Humboldt Historian

Summer 2015: Volume 63, No. 2

The Last Climb
Loni D. Hollenbeck
Fate awaits a young logger in the woods.

You Didn't Hear it from Me: Imposters, Blackmailers, and Masqueraders
Louella Parsnips
A dancing master winds up at the center of a vortex and goes down the drain.

Daniel Campbell's Civil War
Deborah Baskette
At the sesquicentennial of the ending of the Civil War, a soldier’s voice is heard again.

Cudbear to Zingiber
Deborah Baskette
Secrets of the antique apothecary cabinets that serve as bookshelves in the HCHS Bookstore.

History's Mysteries: The Carson Tunnel 
Barry Evans
A surprise Eureka tunnel to discover.

A Tale of Two Bridges: Transporting Logs and Lumber on the Mad River 
Jerry Rohde
A history of the Hammond Bridge.

Eureka's Weather Station & The Greely Expedition
Mary Dawn Cunningham
More than likely, no one in Eureka knew who the new weather station observer really was.

The Eureka waterfront, circa 1915, is shown on this postcard from Steven Lazar’s collection of historic postcards. You can view dozens of marvelous postcards from Steve’s collection at his website: thehumboldtproject.org. Pictured in this scene is the Dolbeer-Carson Bay Mill, the Carson Mansion, and a passenger steamer at the city dock. Only a small part of the Carson Tunnel is visible, but you can see more of it and read about it in Barry Evans’ “History’s Mysteries,” on page 29. William Carson, who is credited with chopping the first sawlogs here in November of 1850, and would become the most well-known capitalist of the early logging industry, was “the prototype pioneer logger,” writes Ray Raphael in Two Peoples, One Place (page 147). Like many redwood lumbermen, he hailed from New Brunswick and already knew the logging business when he came west, but that was not why he set out. Like most westward-bound men of the era, he came to northern California in search of gold. He found it, in the form of the tallest trees on earth.
— On The Cover