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Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller once called Crescent City home – for a couple nights at least. He was just one patron of many who stayed overnight in some of Crescent City’s earliest hotels.

The first hotel, the ‘Cushing House,’ was built in 1853, the very first year the city was founded. It was on Front Street, which, at the time, was so close to the beach that driftwood and various other debris would wash up to the building’s facade.

A sea wall was later built to keep the debris from cluttering Front Street.

The ‘Cushing House’ did not retain its name very long, as it was sold the next year and called the Crescent City Hotel, only to be called the City Hotel by its next owner Gotlieb Meyer. In 1857, a German native, Francis R. Burtschell, who had worked in hotels in New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco, bought the City Hotel and renamed it the Bay Hotel.

But the Bay Hotel was not the only bedding place in the city. At around the same time the ‘Bay Hotel’ was being erected, an Irishman also decided to build a hotel on Front and J Streets. Nicholas McNamara, who was born in Dungarvan County Waterford, Ireland, came to Crescent City on March 12, 1853.

He noticed that many people were camping outside because there weren’t any hotels. To remedy this problem he built the ‘American Hotel’ in 1853, and it became one of the first in the city.

It burned down several years later and was replaced by a more sturdy brick building. However, it was the ‘Travelers Hotel’ off of Front Street that hosted Rockefeller and two of his sons. This hotel was located on Second and L Street until it was torn apart in 1942 and sold as lumber.

Crescent City’s first reported medical doctor arrived in 1853, after serving as a physician to a wagon train that traveled from Missouri. Edgar Mason would also hold the title of court judge.

Mason chaired a meeting to set a trial for three Indian men accused of murdering a white man in 1854, according to A.J. Bledsoe’s “History of Del Norte County.” A jury deliberated for an hour and ordered the three men hanged near Battery Point.

He acquired quite a bit of land in Crescent City, giving parcels for a school house, civic center and a masonic temple, as well as two blocks for a city plaza. During the Civil War, Mason sent money to the Confederacy and the family lamented President Lincoln’s election, according to Marin County Free Library’s history project.

Mason presided over a public vote in Crescent City on whether or not to enforce a law that prevented businesses from operating on Sundays, according to Bledsoe’s book. Proponents of the measure distributed petitions, as bars and other businesses racked up fines for staying open.

The public voted the measure down, letting businesses operate on Sundays.

Think of hotels when you consider the Burtschell family’s roots in Del Norte County. Their ancestor, Francis J. Burchoell – not a typo here, but the original spelling of the family’s name as it made its way to Northern California – made his fame as a hotelier during the county’s earliest years.

Burchoell fled France with two brothers as the French Revolution nipped at the aristocrats’ heels. Francis went first to Bingen, Germany, where he married Elizabeth Brougham, and changed his name to Burtschell.

The couple had a son, Francis R. Burtschell, March 13, 1825. The younger Francis traveled to New York City in 1846 and worked for two years in the hotel industry.

He traveled among New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York City and Germany during a short period of time. Eventually settled near Weaverville, building his first hotel there in the early 1850s.

Burchoell – which the younger Francis now spelled Burtschell – sold the hotel and moved to Shasta County where he repeated the process. He then moved to San Francisco to manage a hotel and found his way north to Crescent City in 1856.

A year later, on April 19, 1857, he purchased the ‘City Hotel’ for $900 from Gottlieb Meyer after having lived there about four months. The ‘City Hotel’ was originally ‘Cushing House,’ located at H and Front streets.

Because it was close to the ocean, the building was damaged when “a tidal wave” carried a tree into its lobby during the years Burtschell owned it. It also sheltered many of the survivors who had been on the Brother Jonathan when she smashed on St. George Reef.

After owning the hotel for six years, Burtschell leased the property to Jacob Reichert but managed it a second time after his wife died and he married Caroline Morscher, New Year’s Eve 1874. He remodeled the hotel in 1885 by removing the front section to across the street then adding a new section.

That same year, he purchased a 664-acre farm in Smith River.  By 1893 the dairy farm – located at the site of ‘Ship Ashore’ and stretching north to the Oregon border – had grown to 992 acres.

In its new form, he renamed the ‘City Hotel’, the ‘Bay Hotel.’  Three years later, he sold the business to a W. Woodbury.

Eventually the back of the hotel was torn down to make room for the ‘Lauff Hotel,’ which later became the ‘Surf Hotel.’

During his 53 years in Crescent City, Burtschell served two terms as a county supervisor and two terms as a city councilman and a school trustee for many years.

His son, Frank Burtschell Sr., worked as county assessor and owned the county’s first Ford dealership. Frank Sr., who established Burtschell’s Paints, was the last person in his family to get a driver’s license – his mother being the first woman in Del Norte County to do so.

Frank Burtschell Jr. was involved in preserving Del Norte County’s history. He placed the sign he made for the cabin 75 years ago on the ‘Addie Meedom House,’ the county’s assisted living center for seniors.

POST SCRIPT: Frank Jr. died in a single car accident on U.S. Hwy. 199 on October 3, 2003, when his vehicle struck a redwood tree.

 

In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship and it was also before commercial fertilizer’s’ invention, so large shipments of manure were common. It was shipped dry, because in dry form it weighed a lot less than when wet, but once water (at sea) hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by product is methane gas.

As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen. Methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern and boom!

Several ships were destroyed in this way before it was determined jus’ what was happening. After that, the bundles of manure were always stamped with the term ‘Ship High In Transit’ on them, which meant for sailors to stow it high enough off the lower decks that any water that came into the hold would not touch the cargo

Thus evolved the term ‘ S.H.I.T,’ which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this very day. You probably did not know the true history of this word.

Neither did I — as I always thought it was a cowboy term.

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 their arrival in Crescent City. McNamara also was half owner of the ‘Point Saint George Dairy Ranch’ with a man named Mr. Emetsburg.

The ‘American Hotel’ was the second in Crescent City, with the first The Del Norte being built by Major Ward Bradford. McNamara was the hotel’s proprietor until his death on May 15, 1893.

McNamara married Margaret Driscoll in San Francisco in about 1859. She was born March 21, 1840, in County Cork, Ireland.

According to a Crescent City census taken on July 19, 1870, McNamara was no slouch when it came to fathering children either. McNamara had 12 children with Margaret.

There were four boys, one of whom died young and nine girls. Two of the girls Rose and Margaret were twins.

From 1869 to 1877, McNamara was the Crescent City’s road overseer, kind of like a transportation director in current cities. Between 1880 and 1892, he was the county supervisor for District 1.

McNamara also was a school trustee at the time of his death.  Margaret died in Crescent City at 74, on Sept. 23, 1914, outliving Nicholas by 10 years.

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 of gold and sand, though, proved too well mixed together to easily separate. Businessmen took a new interest in the site during the Civil War, as gold fetched top prices.

When the tides allowed, miners would load bags of the gold-sand onto mules who would carry them off the beach before waves crashed in again. Operations ended with the war’s end.

Reports vary on whether waves washed the treasure in from the ocean’s depths or stripped it from the shore’s bluffs. The California Geneology and History Archives, an online database, describes the early success in collecting gold from the region.

But that source, too, notes a decline in discovery and a difficulty in separating the sand and gold mix that would fool later prospectors.

“The accounts of the gold found in those olden days read like a romantic story from the times of the Spanish conquest,” states an archive entry on the 1850s reports of gold discoveries.

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 doctor in the area from Smith River to Orick.

“He wanted to be some place where people really needed him,” said Mrs. Murdock Roeder.

Dr. Fine’s first office was on the corner of Third and J streets, which contained a hospital room and a combined office, laboratory, waiting room. An old motto hung on the wall in his office that read: “Nature is the Best Remedy.”

No hospital existed in the county at that time. He often performed amputation of patients on a kitchen table.

Mrs. George Berry said, “If a patient never paid him, he still answered the next call to their home with as much gladness to serve.”

Dr. Fine traveled on a bicycle, in which he used to come to Crescent City. He began using a horse and buggy.

He invested in a Harley Davidson to make short house calls and for trips to work. Fine was his own mechanic performing operations on the engine.

In 1905 he purchased a Ford Roadster, one of the first cars in Del Norte County.  The red, one-seat vehicle carried a four-cylinder engine.

Later, Dr. Fine moved his practice to the corner of Third and E streets, where he created a five- room hospital called the Dr. Fine Hospital.  In 1927, the hospital burned down, and Dr. Fine retired.

When the stock market crashed, he lost his savings and began practicing again. He shared a joint waiting room with another doctor above Endert’s Drug Store with his own examination and x-ray room.

Dr. Fine died on September 30, 1939. high blood pressure and hard work was the cause of death. A Catholic Cemetery is his final resting place.

Two other physicians early to Del Norte County affected the growth of the area positively. Drs. Gustave H. and Anna R. Douglas had a hand in the development of the Klamath Bridge, the growth of the county and the health of early families in the area.

Gustave Douglas moved to Del Norte County from Portland, Oregon, in 1920 at the age of 57. Gustave had intended to retire, but busied himself with civic affairs in the southern end of the county.

He was elected as state representative of Siskiyou and Del Norte counties two years later. Immediately he began working to replace the old ferry across Klamath River with a bridge.

Although he died of a sudden heart attack in 1923 the day before the final approval of his bill by the Senate, a rider was attached to the bill, and approved, to name the structure “The Douglas Memorial Bridge.” After his death, Douglas’ wife, Anna, taught school in Del Norte County.

She also served as county superintendent for a year, until her health forced her to retire. She was born in Horicon, Wisconsin on March 29, 1869, and graduated from Normal School at Winona, Minnesota, in 1899.

A few years later, she received her degree from Northwestern University at Evanston, Illnois, to practice medicine. After she graduated, she and Gustave, who she had married by that time, went to the Jordan Valley in Oregon, built a drug store and practiced medicine.

At the time, some of their patients required the physicians to travel 20 miles to treat them. The two doctors also set up a hospital in Grants Pass that accommodated area mine workers.

Anna outlived her husband by 28 years. Both are buried in Sacramento.

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 River.

He acquired land and established his ranch. In 1858, James A. J. McVay married Lucinda Bledsoe, the daughter of Anthony Jennings Bledsoe Sr. and the sister of Anthony J. Bledsoe Jr., the noted Del Norte County historian.

James and Lucinda had four children, two sons, Nathaniel Green and Asa, and two daughters Ella and Lillian.The children were raised on the ranch and didn’t receive very much formal education.

In 1880, at the age of 15, Nathaniel left home to work on a ranch in Humboldt County, near Ferndale. He remained there for nearly a year, during which time he learned the carpentry trade and became very proficient at it.

Next, Nathaniel went to work in the logging camps. His first job was pulling rigging.

He was a hard worker and rapidly advanced to higher positions with more re-sponsibility. Then he suffered a serious accident and couldn’t work in the logging camps any longer.

Nathaniel had to return to Crescent City.

For the next four years, Nathaniel worked in Crescent City as a clerk and bookkeeper. He became very proficient at bookkeeping and knowledgeable of the total operation of a business.

He felt competent to have his own business, so he purchased a general merchandise store at Smith River in partnership with C. F. Goodrich. Nathaniel conducted the business for 18 months and the store was very successful.

Nathaniel became bored with the business so he sold his share of the business to his partner. Nathaniel married Lucile Bolt in December 1890.

Then Nathaniel went back to his real love, carpentry. He worked for the next four years in Smith River and Wedderburn, Oregon. There he had complete control of the contracts he worked on.

Nathaniel then spent five months in Seattle where he worked at constructing railroad bridges in the construction yards of the Northern Pacific Railway. He returned to Crescent City to accept a position with the Crescent City Mill and Transportation Company.

After driving a team for a year he was put in charge of their extensive transportation yards, a position which he filled for two and a half years.

In 1902 Nathaniel McVay was nominated on the Democratic ticket for the office of auditor and recorder of Del Norte County. Nathaniel was elected and took over the office in January 1903.

He was repeatedly re-elected auditor and recorder and held the position for 40 years. Nathaniel Green McVay died on March 20, 1942.

He was still in office at the time of his death.

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 is taught. It has gone to ‘Hell in Model-T’ just like the rest of the school system.

As far as I am concerned it is the parent’s responsibility to teach their child how to properly operate a motor vehicle. The problem is that parents aren’t allowed to do that anymore. It’s now up to the school district.

From where I’m standing it’s all about money. The more the school district is involved the greater the possibility that someone’s palm is getting greased somewhere in the chain of your child’s driving education.

When I went to school, we had so many hours of classroom and so many hours behind the wheel with a school teacher turned driver’s ed instructor. The rest of the time I was out with my father. I drove around the block, up and down the highway, out to the Klamath Glen and back, Crescent City and back, learning to Parallel Park, safe backing, etc.

In class we studied for our driving test. We watched the messy movies of highway death. We learned about drinking and driving. Yet out biggest educators were our parents, grandparents or someone else other than the school system.

Of course, I see adults driving around my age yakking on cell-phones, reading newspapers, drinking coffee, correcting kids and such while burning old dinosaur meat at 70 mph on US 395 and I-80. What makes it worse is to see the Nevada Highway Patrol zip right on by the majority of these folks as if they were late for their next donut stop. And we wonder where teens get their big ideas.

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 down the West coast. Crescent City’s expulsion followed one in Eureka a few days earlier that rounded up Chinese residents and sent them to San Francisco by boat. The story remains well-known along the Northcoast.

Other communities in the West that carried out similar expulsions – meaning that Eureka and Crescent City are not isolated episodes in racial fights against the Chinese. The West’s white settlers expected Chinese immigrants, known as hard workers, to take jobs at mills, gold mines, road and railroad construction projects.

Labor organizers drummed up support to expel the Chinese on the Northcoast and would prompt similar moves in Tacoma, Wash., and Rock Springs, Wyoming. The expulsions followed a killing of a Humboldt County politician in Eureka, blamed on a Chinese man, and complaints of prostitution and drug use in Chinese neighborhoods.

Connecting the Northcoast expulsions to other incidents against the nation’s Chinese immigrants can clarify American history. Nearly 31 California communities kicked out Chinese residents during the late 1800s.

Ads in Del Norte County publications at the time touted businesses that refused to hire Chinese people. Material from Humboldt County’s 1886 chamber of commerce and business leaders promoted the county’s scenery, climate, homes and lack of Chinese residents.

Chinese American families refused to send their children to the school because of the county’s past. Old newspaper accounts in cities and towns along the West Coast from Seattle to Crescent City to San Diego and east into Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho.

The articles chronicle the often brutal expulsions and racist acts in various western communities, as respected community leaders drafted zoning and employment laws to ban Chinese residents. Labor organizers sought to protect mining and other jobs for white settlers.

City mayors, county supervisors, a high school principal and newspaper editor led anti-Chinese movements. White residents rounded up Chinese families at gunpoint and loaded them onto ships in winter.

Town residents looted or auctioned off the goods that Chinese people left behind after forced evacuations. Besides oral and written accounts, a timeline detail the purges.

Notices for town meetings call for ideas on crafting legal methods to evict Chinese people, while ads boast of Chinese free towns. The federal Exclusion Act of 1882 would ban Chinese immigrants from the U.S. until it was repealed in 1943.

Chinese fought back After being forced from their Eureka homes, Chinese people filed the first lawsuit in America for reparations. They organized a militia in Amador and a vegetable strike in Truckee in response to evacuation attempts.

Chinese workers on the railroad line won the right to keep their own cooks who boiled water for tea and saved their health as diseases spread among whites. In an 1885 roundup in Tacoma, Washington, town leaders forced Chinese residents onto a train to Portland.

Those who couldn’t pay hiked the 140 miles. Upon arriving, the Chinese sued Tacoma’s government leaders.

Eureka’s roundup in 1885 followed the death of a city councilman, caught in the crossfire of a shoot-out in Chinatown. A local crowd wanted to kill all of the city’s Chinese residents and burn down Chinatown.

Leaders settled on immediately driving them out by loading them onto boats for San Francisco. When they arrived, the Chinese sued Eureka for racism, lost wages, fishing vessels, crops and horses.

They eventually won.

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 sold to the American public in a time of duress, when it’s wrapped in the U.S. flag.

All this bill is – is an overreach of the federal government’s powers. It claims to use the U.S. Constitution as a checks-and-balance on its limits, but I think that’s nothing more than smoke being blown up John Q. Public’s butt.

My prediction is that it’ll be around for the next 100-years. If you need an example jus’ look at the Federal Reserve which has been impeding the U.S. economy since 1903 and it’s not even a part of the government.

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 at Orleans Bar, the incoming population decided to disarm the tribes and take action against whites they suspected of or found guilty of selling the tribes arms. Although many of the Indians complied, a few refused and prepared to resist.

Led by the Red Caps, they made their plans, but did not strike the first blow. That was done by the whites, who burned several rancherias and “committing outrages” on the women of the tribes, and the powder keg was lighted.

Whites called for help, and Captain Buchanan at Fort Humboldt organized a volunteer company in Trinidad and began attacking the peaceful Klamath Indians who had been living peacefully with the encroaching whites. Buchanan ordered out a company led by Capt. H.M. Judah, who began negotiating with the Indians when he reached Weitchpec.

The local Yurok then offered to help suppress the Red Caps, but the miners would not agree to their offer. Judah was close to a settlement when Capt. Buchanan recalled him.

At about that time, Special Indian Agent for the County of Siskiyou, A.M. Rosborough reached Weitchpec to assess the situation. Sensing it was critical — Yurok on the rancherias, the Red Caps in the mountains and a serious threat that minors would attack the peaceful Indians if the Red Caps killed any packers.

The volunteers had unsuccessfully sought the Red Caps during their one patrol into the mountains.Weitchpec was critical to the pack trains supplying the miners, so a company of regulars was permanently posted there in the Hoopa Valley.

Nothing less than “the prosperity of that part of the state,” was at stake. Relaying details to his boss, Commissioner of Indian Affairs G.W. Montgomery, Henley told of his conviction that the miners were poised to massacre the Indians.

In the hope of holding off the tragedy, S.G. Whipple was named as Special Agent for Klamath County. Rosborough worried as the uneasy situation continued that it would be impossible for the law-abiding whites to maintain their control over the camps.

He feared that any more killings by the Red Caps would lead to attacks on the rancherias and mass exodus of the peaceful Indians into the mountains. At the same time, no one could locate the 40-50 Red Caps who remained at large.

Judah pleaded to Buchanan to order a company of infantry to Weitchpec and at least establish law on the Klamath, but Buchanan would not budge on his own initiative and ordered Judah to Oregon. Rosborough, in turn, begged for a company of soldiers and a deputy marshal, believing that if an officer of the law was in Klamath and could enforce and arrest offending participants the lawlessness would be curbed.

The Yurok offered to help find the Red Caps, but were disarmed instead by the miners. Rosborough organized more volunteer companies to war with the Red Caps and the inevitable happened.

Guides leading one of the units led them into an ambush. Although no lives were lost, marshals condemned 26 Indians to death, captured a number of others and burned two villages.

Judah, returning to Klamath, was told to help Whipple find a site for an Indian Reservation. The atrocities, perpetrated by the whites, continued.

Judah hoped that fears resulting from the volunteers’ deeds would abate. He traveled down the Klamath hoping to meet with the Indians who wanted peace, but found the camps empty.

In his stead, two of the Indians accompanying Judah traveled farther, returning with about 50 Yurok who shared to goal of peace. Following a council attended by representatives of most of the tribes, he agreed to form a war party, arm the Indians and hunt down eight Red Caps and execute them.

They would also urge the Indians they found on the way to turn themselves in while a reservation was formed Although Whipple found a site he thought would make a good place for the reservation, he was also causing problems for Judah and others. The troops remained on the Klamath as Whipple talked to the Indians there about the reservations plan.

The plan was to follow through, locating the reservation on the Klamath. Congress had already passed an appropriation to fund five reservations in California.  U.S. President Franklin Pierce signed off on the agreement, issuing an order November 16, 1855, to establish the reservation on a piece of land one mile wide on either side of the Klamath that ran for 20 miles — roughly 25,000 acres.