Post #18- Redwood Empire
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather
With the possible exception of the most arid interior deserts, the redwood forests of northern Californie were the most isolated areas of the French colony. The Spanish missions and landlords had never ventured this far north, leaving it an unexplored land, let alone an exploited one. The Russian fur trappers had passed through but they had been content to remain at the ocean’s edge, plundering the otters and moving on. A few American and British fur trappers had penetrated the vast forested expanses in search of beaver but they had left little trace. For the Wiyot people who lived here Europeans were a distant rumor, heard of but rarely seen. They still lived as they had always done, hunting and gathering in the vast northern woods, quite alone.
Until Étienne Cabet and his Icarians came in 1850, dropped off by an overworked Moerenhout, eager to be free of at least one distraction. They had been sent without supplies, without guidance and certainly with no promises of further support. Just free transport north, and wide ranging if vague land grants. At first glance, the shore seemed a desolate place to build a colony. The soil was thin and rocky, full of gnarled tree roots. The bay, which they quickly named Cabet Bay, was deep and cold, and high mountains towered over them. Most striking were the woods, a vast impenetrable curtain of greenery made of truly gigantic redwood trees. For people not long removed from temperate France, it seemed a world away. Yet, for those with eyes to see, there was great potential here. For one thing, the looming redwood forests promised a virtually unlimited supply of wood and the deep water was the only such harbor between San Francisco and American-held Oregon. The water teemed with both fish and whales, while the mountains suggested mineral finds for those brave enough to reach them.
The rather imposing shores of Cabet Bay, complete with this grass covered sandbar.
Still, for those first Frenchmen, it seemed an empty, alien land.
Of course, it was not actually empty and before long the Icaraians met the first Wiyot. Out of both personal feelings and blunt necessity Cabet was friendly with the Wiyots, explaining his purpose was to set up a small community near the beach. The Wiyots, puzzled by all of this, simply watched and waited while Cabet and his fellows set about laboriously building a home. They named it L'Esperance, Hope, after an early Cabet publication. Despite quickly building housing, storage and workshops out of the abundant wood, the settlement did not live up to its name.
For one brutal year Cabet stuck to his original plan for creating a communal farming settlement, one of pure self-sufficiency and simplicity. That ideal, of a socialistic utopia of collective farmers nearly spelled the doom of the entire enterprise. Not knowing the local landscape, the Icarians suffered greatly in that first year, struggling to clear the soil and most crops failing anyway. A full third of the would-be settlers abandoned the colony, returning back to San Francisco on one of the irregular visiting French ships. Only the generous spirit of the Wiyots (and the French desperation to trade their few manufactured goods for food) saved L'Esperance from total disaster.
A painting of the leader of the Wiyot's, nicknamed Jean Martin DuBois by the French
The next spring even the stubborn Cabet had to admit that farming, while not impossible in some of the flatter river bottoms, was clearly not how his Icarians would survive in this new environment. In what seems a painfully obvious move they turned to conspicuous wealth all around them. The trees. Timber, sold to San Francisco, was Cabet’s new watchword. Selling timber could provide all the money that his settlement needed to thrive, and not to mention supplying wood for all of their own needs. Cabet’s plans for L'Esperance involved schools and libraries, elaborate town centers and theaters. Perhaps that could all be paid for by lumber instead of produce.
Of course none of the Icaraians were experienced lumberjacks or woodcutters, but they did have the advantage of coming from a nation with a deep and rich history of forest husbandry. Even as Cabet and his utopians struggled and starved in northern Californie, Napoleon III was creating the first nature preserves in the forest of Fontainebleau, protecting them from the hungry axes of the foresters. So with this tradition in mind, Cabet drew up a complex map of forest cuttings and harvesting. Never one to shy away from elaborate plans, Cabet soon had schedules of vast dimensions in both space and time, regulating the careful removal of trees for the next century. With his blueprint in hand, the Frenchmen went forth and began to cut down the forest in earnest.
This sudden change in directions was not lost on the Wiyot people, who missed very little the Eurpoeans did. Their leader, a man the Icarians nicknamed Jean Martin DuBois (of the woods), quickly arrived and inquired about the sudden burst of logging. When Cabet revealed his grand plans, the two soon fell into sharp disagreement. Jean Martin was quite aware that large scale logging would disrupt the local landscape, and adversely affect his people. Still, the French leader did manage to mollify the locals by saying the cutting would be small-scale and, in a rare gesture from a white settler, promised to recompense Wiyot for the loss of their local resources. Assuaged by this arrangement, Jean Martin acquiesced and even offered to help the French, if they were willing to pay.
With this agreement, the French turned to the herculean task of actually logging the redwood forest. These massive trees, many of which rose over two hundred feet into the air, sometimes had bases fifteen to twenty feet in diameter. Worse, since the water-logged wood near the stump would not float (the only possible way of moving the enormous logs once felled), the actual cutting had to take place some twenty feet off the forest floor. High platforms had to be cut and wedged into place, to even begin the work of felling. The Icarians had to wield long axes to cut deep into the redwood’s heart, creating a vast undercut notch, many feet deep. This notch was cut, backcut and finally wedged until the huge tree toppled The first loggers who managed to bring a forest giant down found, much to their dismay, that the brittle redwood would often smash into splinters when it hit the ground, spoiling days or weeks of work. The French learned to create ‘beds’ for the trees to fall into, vast trenches lined with branches and leaves. Then, once safely on the ground, the trunk had to be laboriously rolled (often by brute force of dozens of workers) into a nearby river, to be floated down to the crude sawmill near the shore.
A redwood, shortly before felling.
Still, despite the dangers and difficulties, in the year 1852, the Icarians cut down and processed hundreds of massive trees, sent off to a wood hungry San Francisco. With that income L'Esperance could shift from mere survival to actually thriving, and for the first time, Cabet’s unique social vision started to actually take shape. The Icarians lifestyle was to be dominated by communal activities. They lived together, ate together, and worked together. All apartments had the same furniture, the same clothes, and the same dimensions. Children were raised and educated in communal creches, instead of by their parents. A school was built, as well as a small library and a ramshackle ‘concert hall’ where weekend social events were held. One unusual feature of the small hamlet was what was missing. L'Esperance had no church or formal place of worship. Religion played an unusual role in Icarian thought, difficult for outsiders to understand. They believed in a high power who followed the Ten Principles laid out on Cabet’s writings. While strange, the little settlement prospered enough that a few converts from San Francisco wandered in, drawn by stories filtering south along the lumber trade. Gaining new converts was a novel, but gratifying experience for the Icarians, who finally thought utopia was in sight.
The unusual experiment might have gone one in such a vein indefinitely except for new arrivals to the region in 1853.The Americans had finally arrived.
Drawn toward the northern forests by San Francisco’s endless desire for lumber, they had arrived, axes in hand, to strike it rich among the redwoods. Unlike the cautious Icarcians, the new arrivals had no long term plans or other priorities. Their goal was was cutting down trees and they quickly got down to business. Rude logging camps sprung up all throughout Cabet Bay, virtually ignoring Icarian land grants and Wiyot complaints. The utopians and natives alike quickly found themselves helplessly watching a new found industry explode around them.
And explode it did. In 1852 the Icarians, through great labor, had provided roughly 800,000 board feet of lumber for export. In 1854, after two years of busy expansion the Americans had cut down nearly five millions, with a great deal of growth yet to come. Sawmills ran day and night, using huge sawblades over fifty inches in diameter. Heaps of sawdust piled around the camps, clogging rivers and creating impromptu dams across streams. When the easiest trees were felled, the logger headed further inland, importing teams of oxen to drag the massive logs to the waterside for transport. The redwood empire, the increasingly common name for the area, was clearly under construction.
A team of American oxen pulling a massive log. Note the clear cut forest behind.
It was nothing short apocalypse for the Wiyot. Unlike the Icarians, who had at least taken the Native Americans into account before embarking on new projects, the Americans ignored them viewed them as little more than nuisances to be cleared off the land as fast as possible. It did not take long for violence to break out all over the region, with both sides resorting to raids and ambushes. The loggers, better armed and more numerous, often had the best of the Wylot in these encounters. Untroubled by moral niceties, the whites became quite adept at attacking Wylot villages during festivals or events that kept the men away, leaving the elderly and children as easier targets. The fate of those who survived such attacks was bleak as many were forced into slavery, often acting as forced domestic service for the nearly entirely male population. In a few short years the Wylot world was shattered, and their population in steep decline.
Outraged but impotent to all of this, Étienne Cabet reacted poorly to the turn of events. Unable to confront these new arrivals directly, he did little but send increasingly querulous notes to a distant Mohrenhout, complaining about how the Americans were violating his legal rights. The Governor essentially ignored the complaints however, seeing no meaningful issue. San Francisco needed a gargantuan quantity of lumber and having it from Californie itself was the only way to sustain the explosive Gold Rush induced growth. Morhrehout did not care much if they upset a religious fanatic or destroyed some distant landscape. His only minor concern was if these rough and tumble loggers united with their fellow Americans in Oregon, but the lumbermen exhibited no political aims. Unlike the restless Argonauts, these Americans seemed quite content to make it rich.
Ignored, Cabet withdrew and became increasingly tyrannical over what he could control, L'Esperance. The philosopher began to promulgated ever stricter rules of morality for the settlement. Tobacco and alcohol was banned for all, a curfew enacted and leisure time increasingly surveilled. Cabet even went so far as to forbid idle talk in the workshops during the, increasingly mandatory, working hours. To protect these unpopular regulations, Cabet strove to increase his own power, and extended his term of office indefinitely via changes in the town charter. These moves alienated many in the community, dividing the socialist village against itself. The dispute probably would have ruptured the entire project if Cabet had not suddenly died of a heart attack in 1855.
A modern model of Cabet's dream, a perfect utopia.
Freed of his dominating leadership, the Icarians began to more accurately assess their situation. The arrival of the Americans, while a total disaster for the increasingly fragmented Wylot, were only a mixed blessing for the French. While the Americans had, by sheer dint of numbers, wrestled away most of the lumber trade, the utopians still had considerable assets to draw on. Despite American violations they still had expansive land grants, consisting of the finest timber and most of the water courses. They had friendly relations with the Wylot, which provided labor, resources and information. Lastly, as generally middle class artisans they had labor skills the lumbermen lacked.
With a flexibility that would have shocked Cabet, had he still be alive, the Icarcians once again changed roles. Instead of lumbering directly, they went after the considerable secondary market opened by the inrush of Americans. The Icarians built the blacksmiths and repair shops the loggers needed, the small farms to feed them, the little factories to make nails and machine belts. Icarians sharpened the sawmill blades and built the wagon wheels for the ox teams. The Frenchmen opened a grocery to serve the hungry logging men. Most importantly, the Icarians began their first tentative forays into boat-building, which would have ramifications for generations to come. The only industry the Icarians did not seize was the entertainment district that blossomed along the waterfront, among the warehouses and quays. Nicknamed the Spanish Quarter, it earned fame throughout Californie as the roughest red-light district in the colony.
The dissolute and diverse Spanish Quarter.
In 1857, thriving as middle-men, the Icarians (now led by an executive committee) finally tried to take action against the loggers. Sending a note to San Francisco, they avoided the whining tone Cabet had used, and did not mention their own rights at all. Instead they raised two other points about the lack of an official French presence in Cabet Bay. First was the immorality on display in the Spanish Quarter, a ‘veritable temple to Mammon’ as their letter put it. Did the French leadership really want such a black stain on their colony’s good name? Secondly they hinted that illegal, unregulated trade was happening there, with lumber being diverted away from Californie and to the growing American cities on the Oregon and Washington coasts.
The response to this carefully written appeal was less than the utopians had hoped. A small detachment of two dozen French marines arrived, as well as a few would-be sheriff deputies. Barely enough to survey the transgressions, let alone meaningfully counter them. Unbeknownst to everyone however, one of the men in the new arrivals would change the fate of the redwood empire forever. An artistic leaning young soldier named Oscar-Claude Monet would, some day, become synonymous with the northern woods for reasons quite beyond anyone’s guess.
A picture of Claude Monet in 1858, as yet, no one of importance.