“Here commenced an expedition, the marked and prominent features of which were constant and unmitigated toil, hardship, privation, and suffering.” From the journal of Lewis Keysor Wood, published in the Humboldt Times, April, 1856 Picking up where we left off last week (“Josiah Gregg: Prairie Years,” April 21): After two decades of prairie living in […]
Gold Rush
Posted inNews
Huffman Introduces Bill to Return Land to the Yurok Tribe
North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman on Tuesday introduced legislation known as the “Yurok Lands Act,” a bill that seeks clear the way for the transfer of more than 1,000 acres of ancestral lands back to the tribe from the U.S. Forest Service and redraws the reservation boundary line to encompass that area and others acquired […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
How They Got Here: Round the Horn
Last time, we looked at how about one-third of the estimated 300,000 “forty-niner” gold-seekers arrived in California via the Isthmus of Panama (“How They Got Here: Panama,” May 20). This time, we’ll look at the history of the other main sea route from the east (the U.S. East Coast and Europe): the stormy passage around […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
How They Got Here: Panama
They came from all over, hoping to get rich, 300,000 of them between 1848 and 1855, changing California forever. Word of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in January of 1848 (“The Gold Bug,” Dec. 3, 2020) got out slowly, and most of the prospectors that first year — a few thousand at most […]