Captain Buhne retired from the piloting life, having sold his tugs, the Mary Ann and the H. H. Buhne, to his rivals, the Humboldt Lumber Manufacturers Association.