We’ve been exploring California as a place created, almost overnight, by the accidental discovery of gold in 1848, which brought tens of thousands of fortune hunters the following year, the ’49ers. Nothing has been the same since.
This being California, change keeps coming. As Sacramento native Joan Didion put it: “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.” True enough.
Still, we—all of us—need to reach out and rescue fragments of our heritage before they disappear. Lend a hand, whenever we can. Close to home here in the far north, we can start by respecting the walls.
Respect the Walls is a determined local effort to get some respect for the remnants of rock walls, mostly built by skilled Portuguese stone masons, that flank the oldest roads near Chico. Most people appreciate the rock walls along Bruce Road and just east, along Humboldt as it climbs toward Forest Ranch, as treasured local heritage. But a few haven’t got a clue.
If you’ve never ventured onto Old Humboldt, to explore what remains of this pioneer highway, you need to do it.
The old wagon road lies between the walls and the current, almost trashed asphalt road. The wheels of so many heavily loaded wagons carved ruts right into the bedrock. Iron cuts deep. And you can touch them, walk on them—the experience illuminating that well-worn phrase, “stuck in a rut,” and clearly demonstrating that many, many people must have been.
The Humboldt Wagon Road wasn’t a direct offshoot of the California Gold Rush, but it did roll out due to early mining—another manic rush, this one after silver. People were expected to rush from California to the silver-rich Nevada Comstock Lode in the Humboldt Range near Virginia City, in what was then Utah Territory, 180 miles east of Chico. John Bidwell built the 100-mile toll road between Chico and Susanville in 1864, with help from financiers. Gold and silver discoveries near Boise in Idaho Territory further boosted revenue expectations for the Humboldt Wagon Road.
Bidwell’s wagon road made it easier for more and more settlers to come, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of tribes. In fact, native hostility to encroaching stagecoach traffic—meaning, determined attacks—in both Nevada and Idaho ended the road’s grandest ambitions. The nation’s first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, did in the rest, though the road survived, serving the timber industry and regional residents. A graveled, improved version joined the state highway system in 1933, more or less today’s Hwy. 32/36 route to Susanville.
Every month—usually, but not always, on the fourth Saturday—volunteers with Respect the Wallsshow up to show the landscape some serious respect, picking up bags of trash, beer cans, and used condoms, and hauling off mattresses and couches that somehow never made it to the dump.
Some folks hope to protect the area as a community park, an idea first put forth years ago by preservationist Francis Farley. But given these parsimonious times when it comes to the public good, that proposal may have to wait for focused attention, organization, and fundraising. In the meantime, jump at any chance to take the history tour with historians Dave Nopel and John Gallardo.
