Starvation or Murder? The Untimely Demise of Josiah Gregg
The Ghost Forest: The Missing Chapters
In 1849, the famous American explorer guided a group of miners to a western landscape never before seen by white pioneers. Gregg would not survive the journey.
Copyright © 2024 by Greg King
On November 4, 1849, a rough collection of two dozen men gathered alongside a roiling Trinity River, in the far northwestern reaches of a land that was still a year away from becoming the state of California. All but one of the men were placer gold miners, nomads who’d invaded the Trinity watershed that year to unearth their fortunes. The lone man out was Josiah Gregg.[1]
Gregg had arrived to the continent’s western frontier to plumb a region then known only to Native inhabitants. It was the last great blank spot on the map of a swiftly expanding United States, a region that today is called Humboldt County, two hundred miles north of San Francisco. In Gregg’s time the area constituted a sizeable bight of “Upper or New California,” the 529,000 square-mile territory seized by the United States in 1848 following the Mexican-American war. The men who traveled alongside Gregg aimed to claim this land for themselves. Gregg was just the man to get them there.[2]
Gregg’s name is nearly lost within the annals of American settlement and occupation of the North American continent during the early to mid-1800s. Yet by the time he’d made his long journey from Missouri to the banks of the Trinity River, Gregg stood among the young nation’s greatest living explorers. For years he had worked as a scout, documentarian, and cartographer of the Great Plains and the Santa Fe Trail. In his day Gregg was famous across the country, and in Europe.[3]
Gregg reached the Trinity River on a crisp afternoon in October. He’d followed a thirty-mile trail westward from the northern bowl of the Central Valley (near present-day Redding), a route squeezed by high, craggy mountains on all sides and carved by a cataract Trinity River. Gregg likely marveled at the land’s explosion of tall conifers and glowing hues of maples and oaks standing alongside the river. In three days’ riding he reached the miners’ camp etched into a craggy south-facing canyon of the North Fork Trinity River, a lonely haunt that the miners called Rich Bar. Here Gregg met a disparate assembly of forty prospectors. Of these men, twenty-four miners and two Indian guides agreed to join Gregg for a seminal trek west to locate Trinidad Bay.[4]
At the time, Trinidad Bay existed in Western minds almost as fable. Basque explorers Bruno de Heceta and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra were the first Europeans to discover and chart the tiny inlet in 1775. In his journal of that voyage, de Heceta’s pilot, Francisco Mourelle, described docking in the bay and climbing a high promontory to claim what appeared to be an abundant land.
“We determined to take possession of the country, upon the top of a high mountain, which lies at the entrance of the port. The crew marched in two bodies, who adored the holy cross upon disembarking, and when at the top of the mountain formed a square, the center of which became a chapel. Here the holy cross was again raised, the mass celebrated, with a sermon, and possession taken. We also fired both our musquetry and cannon which naturally made the Indians suppose we were irresistible. As we took thus possession on the day when [the] holy mother church celebrates the most holy Trinity, we named the port accordingly.”[5]
Over the subsequent seventy years, fewer than five ships would again haul into the rocky inlet. De Heceta had left navigational coordinates, numbers that would allow Gregg to guide his squad of mismatched miners across uncharted mountains to locate the bay and establish an overland route from the coast to the inland mines.[6]
Yet on this day Gregg faced a winter’s day that challenged even the mountain men now gathered. Snow and icy rain stymied ambition and stoked fear. As he sat in his leaky canvas tent, Gregg could hear doubts among the miners. One of the men was a Bostonian by the name of Charles Southard, who would now enter to deliver an unhappy report.[7]
As always, Gregg was making notations into one of several tablets he carried alongside terrestrial navigation equipment in the overstuffed saddlebags that burdened one of his horses. Against the cold he wore a linsey shirt and long woolen duster, thick pants, and handmade Mexican boots that reached his knees. A wide-brimmed hat nearly hid his probing eyes, where arched brows shaded deep blue irises. His straight line of a mouth rarely smiled. Even now, at forty-three years old, Gregg was young-looking. His gaze carried a frank and arrogant air. He was intolerant, caustic, and humorless.[8]
Gregg likely found it a chore to look upon Southard. The man stood tall and stiff, deeply tanned from sunshine toils, skin scarred and pocked. His eyes fairly bulged from a face narrowed by hard work, insufficient calories, and the resolve of the violent. Dirty brown hair tendrilled to his collar, deer-hide pants frayed at the cuffs. A long grimy coat clung to his frame, sinew bound his boots. The moist scent of Southard recalled seared meat and woodsmoke and long spells without soap. Under his left arm hung a carved powder horn and a bullet pouch. A massive Bowie knife, razor-sharp and not unfamiliar with Indian scalps, nested in a makeshift sheath against his right thigh. A pistol jutted from his waistband, the butt shiny from use. In his right hand Southard gripped a .50 caliber Hawken rifle that had seen bitter toils across the North American continent.
Southard told Gregg that sixteen miners were now refusing to trek west. Worse, both Indian guides had also backed out, leaving eight white men and several horses and mules to carve their way across a land unknown to all but the people who had thrived there for nearly ten thousand years. Yet the minds of the miners remained limned with dreams of expansive territory and abundant riches, a destiny to be made manifest and now including a much heralded yet elusive seaport north of San Francisco. Gregg shared the miners’ acquisitiveness — he was determined finally to stake a homeland after decades of wandering — yet the thrill of exploration was even more of a draw.[9]
Southard wasn’t enamored with “educated types.” As a man more suited for looting lands and Indian camps (within two years he would be leading Indian massacres on the Klamath River), Southard generally kept a different class of company.
Yet Southard needed Gregg’s talents. He understood that Gregg was the famous fresh-faced guide and documentarian of America’s westward expansion. Gregg’s two-volume book, The Commerce of the Prairies, published in 1844, documented the lands and rivers, the flora, fauna, tribes, and trading opportunities of the expansive and little known region that was then northwestern Mexico. The book included the first detailed maps of terrain that the United States would soon acquire as spoils in the rout of its southern neighbor. The Commerce of the Prairies sold thousands of copies in the United States, Germany and France. During the war, Gregg attached himself as correspondent and interpreter to General John Wool’s Arkansas Volunteers. He marched alongside troops through the killing fields of Chihuahua, where, after battles, he gathered plants. Along the way Gregg impressed his military contemporaries with his knack for navigating routes through forbidding landscapes, a skill honed and perfected while crossing oceans of flat and indiscernible prairie. He was well suited to locate an overland path across America’s only remaining reach of unexplored coastal terrain.[10]
The Treaty of Guadalupe went into effect on July 4, 1848, ending the Mexican-American War and ceding to the United States half a million square miles of land, including all of what is now California. At virtually the same moment, a rancher named Pierson Barton Reading discovered gold along a small draw within a northwestern quadrant of the newly seized territory, a few miles southwest of the present-day city of Redding. Reading had tramped this terrain since 1845, along with dozens of Spanish, American, Russian, and British fur trappers. No one had found gold until Reading’s discovery during his fourth year in-country. His strike occurred just six months after James Marshall dug great veins of the ore out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and ignited the California Gold Rush. Along the Trinity, Reading stared at his open hand, incredulous at the sight of a nugget the size of his thumb. He started digging. Word spread quickly, as such things do, and over the coming years thousands of newcomers attacked California’s northern gold fields and hacked out riches second only to those of the Sierra.[11]
Reading was a consummate colonist. He’d arrived in the West after spending thirteen years among slave owners in the Deep South. To Reading and his ilk, including Southard and to some degree Gregg, all life was commodity. In 1844 Reading wrote, “The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the negroes in the south, for a mere trifle you can secure their services for life.” With his guns and hired thugs, Reading cudgeled Indian slaves to run his cattle and mine his gold. (In 1852, Congress appointed Reading to be Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California.) What he didn’t have was a means of hauling ore to markets in San Francisco other than the long and treacherous overland trail first east to California’s Central Valley, then two hundred miles south to the swiftly growing boom town of San Francisco. Reading and many others understood that somewhere in the distant west they might find the small, rock-strewn bay where they could welcome ships that would deliver mining supplies and take their gold back to San Francisco. Without evidence, Reading erroneously believed that the river near where he’d found gold emptied into the Pacific Ocean at Trinidad, so he named it the Trinity.[12]
By now the West had been well explored by non-Native adventurers, who’d tramped four major trails from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River in 1806, followed by the Astor expedition of 1810–1812, which, with the help of native guides, charted a low pass through the Rocky Mountains that would become the Oregon Trail. Still, the cleaves and crags of coastal mountains and streams that lay west of Reading’s claim were so rugged and impenetrable that by 1849 just one set of whites, led by trapper Jedediah Smith in 1827, had ever crossed them, and this group traveled far north of the fabled bay. Likewise, the ocean shore was steep and perilous with hull-shearing rocks. The land’s inaccessibility had saved it from being overrun by white newcomers, shielding twenty distinct bands of Native peoples who occupied hundreds of geographically isolated villages in the region.
After finding gold, Reading sent word to Washington that the United States needed an overland route to the coast to establish a shipping outlet for gold. Washington heard him and tapped Gregg for the job. Gregg had met with President James Polk just prior to Reading’s entreaty, after which “Josiah [came] under government commission to find the northwestern bay” at Trinidad, according to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Paul Horgan.[13]
Gregg left Washington with a bleak impression of the eleventh president. He later wrote that it was “remarkable that a man so short of intellect should have been placed in the executive chair.” Nonetheless, Polk, who stood closely aligned with the expansionist policies of his mentor, Andrew Jackson, including Jackson’s enmity toward Indians, had overseen the annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845, the political seizure of Oregon Country (including present-day Washington state) from the British in 1846, and the vast addition of southwestern terrain that followed the Mexican-American War two years later. That Reading would discover his Trinity gold at virtually the same moment that the land from whence it came was ceded to the Americans seemed less serendipitous than simply ordained.[14]
On December 5, 1848, Polk publicly confirmed accounts of gold deposits in California that “are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service. …” The rush was on.[15]
Gregg had seen it coming. As early as 1846 he wrote in his diary “The emigration this spring to California or Oregon will be immense.” Already, he said, “6000 souls, with 1000 wagons, [are] moving Westward across the great Prairies.” Many more would follow. In January 1849, 25,000 non-Indians lived in California. By December that year immigrants numbered nearly 100,000. To Native peoples, it was as if someone had airdropped crates of rats onto a small town.[16]
Gregg was born in Tennessee in 1806 and grew up on the Missouri frontier, the youngest member of a scrappy pioneer family. As a child Gregg was sickly and weak. His parents excused him from the family’s daily toils, and he used this time for intellectual pursuits. When Gregg was twelve he invented a crude implement that allowed him to measure the heights of trees. At sixteen he taught himself to survey land.[17]
Even as a young adult Gregg evaluated his fellow man largely through a lens of disdain. His attitude of superiority and disrespect was only fueled by his regular association with the pioneers of iron and gunpowder who surrounded him in the nascent village of Independence, Missouri. He would soon lead those men across foreign soils. In 1824 Gregg watched with envy as his older brother Jacob departed Independence with the first group of American traders on a path that would soon become known as the Santa Fe Trail. Six years later, hardly able to emerge from bed and apparently en route to an early demise, and with no apparent cure available, Gregg took the advice of a mystified physician and allowed himself to be laid upon the hard planks of a covered wagon to be carried along with a team of traders to Santa Fe. Incredibly, as if to prove modern claims of nature as tonic, Gregg’s health rapidly improved.
“Within the first week of prairie travel he saddled his own pony, and rode part of each day,” writes Horgan. After two weeks Gregg was as healthy and robust as the next rider. Only when he returned to civilization did his “illness” return. “Ever after,” writes Horgan, Gregg was “completely well only when he was on the plains.”[18]
Gregg arrived San Francisco in late August 1849 and left there on September 1 to follow the Great Indian Trail northward through the lush Sacramento Valley. Along the way Gregg was stunned to see thousands of would-be miners and white settlers spreading across the landscape. At the north end of the Central Valley Gregg veered west toward the Trinity mines. Along the way he found Reading’s operation where, according to a history of the region by Bryan Burruss, Reading was utilizing the labor of “three white men, seven Delawares, one Walla Walla, one Chinook, and sixty Sacramento Valley Indians.” The Indians were slaves, yet “a group of belligerent Oregonians … protested his association with Indians,” forcing Reading to abandon the digs.[19]
The Oregonians’ violence toward Indians was already notorious. Peter H. Burnett, California’s first civilian U.S. governor, wrote, “I think that at least two thirds of the population of Oregon, capable of bearing arms, left for California in the summer and fall of 1848.” Many of the Oregonians “arrived full of murderous hostility toward American Indians,” writes Benjamin Madley, a professor of history at UCLA, in his 2016 book An American Genocide. “[T]he Oregonians introduced … systematic and sustained killing.” J.B. Truesdell was one such Oregonian. He would join Gregg on his journey to the Humboldt Coast, alongside Southard as well as Thomas Buck, from New York, and James Van Duzen from New Jersey. Isaac Wilson, like Gregg, was from Missouri, Thomas Seabring came from Illinois, and Lewis Keysor Wood was a Kentuckian.[20]
When Southard entered Gregg’s now snowbound tent and announced that two-thirds of the miners and both Indian guides had withdrawn from the journey, Gregg met the news with a proposal to strike west the very next day. Gregg’s self-assurance had always served him well in navigating and charting the American southwest. But he could not have predicted the coming terrain. Had the group any idea of what lay ahead there is little doubt they, too, would have abandoned the excursion.
The miners’ confidence in Gregg’s navigational skills was matched by their fervor to acquire riches in the form of gold, land, and other resources yet undiscovered. They were not afraid of Indians, though Gregg was one of the few white leaders now foraging the North American continent who considered Native Americans not just people, but individuals of character and history. His nine journeys from the fur-trading hub of Missouri along the Santa Fe Trail, into and through the Southwest, frequently brought him in contact with Plains tribes. He gave credence to their religious claims — “They argue, with some plausibility, that the sun animates everything” — and admired their craftsmanship.[21]
Nonetheless, Gregg’s party to the Pacific would be well armed. Gregg himself carried one of Samuel Colt’s famous six-shot “Dragoon” revolvers, produced the previous year for the war against Mexico. Southard and Truesdell each hauled heavy caches of armament and were well versed in its use. Still, all the men understood that a large and determined band of “savages” could overwhelm eight travelers no matter their arms, so they would remain on best behavior across the coastal mountains.[22]
Despite Gregg’s relative benignity toward Indians, he was disinclined to grant them rights or any sort of status that approached the exalted position of whites. He was a leading force among Americans who believed in “Manifest Destiny,” a credo that embraced the idea that Native peoples were fated to occupy the land only until a “superior race” could come along to claim it. Gregg and others called the lands of California “uninhabited” — no matter the hundreds of thousands of Native people who had lived there for millennia in sophisticated and clearly defined communities that occupied the best possible sites. (Estimates of California’s pre-contact Native populations run as high as one million people.) In Commerce of the Prairies, Gregg writes, “All who have traversed these delightful regions [of the Southwest], look forward with anxiety to the day when the Indian title to the land shall be extinguished, and flourishing ‘white’ settlements dispel the gloom which at present prevails over this uninhabited region.” He said that the “half-civilized” Plains Indians presented a “perverse, restless disposition. … few possess much intrinsic bravery. … [They] have made little or no perceptible progress in civilization.”[23]
Gregg and the Trinity miners were versed in laws that would allow them to take, hold, and sell Indian lands. The Unites States Preemption Act of 1841 authorized male citizens over the age of twenty-one to “squat” upon and thus occupy and eventually own tracts held by the federal government. Subsequent laws further streamlined privatization. Though Gregg’s principal interest in the California North Coast was to document the land and all that it held, he was also seeking personal gain. Like his fellow travelers, Gregg was intent on finding and taking for himself properties west of the Trinity goldfields. With the California land rush now fully engaged, Gregg understood that little time remained to explore and lay claim to this geographic question mark on an otherwise largely completed map of the West. He was not intimidated by the idea of exploring unknown terrain in winter — he had done it many times. But he had never wintered in the forbidding and densely forested mountains of northwestern California.[24]
The two Indian guides who had backed out of the journey were likely of the Wintu Tribe, a large and formerly prosperous nation whose territory stretched from the northern Sacramento Valley to just west of Canyon Creek, on the Trinity River, near the North Fork mining claim. (Today, Canyon Creek is the most popular hiker’s destination in the Trinity Alps Wilderness.) Gregg may have been amazed that the Wintu communicated in a sign language remarkably similar to that used by tribes of the Southwest. (“This system of signs has been brought to such perfection among them,” Gregg wrote of Native people of the Southwest, “that the most intricate correspondence seems to be intelligently conducted. …”) The guides gave the white men directions to the coast and enticed their imaginations by describing a large coastal inlet — the future Humboldt Bay, the second largest natural harbor in California. Like Trinidad Bay, Humboldt Bay at the time remained largely mythological, with just one ship, the O’Cain, said to have crossed the bar, in 1806. The Indians said that the bay lay surrounded by lush fields of grass where elk, bear, and deer grazed in abundance. They said the journey would require eight days’ travel.[25]
The Wintu were undoubtedly happy to see the men leave. Just three years earlier a contingent of raiders led by Kit Carson and John Frémont massacred at least two hundred Wintu on the banks of the Sacramento River. (Some accounts put the figure as high as eight hundred dead.) One of the raiders, Thomas Breckenridge, later wrote, “The bucks, squaws and paposes were shot down like sheep and those men never stopped as long as they could find one alive.” Madley writes that the Wintu slaughter “was the prelude to hundreds of similar massacres and ultimately an American genocide” of California Indians. “Between 1846 and 1873 perhaps 80 percent of all California Indians died,” writes Madley, primarily as the result of “the organized destruction of California’s Indian peoples under US rule [by] mass murder or other deliberate acts like forced incarceration under lethal conditions. … [M]any massacres left no survivors or only small children.”[26]
The arrival to the West of explorers and settlers generally spelled doom not just for Native Americans, but also for native flora and fauna. In a century’s time — an ecological instant — the newcomers would kill off most of the game, net whole schools of salmon, level the forest, and plug once-deep rivers with sediment. They altered geography by hydro-mining miles of mountainside and alluvial terrace, a practice so destructive that in just a few years 850 million cubic meters of sediment would wash into rivers and creeks draining from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, nearly half of which would make its way downstream to fill much of San Francisco Bay. In California’s southern Central Valley, Tulare Lake spread across 687 square miles, three times the size of Lake Tahoe and once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi. Farmers watered their crops with streams that filled Tulare Lake, and once the lake ran dry they farmed that land too. Further north, the filling, diking, and draining of Humboldt Bay eliminated 90 percent of the bay’s fecund salt marsh — a process that began shortly after the Gregg Party found the bay.[27]
Gregg and his fellow travelers well represented this destructive ethos of forceful expansion. Yet among these rough-hewn Argonauts Gregg must have seemed a dilettante, an effete among iron fists. He’d even studied medicine for a year. Along with guns and knives he carried a field desk, pens, ink, small notebooks for daily entries, a compass, and a sextant. “He had with him all the implements necessary to guide us through the uninhabited, trackless region,” Wood later wrote. Gregg recognized and used the planets and stars. He felt intrinsically superior to these men, and he let them know it. His contempt may have been a fatal error.[28]
It was left to Wood, in 1856, to provide the only written account of the group’s trek west of the mining claim. Gregg would not survive the journey, nor would his voluminous notes. The story of Gregg’s death is mysterious, extraordinary, and it doesn’t add up. Still, for decades Wood’s version defined the lore of that moment, much as enormous redwood stumps that still mark the route taken by the Gregg Party provide an echo of the forest that once stood. Was Gregg, too, intentionally cut down, his demise covered by lies?
The Indians’ claims of an eight-day journey to the coast likely eased whatever anxieties the miners may have harbored about continuing west at the start of what was already presenting itself as a bitterly cold winter. The men suffered low provisions, yet the Indians told them that abundant game could be found along the way. The party mustered a ten-day larder consisting primarily of pork, beans, and flour, packed a dozen mules and horses, and departed camp on November 5, 1849.
At a roiling ford eight riders crossed the main stem of the Trinity River and side-hilled onto a knifing ridge that led to what is today called Hayfork Divide. Immediately the landscape was unlike anything they’d previously known. At altitude the men gazed upon the terrain from whence they’d come and likely discussed turning back. Snow fell and their animals mired. The Indian trail disappeared. To the northeast the Trinity Alps rose naked and snowbound eight thousand feet above the swollen river, itself a turquoise snake coiling westward out of the mountains’ highest reaches. Ahead, the men saw no obvious course to the coast. The land never flattened but expanded endlessly into a succession of heavily forested ridges that seemed to lock into each other like a crumpled quilt.
“Before us,” wrote Wood, “stretching as far as the eye could reach, lay mountains, high and rugged, deep valleys and difficult canyons, now filled with water by the recent heavy rain. … As I gazed upon the wild and rugged country spread out before us and knew that all these snow-crested mountains lay between us and the place of our destination, a feeling of dread came over me.”[29]
The men toiled up the ridge and followed it for several miles to the southwest until reaching a low peak where the ridge arced northwesterly. They skirted the headwaters of Packers Creek, Miners Creek, Corral Creek — future Americanized nomenclature that would permanently usurp Native names in use for thousands of years. The land held great conifers and oak woodlands or else maddening brush fields and dangerous scree piles. When they reached a new apex and looked ahead they saw more of the same. Fat bosoms of icebox air glided almost imperceptibly down distant ridges, liquid Butoh dancers shawling once-glistening slopes, erasing landmarks, seizing throats. Gray gluts of cloud unfurled at distance, tumbled into bottomless draws, and drifted lazily until engulfing the men in a remorseless chill. As their food ran out they grew cold, desperate.
Five days of grinding travel across Chaparral Mountain led them to Hennessy Ridge. Here the travelers descended to the South Fork of the Trinity River, which today remains the wildest branch of that great stream. At significant risk they forded the raging South Fork and hauled onto a wide bench that was occupied by a hundred Indians. The Spanish called these villages “rancherias,” and the name has stuck to this day. The two groups were shocked to see each other. Though they well outnumbered the whites, the Indians, from the tiny Chimariko tribe, scattered.[30]
“These savages … fled in the wildest confusion, and in every direction,” wrote Wood, “some plunging headlong into the river.” Wood was convinced that the Chimariko feared his group because “they had never before seen a white man, nor had they received any intelligence of our coming.” Yet the Chimariko had every reason to flee. They well understood the evil that had descended on their trading partners of the Wintu tribe just upstream. A new breed of human animal had appeared seemingly from nowhere, intent on occupying the land — a people previously unfathomable, actual savages who killed game and humans alike in great numbers and with volleys of explosions never before heard. By now, in just a few years, thousands of Oregon and California Indians had been murdered.[31]
With the camp now empty the Americans raided the Indians’ stores of dried salmon. “We helped ourselves to as much as we wanted,” wrote Wood. As they dined a band of “some seventy-five or eighty warriors, their faces painted, looking like so many demons, and armed and prepared for battle,” approached the miners, now defenseless because “our firearms had been rendered completely unfit for use, from constant exposure to the rain. …” But these Indians, like all of the Native people they would encounter, would leave the men unscathed and even well fed. Such benevolence illustrated not “timidity,” as the Americans would characterize it, but generosity, something to which the newcomers were perhaps unaccustomed. Within ten years all but a few Chimariko Indians would be dead.[32]
The Indians indicated a proper westerly course and the group took it. Rain and snow fell as if preordained, and when the sun broke next morning it served mostly to taunt the men, as it carried little warmth. Leading horse and mule across a landscape not suitable for the beasts, the men took even longer than expected to achieve any distance, covering just seven miles in a day, according to Gregg’s calculations. Soon their food was gone and they resorted to scraping the flour sacks “for a kind of paste which the dampness had soured and moulded,” wrote Wood. “The paste was carefully peeled off, softened with water and equally divided among the party. … Nothing now remained of the stock of provisions that constituted our outfit.” On November 13, just eight days after leaving Rich Bar, “we were compelled to retire to our blankets supperless.”
Next morning the men tramped on. Nearing 5,000 feet in elevation, they skirted a high knob now called Horse Mountain, then headed southwest, as the Indians had advised, along a Native trail thousands of years old and today encrusted with the pavement of U.S. Highway 299. Yet Gregg would direct the group in a more northerly direction so they might better arrive at the latitudinal coordinate for Trinidad Bay, as described by the Spanish in 1775.
The land shone glorious and ripe as an unconquered wilderness. While the pleasures of such a vital landscape were likely lost on these cold and starving men, there is little doubt that Gregg recorded daily observations including coordinates, conditions, plants, and animals. Yet even Gregg may not have recognized the domestic influence that surrounded them. Native peoples of that land, as in nearly all of California, had for thousands of years tended the landscape, primarily with fire, to maintain openings in the forest. In these diverse ecosystems, elk and deer thrived alongside edible plants. The Indians also cultivated landscapes for plant species used in basketry, homes, weapons, and clothing. When the men came upon a sweeping meadow they may have thanked God, for in the open field they shot three deer. Really they should have thanked the Indians. Soon the travelers ran out of venison, but then, writes Wood, “again we had the good fortune to reach a piece of mountain prairie where we found an abundance of game for ourselves and plenty of grass for the animals.” This prairie was atop a long north-running crest now called Indian Field Ridge.
Flummoxed by ridges that refused to run west, the men finally descended into what is now, for excellent reason, called Redwood Creek. They balked at the pitch and swell of this tumbling flow. How many more cataracts would they encounter in this land? At times it seemed mad to ford such raging freshets, iron gauntlets that audibly heaved boulders tumbling downstream.
Being far upstream of the redwoods’ eastern limit, the men encountered none of the great Sequoia sempervirens for which the stream is named. Instead, this reach of Redwood Creek grew magnificent stands of Douglas fir and several other conifers mixed with hardwoods growing ancient and unsparing. In places the fir stood dominant, some of them two hundred fifty feet tall with trunks reaching ten feet across. Whole groves of hardwoods grew regal, muscular, many of them huge, their great branches outstretched and grasping light. Sultry red madrones, six feet in diameter and smooth as a baby’s skin, branched into dozens of massive independent arms, forging wide evergreen canopies virid and golden in angled autumn light. In wet areas, swooning bay laurels sprawled against the sky and spiced the moistened air with exotic scents. Here the men gathered bay nuts, which are nearly inedible, but they roasted and ate them anyway, as “ten days passed away without our being favored with a sight of any living thing that could be made available or useful for food,” wrote Wood. The bay nuts would prove a feast compared with what was to come.[33]
What came were the redwoods.
The men were traversing Wiregrass Ridge when they first encountered what they immediately understood to be some of the largest trees in the world. The conifers grew to impossible widths and towered in height, yet were softened by a spongy ocher bark. At the same time, as if being coaxed into an arboreal trap, they heard, for the first time, the distant but unmistakable thunder of Pacific waves. They packed their guns and food bags, cast iron and blankets, and began fording thickets of salal and huckleberry so densely intergrown with small hardwood trees that they were left no choice but to chop and burst through. Following a zigzag course, the men hacked and stumbled along yet another north-running ridge that skirted the headwaters of what they would call Little River. To their delight the ridge arced westward and downhill so they remained upon it. But here the redwoods ballooned in size and dominance, until they, not the undergrowth, impeded forward progress. Indeed, in places the undergrowth eased into wide carpets of ferns. The ferns grew to great heights, nearly to a horse’s eyes, but they were easily traversed, parting as if silk curtains. Often the ferns gave way to a dominance of dainty oxalis, an even easier crossing.
Yet stitching this primordial landscape lay myriad fallen boles, unbelievable warrens of crisscrossed redwoods arranged like skyscrapers after an earthquake. The logs didn’t so much block forward progress as erase it. Some of the downed redwoods rose four times taller than the men themselves, with root wads reaching well beyond that and twined like Medusa’s hair. Several fallen giants had even more redwoods stacked atop them. The fallen redwoods betrayed little rot despite having reclined in place for hundreds of years. Here were communities of arboreal history, a story two hundred million years in the making.
“Through this forest we could not travel to exceed two miles a day,” wrote Wood. “The reason of this was the immense quantity of fallen timber that lay upon the ground in every conceivable shape and direction, and in many instances one piled upon another so that the only alternative left was literally to cut our way through. To go around them was often as impossible as to go over them. We were obliged, therefore, constantly to keep two men ahead with axes, who, as occasion required, would chop into and slab off sufficient to construct a sort of platform by means of which the animals were driven up on the log and forced to jump off on the opposite side.”[34]
Ludicrous is the idea of men lopping slabs of fallen redwoods so that laden pack animals might climb and soar off. Hunger grew so extreme that the men boiled deer hide and drank the water as their only means of sustenance. Their own starvation, they understood, was not out of the question. As the travelers groaned through terrain as foreign as another planet they knew not where they would end up, or in what condition.
At times the men of the Gregg Party found and utilized fire-scarred redwoods that opened as if great blackened rooms sometimes fifteen feet across. The drenched travelers gave thanks during those short days and blackened nights as they bedded against the now incessant rains within the hollowed but still living trees. Later white settlers would call these chambers “goose pens.” Some goose pens offered slender doorways wide enough to allow the men to slide through, their decomposing garb further blackening upon entry.
They rode on. “For three long weary days did we toil in these redwoods,” writes Wood. “There was not the least sign indicating the presence of any of the animal creation.” The travelers were accustomed to controlling their surroundings, to surviving great struggles. What they touched bent to their will. But there was nothing they could change about the route they’d taken, nothing they could alter of what Wood maligned as “this dismal forest prison.”[35]
Doubtless the men of the Gregg Party concurred with Wood, that they inhabited an arboreal prison seemingly impossible to escape. Yet Gregg, the explorer that historian Horgan described as being “in love with nature: the land and its features; the physical world, its phenomena and its laws,” undoubtedly journeyed awestruck across the redwood domain. He would have marveled at the gargantuan nurturing the dainty, the living earth standing in a state of primordial timelessness, a world within a world. Gregg was a man who’d professed to endure untold hardships of the trail “partly on business and partly to see the country.” He could not have confused this particular country with any sort of jail — not the man who gathered plants after battles, carefully sketching and packing them and carting them across half a continent for presentation to his friends in academia. A man so renowned that he is credited with discovering four new species of succulents in the American southwest, two of which are named for him. (Today forty-seven species of plants are named for Gregg, with the epithet greggii.)
Gregg pressed the others to help him measure redwoods. But his comrades, “having neither ambition to gratify him nor desire to enlighten the curious world … answered his calls with shameful abuse,” wrote a candid Wood. Gregg rued his comrades’ incurious minds. He once wrote that he suffered from the rougher riders who rode alongside him with “taunting and insulting expressions; so that the naturalist has to pass an ordeal in laboring among ignorant people.”[36]
Gregg’s labors among the ignorant constituted “one further dimension of effectiveness,” writes Horgan. “He was analyzing, reasoning, recording. He was observing the conditions of natural life throughout which other men passed with shorter sight. He was the theorist, the man of mind … the intellectual frontiersman of the natural world.”[37]
Only twice did Gregg receive a second set of hands to measure a tree’s circumference. The biggest redwoods typically grow on alluvial flats along streams, where soils are rich and nurture the redwoods’ long, shallow, interdependent root systems that require water year-round. Yet even along the ridgetop the men measured one tree with a diameter of twenty-two feet — a giant, to be sure, though not uncommon in the redwoods. Less likely are Sequoia sempervirens in the range of thirty feet in diameter, though they existed as well. A few miles south of Little River, on Lindsay Creek, researchers to this day descend upon a stump measuring thirty-two feet in diameter. The tree was actually wider than this, as its bark, which has since fallen away, was likely a foot wide on both sides. At 130 feet above the ground the Lindsay Creek tree measured nineteen feet in diameter.[38]
After two days in the redwoods the men reached a knob at 1,200 feet elevation where the ridge abruptly turned north. Yet a spur ridge descended southwesterly, as if pulled by the distant hiss of a raging surf, so this route they chose. After descending six hundred vertical feet in half a mile the land began to flatten. The forest, impossibly, took on dimensions for which even their recent redwood immersion could not have prepared them. Here they entered one of the greatest of all redwood flats.
A redwood flat is a world wholly its own. On hillsides and in the dryer eastern and southern reaches of the redwood biome other species such as Douglas fir, grand fir, madrone, maple, and oak commonly carve out a hearty if not codominant existence amid the sempervirens. In the flats, however, with some exception, redwood reigns as a nearly insurmountable arboreal force. Other trees will grow among the redwoods, but they are few in number and so struggle to reach light that a normally contorted tanoak might grow a hundred feet straight as a conifer.
The flat now traversed by the Gregg Party was unusual because it was coastal. It ranged from one to two miles wide and ten miles long, running parallel to the Pacific Ocean from Little River to Big Lagoon and arcing to the northwest alongside the shore. Where the land finally gave way to ocean it descended in rocky cliffs sometimes two hundred feet above the breaking surf. It was here, on December 13, 1849, five and a half weeks after embarking on an eight-day journey, the men of the Gregg Party finally stumbled blinking and disbelieving into the glare of open air and onto a great coastal meadow that dropped abruptly into a limitless sea. Trinidad beckoned just two miles north. Gregg had nailed it. A smart wind greeted their exit and turned whitecaps on the distant surf. Gulls wheeled and eagles stalked them. Sea lions barked from rocks that sieved the ocean tides.
When the men reached the Pacific “it seemed like meeting some dear old friend,” wrote Wood. “I felt as though there was yet some hope of deliverance from these sufferings.”[39]
The travelers were famished so they shot a raven that happened to be carrying a half-eaten salmon, then, as if to announce the coming American century, they also shot a bald eagle. Ravenous, they cooked the three disparate creatures in a stew and devoured it. From their tin plates they gazed miserably across a milky mid-December sky. A bitter north wind carried scents of ocean brine. The sky blossomed with birds and the land teemed with fauna. Soon they found elk and deer in abundance. They gorged and prepared food for travel. In the lush grasses they surprised snakes and rabbits, fox, beaver, mountain lion, black bear, and several grizzlies. Soon enough one griz would nearly take Wood to that happy hunting ground he’d heard so much about as a child reared in Kentucky.
Once the men reached shore they easily plied an ancient Indian trail, still well in use, that offered a distant view of the bulbous knob of Trinidad Head. The promontory stood three hundred fifty feet above a raging surf and descended to the east onto the mainland and a plateau of fine grass. Today the plateau is dominated by one of California’s smallest cities, a population of four hundred souls that expands during tourist season. Yet when the Gregg Party finally arrived, the only sign of humanity at Trinidad was a small Yurok Indian village called Tsurai (“mountain”), which, unlike the future white settlement, sat southward below the plateau, out of the wind. The Yurok controlled fifty miles of coastline, from Little River, south of Tsurai, to a small creek just north of an expansive Klamath River, as well as the first thirty-six miles of the Klamath itself. Tsurai was the Yurok’s southernmost village. It overlooked a small but calm anchorage, the one that Bodega had discovered but which had remained nearly mythical until now.[40]
At Trinidad, Gregg stripped bark from a tree and there, in the fashion of a claimant, carved the latitude, the day’s barometer reading, the date, and his name. All of the men agreed to call this place “Gregg’s Point.” Under rules set down by a federal government seeking to colonize its new territories, Trinidad now belonged to Gregg, so long as he followed up with a claim as required by the Preemption Act. This he would not get a chance to do.[41]
From Trinidad the men followed the Indian trail seven miles northward along the edge of the coast until reaching Big Lagoon. Along the way they crossed several small streams, yet they found nothing that resembled a river the size of the Trinity, thus dispelling Reading’s claim that it emptied at Trinidad Bay. (The Trinity River actually feeds the Klamath River eighteen miles due east of Big Lagoon.) Reversing course, they trekked south through landscapes seen, at that time, only by Native peoples.
Though relieved to be on the coast and following a distinct Indian trail, travel was enervating and dangerous. At a time when growing animosities divided the group, Woods’s horse fell lame, leaving him with a single mule. He “visited the chief of a tribe of Indians who lived close at hand,” he later wrote, and the chief agreed to give Wood safe shelter through the winter. The men objected to Wood’s plan. All of the men were needed, they said, to negotiate the foreign landscape and unknown tribes. “I told them I had no horse that could travel,” said Wood. Truesdell, exemplifying the Oregonian spirit of the day, offered to sell Wood one of his horses for a hundred dollars — thirty-five hundred dollars today. Wood agreed and the men moved along.[42]
Heading south, Little River offered easy crossing, and they entered the territory of the Wiyot Tribe. Yet the next stream, a few miles further south, presented as a wide and swollen serpent flush with recent rains. Here Gregg removed from his saddlebags instruments necessary to draw the river’s whereabouts on his expanding depictions of the land. He was charting the first usable map of the region, just as he’d created remarkably accurate and detailed maps of the Southwest. The other men objected. They had somehow “procured from the Indians” two large canoes and were eager to shove off. These were spectacular boats. Yurok and Wiyot craftsmen carved long, heavy canoes from twenty-foot lengths of whole redwood trees. The logs were first hollowed using slow-burning fires, then chopped with wedges and adzes made from elk horn and shells. The vessels could haul several thousand pounds of cargo and people, and they plied rivers and oceans alike. With appreciation and respect for the trees that served them, the Indians carved a “heart” into the center of the canoe to honor the living earth that so fully met their needs.[43]
The men did not see the heart. They saw only red while waiting for Gregg. They filled the canoes, then threatened to leave Gregg stranded on shore if he did not give up the task. Gregg frantically stuffed his instruments into bags and waded the icy current. He tossed his gear and himself into the wide redwood conveyance and steamed. The animals swam alongside, struggling, galloping across surging currents, yet none were lost.
During the crossing Gregg went quiet, but once on shore, “his cup of wrath now filled to the brim … he opened upon us a perfect battery of the most withering and violent abuse,” wrote Wood. “Several times during the ebullition of the old man’s passion he indulged in such insulting language and comparisons, that some of the party, at best not any too amiable in their disposition, came very nearly to inflicting upon him summary punishment by consigning him, instruments and all, to this beautiful river.” Thus the men, after threatening Gregg’s life, and in commemoration of the scene, called this mighty stream the Mad River.
South of Mad River they found their easiest trekking yet, as a nearly flat ocean shore ran fifteen miles from the south side of the river to the mouth of Humboldt Bay. Still, they had no idea that they were skirting this enormous inland waterway. Above them to the east rose a high ridge of dunes, a mile wide in places, that blocked their view of the bay even as they walked alongside it. Only when one of the men tarried eastward in search of fresh water, returning with a pail of brackish liquid unfit for consumption, did Gregg realize the geographic possibility to be found just over the dunes. The men trudged up a small rise of slithery sand and continued east, at times fording small, strange ravines of stunted pine and ranging across panoramas of bare dunes, wind-smoothed mesas the size of small towns. Rain had left the sand wet and darkened it to the color of slate. Yet in places the day’s ceaseless winds and unseasonable sun had dried the surface grit and sent sand undulating across the surface in sleek ribbons that streaked forth like the ghost of the rock it once was to sculpt the ever malleable dunes.[44]
From atop a wide rise the men stood stunned by the view now unfolding to the east and south: sixteen thousand acres of water and salt marsh, sinuous sloughs and great hordes of avian life, lit by orange sunshine now sinking in the southwest.[45]
Eastward, beyond the bay, stood the redwoods. The great conifers cloaked slopes that appeared gentle, even inviting. The men knew better. Their eyes followed unbroken ridges to horizons flush with mushrooming clouds foretelling the next deluge. Hundreds of thousands of birds flocked everywhere around them. Shrill gulls chided them, backed by herds of skittering yellow-beaked terns, marbled godwits, avocets and drakes, sexy cormorants, diving mergansers, whimsical buffleheads. Great blue herons stretched graceful necks. Egrets in blinding white stood regal, silent, until darting downward for the abundant fare of daily life. A dozen species of raptor patrolled the skies. Pelicans channeled pterodactyls, lifting and dropping in sine waves across curling breakers as if ambassadors of prehistory, then stabbing rollers headlong like kamikazes to stuff protracted beaks with catch of the day. Never had these men witnessed such life, among the world’s most diverse and abundant bird populations.[46]
Did the distant roar of Pacific storms, the heathen perfumes of ocean life, the chorus of birdcalls, the ambling of fauna arouse within these men a humble hurrah, a tip of the cap to such engulfing sentience? With the exception of Gregg, the idea is improbable. More likely were visions of ships in port, the clanging and grunts of men disgorging supplies and on-loading timber and gold. Their highest priority, wrote Wood, was “locat[ing] claims for ourselves and lay[ing] out a town.” Such was a vision almost instantly realized, to the eventual detriment of nearly all life now spread before them.[47]
After their easy walk along a seemingly changeless shoreline the men balked at a south-facing downslope that terminated at a calamity of surf. Ten-foot swells invaded and retreated across a narrow inlet, crashing into each other and lifting into great sprays of implacable water that would soon devastate dozens of ships. They had stumbled upon the mouth of Humboldt Bay. Quickly they understood the near impossibility of a sailor discerning this opening from sea, as its north and south spits jutted nearly perpendicular to and extended past each other to form what appeared to be a single length of land. Never again would a mariner make this mistake. They had found their Xanadu, a New York of the West. Or so they believed. Yet what was to emerge on that land was more of a colony, something like the Congo, to be largely inhabited by satraps and grunts charged with subjugating and exterminating the original inhabitants and extracting economic value.
They pitched camp. Almost immediately a small band of Indians, led by Ki-we-lat-tah, a headman for the Wiyot Tribe, rowed their redwood canoes across the bay to visit these strange human creatures. Wiyot territory ran for forty miles along Shou’r (the Pacific Ocean), extending ten miles inland, with Wigi (Humboldt Bay) centered at the very heart of Wiyot life. Against the cold the men appeared almost regal in luxurious but functional robes of deer and rabbit skin. Their legs were bare save buckskin breechclouts, and they wore moccasins adorned with shells. If the presence of white men surprised them the Natives didn’t show it. Yet they must have been astonished, so alien were these humans astride giant beasts and festooned with all manner of leather and metal. The two thousand Wiyots who inhabited the area could easily have overcome and massacred the eight white travelers. Instead the Natives were friendly, peaceful, instinctively helpful.
Ki-we-lat-tah, according to Wood, promised the travelers “every means of comfort in his power,” and proved it with a feast of clams. Ki-we-lat-tah dissuaded the men from attempting to cross the mouth of the bay, explaining that it was as deep as the redwoods stood tall, and clearly treacherous. So the men journeyed back northward, eventually arcing easterly to ford the mire of the bay’s biologically robust sloughs and salt marshes. They crashed through thickets of alder and willow until they came to a rise of solid land above the northeastern shore. Within months this spot would become the white man’s town of Union, later Arcata. They camped at a sweetwater spring that many years later would be subsumed by a freeway. Next morning they trudged south along an Indian trail some seven miles through woods and rich prairies and across small streams. They halted at a fetching site, opposite the mouth of the bay, where Thomas Buck immediately staked his claim. Like Gregg at Trinidad, Buck carved into a tree his name and the latitude of the instantly gotten wealth. He called the place Bucksport, site of today’s Eureka sewage treatment plant.[48]
They moved south along the east rim of Humboldt Bay and crossed a small stream, soon to be called Elk River. The men could not have known that, a few miles upstream, the Elk River contracted into a warren of oxbows that ran protected by low ridges on all sides and engineered a dozen flat isthmuses where redwoods grew magnificent, sublime. In 1889, the Humboldt Times noted that, three years earlier, loggers had felled a redwood on Elk River that they said measured 424 feet tall. (Today the world’s tallest tree is a redwood 379 feet tall.)[49]
Shortly after fording Elk River the men crossed Salmon Creek, then ascended a low, wide bluff jutting between the southern reach of Humboldt Bay and the sprawling delta of yet another great river, this one much wider than the Mad. Here the torrent flowed swiftly yet appeared near motionless, quiet save the hissing of shallows along shoreline cobbles thick with alder and willow. Even at first glance the river was clearly navigable, running imperious, broad, enriching the fertile earth and in some years swarming with up to a million salmon. Just upstream the river bisected miles of luxuriant grasslands that now spread before the men as if to coax an eternal stay. Further along the travelers would discover more prairies that would abruptly give way to the world’s largest riverside flat of ancient redwoods.[50]
The men hewed to the river’s eastern shore. Just south of a future town called Fortuna, they encountered a midsized tributary that flowed from the east and poured gently into the larger river. This smaller river they would name the Van Duzen, in honor of brother James. The land around the confluence lay rich in prairie, so they camped for two days and their animals fed.
Crossing the Van Duzen was no easy feat, but the men remained astride their horses and bobbed to the opposite shore. They continued alongside the larger river, skirting the terminus of a westerly ridge through a great field of tall grasses until a bluff halted all travel. They would have to cross this gaping stream. And they would need help.
“Upon reaching this river we came suddenly upon two very old Indians who, at seeing us, fell to the ground as if they had been shot,” wrote Wood. “We dismounted and made them get up, giving them to understand that we were their friends; but it was with much difficulty that we succeeded in quieting their fears.”
The men were elders of the Wiyot Tribe. No matter that the Indians had never before seen white men, communication between the Wiyot and nearby tribes undoubtedly spread news of the recent rampages and massacres then ongoing to the north, east, and south. The elderly Indians confronted by these festooned invaders along that great river were well aware of the dangers they now faced. That they would fall as if shot demonstrated an understanding of the power of the gun, though they had never witnessed one in use. Very soon such lack of direct knowledge would be a thing of the past.[51]
The old Indians had been netting lamprey, an eel-like anadromous fish that, when smoked, is delicious. The Americans traded beads and pieces of iron for the Indians’ lamprey. “We helped ourselves to nearly the whole of their load,” wrote Wood. In honor of this nutritious fish the men named the river the Eel. After the Indians fed them they carted the white travelers across the Eel River in their huge redwood canoes. The animals swam. All safely reached the opposite shore. Yet with bellies now full and a long trek ahead through unknown terrain, on a New Year’s Day fraught with gathering storm, the last threads of amicability among the whites frayed and finally snapped.[52]
This time they were divided by the question of direction, so the party decided to split. Wood, Sebring, Wilson, and Buck opted to follow an Indian trail that shortly led to a wide prairie along the river, while the others — Van Duzen, Truesdell, and Southard, led by Gregg — veered west into the hills to locate and continue documenting America’s last stretch of unexplored coastal terrain.
For Wood’s group the going at first came easy, as passage on the prairie was on a trail well tramped by human and four-legged alike. But soon they reached the redwoods, where a thousand-acre flat of impenetrable forest immediately brought night. This forest led only to more forest, seemingly forever up the mighty Eel. The commanding redwoods grew to the water’s edge and abutted pools seventy feet deep. Such depths were not uncommon along the lower Eel, which would turn out to be navigable for fifty miles inland from the coast. But that was then. One hundred fifty years of logging and road-building would shave and gouge slopes and flats and dump whole hillsides into the Eel’s legendary pools, filling them with up to forty feet of sediment and erasing millions of years of geologic evolution.[53]
The foursome took leave of the river and hauled upward along an escarpment now called Monument Ridge. Quickly they became mired in snow and spent five days sedentary and living from the protein of one small deer. They returned to the river starving, and in a fit of foreboding they reentered the forest. Two weeks later, on January 26, 1850, the men came into, a small clearing and there spied a family of eight grizzly bears. In desperation they hunted the bears, never a good idea. At the time California grizzlies, which are now extinct, were among the biggest bears in the world — the largest recorded individual weighed twenty-two hundred pounds. Wood shot a giant mother ursa. She laid prone for several minutes, but then rebounded and chased Wood to a small buckeye tree, which the bear broke in half. The grizzly mauled Wood but somehow didn’t kill him.
The other three men rallied and trussed Wood’s torn body to a travois that was pulled by the horse he’d acquired from Truesdell. They hoofed one hundred fifty miles up and out of the Eel River watershed and into the Russian River, eventually reaching Sonoma County and the farm of an American named Mark West. Whereas their journey brought them through long reaches of what was arguably the world’s most spectacular forest, Wood’s history makes no mention of it. Rather, the narrative devolves into a classic bear story of the day. After that, in a three-paragraph postscript, Wood recounts the death of one of the young nation’s exalted explorers.[54]
After the group split at the Van Duzen River, Gregg’s foursome at first journeyed west with some success. The Missourian guided the men toward Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in the continental United States named in 1565 by Spanish explorer Andrés de Urdaneta. From the Cape they entered some of the most rugged coastal terrain in North America — a landscape of fierce declivity, impossible to traverse in many places, and enforcing a remoteness so impenetrable that even today the region is called the Lost Coast. For a while the group easily followed a small and lovely river that hugged great expanses of grasses and forests of oak, madrone, and fir. The river is now called the Mattole, named for a tribe that inhabited the watershed but which would suffer extreme privation and violence at the hands of white newcomers.[55]
The men followed the Mattole upstream, due south, until stopping against a mountain range. This small cluster of peaks, now called the King Range, rises nearly vertical a single pitch to a point four thousand feet above the ocean. The mountains forced the foursome to veer easterly out of the Mattole and back to the South Fork Eel River, which they followed on distinctive Indian trails into the Russian River watershed to a point just north of present-day Ukiah. Here they followed a short, southeasterly route through game-rich prairies to Clear Lake. Along the way they undoubtedly met and bartered with native people who inhabited dozens of small villages in the region.
Once at Clear Lake, all of the men, not just Gregg, knew exactly where they were. The four travelers were aware that they could follow the lake’s western shore to reach a homestead called Big Valley Ranch, run by Americans Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey. What the travelers did not yet know was that they were entering a region that, at that very moment, was awash in the blood of hundreds of Indians slaughtered by rampaging whites.
On Christmas Day, 1849, as members of the Gregg Party celebrated that holiday by roasting an elk head alongside Humboldt Bay, a company of twenty-five American “Dragoons” was riding northward from the former Spanish outpost of Sonoma to avenge the deaths of Stone and Kelsey at Clear Lake. The pair were killed by Pomo Indian ranch workers who feared for their lives because, in a state of starvation, they had taken one of the ranchers’ cows for meat and in the process lost one of the ranch horses. Their fears were well founded. Historian Madley reports that “the Indian people on Big Valley Ranch harbored six profound grievances against the two ranchers. These included de facto slavery, institutionalized starvation, torture, rape, abandonment at gold mines, and the threat of imminent forced removal.” In just a few years, scores of Kelsey’s enslaved Pomo laborers had died of starvation, torture, and execution. Indians were whipped and hung by their thumbs, young girls were repeatedly raped. In addition, “Stone and Kelsey also brutalized Indians for entertainment,” writes Madley, who quotes 19th century historian L. L. Palmer: “It is … no uncommon thing for [Stone and Kelsey] to shoot an Indian just for the fun of seeing him jump, and … they lashed them as a sort of recreation when friends from the outside world chanced to pay them a visit.”[56]
In this spirit of institutionalized violence, the justifiable killing of Stone and Kelsey unleashed a wave of atrocities by whites against California Indians, especially those in the north. In late February, 1850, Gregg and the three others staggered into this killing field. It was here, on February 25, 1850, three months and three weeks after leaving the Trinity River, and not far from white civilization, that Gregg died near the shore of Clear Lake, of “starvation,” according to Wood.[57]
For nearly a century Wood’s account of Gregg’s death was generally accepted as truth, no matter that Wood’s story was really that of Charles Southard and J. B. Truesdell.
“[A]s Mr Southard related to me,” wrote Wood, “Dr. Gregg … fell from his horse and died in a few hours without speaking — died of starvation.” The men buried Gregg in an unmarked grave, then moved along.[58]
The idea that Gregg died of “starvation” is absurd. From the upper reaches of the South Fork Eel River all the way to Clear Lake, the land was dotted and in places dominated by prairie openings thick with game. Along this route the travelers undoubtedly bartered with Indians who could be counted on for food. Why would Gregg be the only one of the four to die of starvation? Did they have food and he not? And what about Gregg’s daily log, his inevitable sketches of plants and terrain, his documentation of landmarks and bearings, his descriptions of redwoods, his detailed maps? They were never seen again, nor did Wood even mention them. Perhaps most telling, what happened to Gregg’s written claim to Trinidad, possession of which he would not have failed to record?
After returning to San Francisco, Truesdell reported that Gregg “got slower and slower and we was so tired and weak we couldn’t give him help. He drove on until he fell off his horse. We couldn’t do anything and finally he died. …” Southard added, “I couldn’t stand [Gregg] ordering us his way that proved difficult going. We got rid of his instruments when we decided to turn toward the settlements. [Gregg] became extremely angry and nervous and never got over shaking until he died.”[59]
It took historian Howard T. Dimick, in the July 1947 edition of the New Mexico Historical Review, to finally challenge the long accepted and often-repeated account of Gregg’s death. Dimick wrote,
“[I]t must not be overlooked that Gregg was a hardened explorer and traveler used to living on scant food when that was necessary, and in no danger of ‘sinking’ after a few days of hunger. … Wood’s account can not be accepted as having historical weight (and) a possibility remains which can not be ignored: the possibility that the death of Josiah Gregg was in fact homicidal. … If Greg’s death were homicidal, it would explain the disappearance of his notebooks and personal effects, for they would probably have been buried with him as a precaution by the killer. So, too, would it explain that unlikely story of death by starvation.”[60]
Horgan, too, is reticent to swallow the tale. As for Gregg’s critically important notes and maps, Horgan wonders, “Were the men who had treated him so badly exposed in his pages, as he had exposed so many others who had offended him through the years of wandering? When they buried him … did they destroy the notebooks which may have contained evidence of their rebellious contempt, which at one point went so far as a threat of murder by drowning?”[61]
In 1968 Humboldt County historian Chad L. Hoopes examined the evidence and concluded, “When you review the situation of the Gregg party being at odds with one another and not one among them ‘could quell the storm that was gathering’ the possibility of manslaughter remans. Van Duzen, Southard, and Truesdell arrived in Sonoma without Gregg’s mule, which they testified to have eaten; without Gregg’s scientific instruments, which they had thrown away; and, especially important, without Gregg’s detailed journal which he had kept since leaving the Trinity Mines. Truesdell looked at Gregg’s journal and commented that ‘his notebook had lots of figures and sayings about the landscape and things. It wasn’t much good so we left it in the grave.’”[62]
Also improbable is the idea that the men would resort to eating Gregg’s mule in an area where food was replete, yet they ate none of their animals while starving in the redwoods.
If Gregg was murdered by his fellow travelers it would have been an act of violence well in league with the tenor of the day. It takes little imagination to visualize Southard and Truesdell, perhaps also Van Duzen, at the end of the trail, jaws set, eyes slit, no longer in need of a guide in such well understood terrain — land now furrowed by currents of violence echoing across sweet rolling hills and a freshwater lake ninety miles across, an inland sea that not long before had rippled only with sunlight, wind, fish, birds, and Pomo tule canoes. Gregg’s companions well understood the value of the land and the harbor that he had found and claimed. While their minds and bodies may have been weakened by nearly four months of toil along a calamitous trail, yet still these men of purpose no doubt possessed the will and the musculature sufficient to lift a heavy rock.
The two halves of the Gregg Party, sans Gregg, reached San Francisco within days of each other. While Wood convalesced from his bear adventure in San Jose, the others did not take time to rejuvenate but instead planned their return to the Humboldt Coast. Van Duzen hoofed the Indian trail up the Central Valley and directly back to the Trinity mines. By May he had again trekked overland to Trinidad Bay, leading a cadre of Canadians.
Well before that, however, the men not just of the Wood Party but of the bars and brothels of San Francisco, who’d heard the alcoholic boasts of explorers who had found not one but two viable seaports along California’s last “unoccupied” coastline, would seek passage by sea to claim spoils for themselves. Conveniently, at that very moment in March of 1850, there bobbed in the fine natural harbor of San Francisco Bay scores of empty sailing vessels whose crews, upon landing, had immediately jumped ship for the California gold fields. Still, the comely seaside village burgeoned with newcomers who’d apparently been fated by providence to receive the loquacious adventurers.[63]
Almost immediately, hundreds of prospectors and nearly fifty ships sailed independent of and in competition with each other, streaming northward toward Humboldt Bay as if a 19th century prequel to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. A spontaneous competition ensued to see which ship would first enter the bay, and which “association” of land seekers could claim the best plots of earth. Trees were marked and cut, stakes driven into corners, surveyors found sightlines, and fights broke out among the men. Within months the associations had claimed and laid out four complete towns along the shores of Humboldt Bay: Union, which is now Arcata; and Humboldt City, Bucksport, and Eureka, all of which today comprise the city of Eureka. If any of the men expressed concern whatsoever over their wholesale seizure of lands that humans had been occupying for thousands of years, the record does not show it. Six months later speculators erected a sawmill on Humboldt Bay, and the first batch of Humboldt County lumber reached San Francisco before the year was up.[64]
Leading this moblike flotilla to the West’s final frontier were none other than Charles Southard and J. B. Truesdell, two of the three people in the world who knew what had happened to Josiah Gregg. In San Francisco, the men chartered the James K. Whiting, sailed north, and anchored at Trinidad Bay on April 3, 1850. There, in a sleight of hand that would announce and exemplify the coming abuse of this great land and the decimation of most of its original people, Southard and Truesdell claimed “Gregg’s Point” for themselves.[65]
The End
Thanks to Kate Juliana for her editing prowess.
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Notes
[1] Lewis Keysor Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay,” Humboldt Times, April 26, 1856. Clarence E. Pearsall et al, The Quest for Qual-a-wa-loo (Oakland: The Holmes Book Company, 1966), 114.
[2] Chad L. Hoopes, Lure of Humboldt Bay Region (Dubuque: William C. Brown Co., 1966), 14.
[3] Howard T. Dimick, “Reconsideration of the death of Josiah Gregg,” New Mexico Historical Review, July 1947. Owen C. Coy, “The Last Expedition of Josiah Gregg,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, July 1916. Chad L. Hoopes, “Josiah Gregg’s Last Expedition,” (paper read at a meeting of the Humboldt County Historical Society), May 28, 1968.
[4] Hoopes, Lure of Humboldt Bay Region, 15. Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[5] US National Park Service, “History: Basic Data: Redwood National Park,” September 1, 1969.
[6] Famously, in 1793 one of the ships included the Discovery, at the helm of British explorer George Vancouver, who was exploring the Pacific coast for the British government. Owen C. Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region 1850–1875 (Los Angeles: California State Historical Society, 1929), 22–25. Tony Platt, The Scandal of Cal (Berkeley: Heyday, 2023), 92.
[7] Hoopes, Lure of Humboldt Bay Region, 16. Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[8] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 12.
[9] Hoopes, “Josiah Gregg’s Last Expedition.”
[10] Josiah A. Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (New York: H. G. Langley, 1844; San Bernardino: facsimile published by Pantianos Classics, 2019) 20. Dimick, “Reconsideration of the death of Josiah Gregg.” Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” A. J. Bledsoe, Indian wars of the Northwest (San Francisco: Bacon & Company, 1885), 135. Letter from Charles Southard to “Ned,” September 4, 1851.
[11] Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft Vol. XXIII: History of California: 1848–1859, (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888) 364. “Trinity River Gold Mining,” GoldRushNuggets.com.
[12] Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press), 38.
[13] Paul Horgan, Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 91
[14] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 91
[15] J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 48
[16] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 80. Madley, An American Genocide, 23.
[17] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 16, 19–20.
[18] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 26–27.
[19] Bryan Burruss et al, A Memorial & Biographical History of Northern California (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co., 1891), 274.
[20] Madley, An American Genocide, 74.
[21] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 54–58.
[22] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 97
[23] Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 165–170.
[24] Thomas Donaldson, “The Public Lands of the United States,” The North American Review, August 1881.
[25] Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 29. Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[26] Madley, An American Genocide, 10, 45–49.
[27] Patrick L. Barnard, et al. “Sediment transport in the San Francisco Bay Coastal System: An overview.” Marine Geology, April 20, 2013. “Tulare Lake was once considered largest body of water west of Mississippi,” https://sarahamooneymuseum.org/a-look-back/tulare-lake-was-once-considered-largest-body-of-water-west-of-mississippi/. Aldaron Laird, “Humboldt Bay Shoreline Inventory, Mapping, and Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment,” California State Coastal Conservancy, 2013.
[28] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 30. Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[29] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[30] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” Pearsall, The Quest for Qual-a-wa-loo, 119–121.
[31] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[32] Jack Norton, “To Destroy in Whole or in Part,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, #42, 2020.
[33] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[34] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[35] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[36] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 29, 33, 89.
[37] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 78, 110.
[38] Guinness Book of World Records, www.guinnessworldrecords.com
[39] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[40] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” Robert F. Heizer and John E. Mills, The Four Ages of Tsurai: A Documentary History of the Indian Village on Trinidad Bay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952) 2–4, 105–108
[41] Coy, “The Last Expedition of Josiah Gregg.”
[42] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[43] Llewellyn Loud, “Ethnography and Archeology of the Wiyot Territory,” University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology,” December 23, 1918.
[44] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[45] Susan Schlosser and Annie Eicher, “Humboldt Bay and Eel River Estuary Benthic Habitat Project,” California Sea Grant College Program Publication,” April 2, 2015.
[46] G. A. Gough et al, “Birds of Humboldt Bay,” Patuxent Bird Identification
Infocenter. 1998.
[47] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[48] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” Pearsall, The Quest for Qual-a-wa-loo, 137. The Wiyot Tribe, “Our Story.” https://www.wiyot.us/361/Our-Story
[49] Humboldt Times, November 13, 1886
[50] Greg King, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), 59.
[51] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” Jack Norton, Genocide in Northwestern California (San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press, 1979), 65–73. Madley, An American Genocide, 3.
[52] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” “Mute nostril agony” lifted from Jim Morrison’s poem “Horse Latitudes.”
[53] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.” King, The Ghost Forest, 56–59. Thomas E. Lisle, Surface Water Hydrology, The Geology of North America (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 1990), 311–314.
[54] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[55] Koichi Hagimoto, Trans-Pacific Encounters (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 24.
[56] Madley, American Genocide, 103–124.
[57] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[58] Wood, “The Discovery of Humboldt Bay.”
[59] Hoopes, “Josiah Gregg’s Last Expedition.”
[60] Dimick, “Reconsideration of the death of Josiah Gregg.”
[61] Horgan, Josiah Gregg, 108.
[62] Hoopes, “Josiah Gregg’s Last Expedition.”
[63] Pearsall, The Quest for Qual-a-wa-loo, 159. Carl Nolte, “Ships Under San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 1999.
[64] Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 52–57.
[65] Pearsall, The Quest for Qual-a-wa-loo, 160. Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 49–51.
