Nicholas McNamara, one of the first businessmen to set foot in Crescent City, arrived here on March 12, 1853. McNamara was born on February 10, 1829, in Dungarvin County, located in Waterford, Ireland. He was naturalized on April 12, 1858, in San Francisco. McNamara and his brother, Mark, built the ‘American Hotel’ seven years after…

Gold Bluffs boasts the perfect name for the beaches near Orick, along the coast of what would become Prairie Creek State Park. Gold digs along the Trinity River in the 1850s attracted prospectors to the stretch between the river’s mouth and Klamath City, according to historical information from the National Parks Service. The fine blend…

The last horse and buggy doctor in Del Norte County was Dr. Ernest Maxwell Fine. Whether delivering a baby, setting a broken bone, or administering medicine, he was always on-call. With no doctor in the area at the time, he moved to Del Norte County in 1899 to help the sick. He was the only…

James Andrew Jackson McVay was born in 1834 in Indiana. In 1850 at the age of 16 he joined a wagon train and came west with his wife and child. On the long trip west, his wife and child both died of the fever. When he arrived in Del Norte County, he settled in Smith…

Everywhere I turn I see that the media is down on “teen” drivers. I don’t get it. Driving has not change all that much since Henry Ford dropped an engine in a wooden frame and scared the crap out of all the horse and buggy types in town. What has changed is how driving class…

In January 1886, Del Norte County leaders called a meeting to draft a legal way to drive out the local Chinese population. The outcome would force the county’s hundreds of Chinese residents and workers onto boats and wagons headed for San Francisco and Oregon in the following weeks. Similar expulsions would take place up and…

The USA PATRIOT Act is a ten-letter acronym that stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act of 2001. It is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush in October 2001. I’m amazed at the bull-shit that can be…

Soon to follow the friction between miners and this area’s indigenous population was more friction between the two groups on the Klamath area in January 1855. Miners there began to desert their claims and rally on the camps for protection, while the tribe moved its families to the mountains. At a January 6th mass meeting…

It was somewhere along the State Route 215 near San Bernardino, that I learned what makes Californians different from the rest of the nation. It’s in their approach to driving and a highway patrol officer pointed this out to me. The 215 at that point is a stretch of three-lane freeway. I was in the…

Edwin Young was born in Tennessee in 1799, and later moved west to what was then territory belonging to Spain and Mexico. He primarily worked out of Taos, New Mexico, during the 1820s, making forays into California through that decade. But he never got farther north than the San Joaquin River. In 1833, he came…