Los Angeles dropped from 6,000 to 1,600 and the population of San Francisco jumped from 800 to 35,000.
Mining and logging soon destroyed the forests around Eureka and the rivers that drained into Humboldt Bay. When the local natives, the Wiyot, protested the degradation, the citizens of Eureka hit upon a solution. In 1860, the local newspaper, the Humboldt Times, proclaimed that “for the past four years we have advocated two . . . alternatives to ridding our country of Indians: either remove them to some reservation or kill them.” Eureka went for the second alternative. A group of citizens calling themselves the Humboldt Volunteers rowed out to a Wiyot village on Indian Island and slaughtered most of the Wiyot who were there celebrating in their annual World Renewal.
Bret Harte, then a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Humboldt Times, wrote an account of the incident: “A more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Women wrinkled and decrepit weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long, grey hair. Infants scarcely a span along, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.”
Without the Wiyot to protest, the degradation continued. By the 1880s, when the gold ran out, there were eighteen sawmills ringing the bay, and the city was supplying lumber to most of the northern coast. So much sawdust was dumped into Humboldt Bay that salmon stopped spawning in the Trinity River. Scientists are still working on ways to get them back.
Scientists! That’s how I know Eureka! A few years ago, the Sci Fi Channel aired a series called Eureka. The premise of the show was that the American government was secretly hiding all of its scientific geniuses in Eureka, not an easy secret to keep since the scientists kept inventing things like antimatter and telekinetic computers. In the series, things are always going awry. For example, in one episode, when they create a Star Trek–like transporter (it worked by decoding a person’s DNA in one place and recoding it somewhere else minus the person’s clothes, a complication not thought of by Gene Roddenberry), they inadvertently produce an über-Einstein kid who could launch missiles just by thinking about them.
“Did your cousin ever do television?” I ask Merilyn.
“Yes,” she replies, getting a faraway look in her eye as if she’s just turned on the old black-and-white set. “He was a regular on Ozzie and Harriet. ”
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