Moving Logs on Big River by Chuck Bush

Part 1 of 2; reprinted from the May 25, 2006 Mendocino Beacon

During all of the early days of our fair Mendocino, logging was king. Once the big redwoods were felled, bucked (cut into movable lengths), and peeled (debarked), they had to be brought to the mill. That involved using jackscrews (like an automotive screw jack), building chutes and skid roads, utilizing horses and oxen and railroads to haul them to creek beds, and erecting dams to collect enough water to carry the logs down to the upper end of Big River.

Once in the river, which was and still is tidal for about eight miles, the logs were floated down to the first boom, which consisted of a line of floating logs fastened together across the river. That early boom was located very close to the mouth of Big River—too close, in fact. The turbulence from winter storms, combined with the pressure from all the logs being pushed against the boom by the runoff from heavy rains, sometimes broke the boom and allowed the logs to float out to sea. Very expensive!

The second boom was completed in 1858. It was located over three miles upstream, and consisted of three very solid log piers built right in the river so as to deflect and entangle the free-floating logs, essentially to make a logjam behind which there might be up to 25,000 logs. Then just downstream of the piers, log rafts were created by tying one log to the next to the next, small rafts of parallel logs that could be floated with the outgoing tide down to the millpond,  guided by men on the rafts using only long poles to keep them in the deeper water.

And so it went for many years, all the way up to just before 1900; Joshua Grindle and John Daniels were the last two polers. In the mid-1890s the lumber company started experimenting with ways to move the logs more efficiently, using first rowboats and then power-driven boats. Two notes in issues of the Mendocino Beacon are appropriate here. On May 19, 1900, it was reported that the boiler and engine had arrived for the new river boat being built at the mill. The flatboat was named “Big River” by Jerome C. Ford; however, company employees in San Francisco insisted it be called “Maru.” A month later, on June 13^th, the paper announced “Big River Maru was launched at the mill without fanfare. A licensed engineer was required to run it.”

W. Francis Jackson, whose two wonderful books, “Big River Was Dammed” and “Mendocino City,” provided me with material for this article, notes that the employees in San Francisco had seen the name Maru on a visiting Japanese ship. (Shizuko McConathy told me that Maru does not mean ship, nor does it tie to ocean; it is a good luck word that traditionally goes at the end of every Japanese ship’s name.)

The “Maru” was designed by John Peterson. It was a flat bottom scow about 40 feet long and 16 feet wide, with a stern paddle wheel driven by a wood-burning steam engine. The engine also could turn a large drum of wire cable, with which sunken logs could be raised, and stranded logs could be pulled back into the river. By attaching the cable to some solid object on shore, the boat could pull itself up on land for repairs. It was the first powered boat built to ply Big River.

Continued next Thursday…

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