Fort Humboldt

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park

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Being both free to visit and over half covered with a lawn, the old fort is to some extent just another city park, but with better direction signs on the road and historic exhibits around the edges. There's also a few museum areas, but they weren't open, so I probably got to experience less than half of what the State Historic Park really has to offer.

Lots of picnic tables making this a prime place for a lunch stop with many added featurs.

I headed out of the parking lot past the administrative offices (the North Coast Redwoods District office is also there) to some exhibits at the north end of the park to find they're not actually about the fort at all. They are all about area logging.

Passing by one of two "tractors" for moving giant trees around.

The trail crosses tracks that come out of either side of a barn and the barn holds a couple of old engines. They're a bit hard to see in the barns through the glass, but the tracks suggest that sometimes you can get a better look at them and the certificates allowing operation of a boiler taped onto either window suggest they get out on their own steam. I had to settle for the view fighting the reflections.

The train barn houses two locomotives behind glass and includes their history. Behind is one of the cars they might have pulled with the sort of cargo they moved around.

A bit of the boiler of one engine. They've got some crosscut saws hidden away in there too.

The older engine, I expect, came out of Falk, which is somewhere you can still sort of visit.

There's an old "steam-up schedule" on the windows with one a month April-September. It might be more interesting to come around just before a date and try to catch them making sure it still goes. Unfortunately, there's no dates for this year. I walked out the back to see something that was on display in the demonstration forest: a steam donkey. Actually, there's quite a few more than "a", someone might have been a little excessive at one point. They've got five in all sizes. The sign on one says it was the biggest ever made. Others are smaller than the one I'd seen before. Seeing them in all sizes has made me finally realize that one of the seemingly random bits of metal I have found out in Falk is probably the boiler off one of these.

Three of the steam donkeys in the collection. The big one is mostly obscured by a branch in the center. These were connected to cables to pull the trees up and down hills. They themselves did not move.

These larger ones had ferns growing among the gears, so probably don't get to run sometimes.

Along the way, I found a sign about local boy John Dolbeer who invented the Dolbeer Logging Engine, dubbed steam donkey by the people who actually used it. So that begins to explain why there are so many of them.

Two more steam donkeys. These two are quite small compared to the first two encountered on coming out of the train barn.

I found a few other exhibits as I walked the circle, but you can't look around the tiny house from when tiny houses were a way of life rather than a new thing.

More machinery. This is a shingle mill.

A loggers cabin beside the tracks.

No space saving innovations for this tiny house. That's all the space that was needed.

Then I was off to the fort related displays. There is very little left of the fort and what is here was ultimately preserved simply because old "Unconditional Surrender" Grant was the quartermaster here for about 3 months on his way to becoming a general so famous they made him President.

The area of the old fort. The large building across the way was used as a farmhouse in the years after the fort when the field was used to grow oats. One sign indicates it is the only survivor while another indicates the collection of three buildings are original.

One of the stated purposes for Fort Humboldt State Historic Park now is to remember and learn, which means not shying away from mentioning genocide and massacre. The first was at the instigation of soldiers at the fort. The fort was initially filled with federal soldiers, but was handed off to the state in 1860 when the federal troops left for the Civil War. The federal troops were under pressure from Washington DC to keep the native peoples safe and under pressure from their neighboring settlers to "finish the job" and clear out the native peoples. The state had less of a problem.

Native Americans were coming to the fort for safety, which was increasingly difficult to provide, so in 1962 the state militiamen decided to build a "corral" for their "prisoners" of 12 foot boards placed upright, 2 feet into the ground, in an 80 foot circle. They were kept within for months while 200-300 people died until the surgeon (second in command at the fort) was able to stop it.

The massacre came about at the instigation of the townspeople who, one day, gathered up guns and machetes and set about a village near the mouth of the Elk River, killing hundreds of people. The fort sits with a view of the area, but that protection seems to have meant little. As horrific as these large instances are, they probably pale in comparison to the cumulative effects of small, daily events. Time didn't mellow the place out, either. Unmentioned on the signs is that time (1885) when Eureka decided to expel every single member of the "Chinese race" from the county.

US-101 passes by at the base of the bluff where the fort sits. Between the buildings, I can see the end of the Elk River Sandspit.

There are signs along the path showing approximately where other buildings for the fort stood. I followed it to the buildings that do stand. The smaller is set up to walk through (but not right now) and the larger is a museum. The outside displays aren't all atrocities. Between the two buildings is a primer on medicinal plants as they were understood and a small garden. Being so far from anything, medicines were not easy to come by, so a garden was kept when it was a fort.

I doubt the garden kept by the surgeon looked quite like this, but a little garden is a quite nice thing.

Nice to find a little something blooming, too. There were actually a couple other singular blooms too.

I found myself directed right back to the parking lot where I decided to trade my camera for my new kite to test it out. The wind was nearly nothing at the ground, but the flag was fluttering well and there was one spot along the edge of the bluff without so much thorn bush growing. It took a little timing as even there, the wind was minimal and inconsistent, but I eventually got it up and it flew steadily once up high.

Trying out my cheap kite. It's a ram air (AKA parafoil) kite, so no sticks to break and perfect to bring hiking.

The kite worked well. I tried out the tables for eating, too. The place definitely works as a park as well as a history lesson.

©2021 Valerie Norton
Written 10 Jan 2021