s. The Pacific does not uniformly justify the name,
but this time it completely succeeded. The ocean was as smooth as the
deadest mill-pond--not a breath of wind or a ripple of the placid
surface. Treacherous Humboldt Bar, sometimes a mountain of danger, did
not even disclose its location. The tar from the ancient seams of the
Humboldt's decks responded to the glowing sun until pacing the deck was
impossible, but sea-sickness was no less so. We lazily steamed into the
beautiful harbor, up past Eureka, her streets still occupied by stumps,
and on to the ambitious pier stretching nearly two miles from Uniontown
to deep water.

And now that the surroundings may be better understood, let me digress
from the story of my boyhood and touch on the early romance of Humboldt
Bay--its discovery and settlement.

CHAPTER II

A HIDDEN HARBOR

The northwesterly corner of California is a region apart. In its
physical characteristics and in its history it has little in common with
the rest of the state. With no glamour of Spanish occupancy, its romance
is of quite another type. At the time of the discovery of gold in
California the northwestern portion of the state was almost unknown
territory. For seven hundred miles, from Fort Ross to the mouth of the
Columbia, there stretched a practically uncharted coast. A few headlands
were designated on the imperfect map and a few streams were poorly
sketched in, but the great domain had simply been approached from the
sea and its characteristics were mostly a matter of conjecture. So far
as is known, not a white man lived in all California west of the Coast
Range and north of Fort Ross.

Here is, generally speaking, a mountainous region heavily timbered along
the coast, diversified with river valleys and rolling hills. A marked
peculiarity is its sharp slope toward the northwest for its entire
length. East of the Coast Range the Sacramento River flows due south,
while to the west of the broken mountains all the streams flow
northwesterly--more northerly than westerly. Eel River flows about 130
miles northerly and, say, forty miles westerly. The same course is taken
by the Mattole, the Mad, and the Trinity rivers. The watershed of this
corner to the northwest is extensive, including a good part of what are
now Mendocino, Trinity, Siskiyou, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties. The
drainage of the westerly slope of the mountain ranges north and west of
Shasta reaches the Pacific with dif