Laura Perrott Mahan, an artist and rancher's daughter, led Humboldt County's women in the fight to save Dyerville Flat and Bull Creek. The tale follows that fight from a November morning in 1924 to a packed courthouse the following February.
The histories mostly tell this as a tale of men with checkbooks. Let me tell you who got up before breakfast.
Laura Perrott Mahan came off a Humboldt County ranch, went to art school, and came home to paint these trees. In nineteen nineteen the women's clubs here formed a Save the Redwoods League of their own. Dues were fifty cents a year, soon cut to a quarter. Inside three months they were eight hundred strong, with Laura at the head, and some of those ladies were married to lumber money.
Nineteen twenty-four, one evening that November, word reached her. The choppers were back at Dyerville Flat. They'd been at it in secret, cutting a corridor toward Bull Creek. Next morning she and her husband James drove south to see. The League's own history says she stood with other women between the loggers and the trees. What the papers carried is this. She made the afternoon deadline, and by breakfast the whole county was reading that it was in a fight with the lumber company. The supervisors voted to fight.
The company offered a sliver of the flat, and the county began to waver. So on February eleventh, nineteen twenty-five, people packed the courthouse, and it came down to one question. Did the League really have the money? Newton Drury of the League phoned his brother in San Francisco for proof. Lunch came and went. No word. James Mahan and the company treasurer were squared up, fist shaking, when three telegrams landed in Drury's hand. Seven hundred thousand dollars on hand. Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Seven hundred and fifty thousand. You could have heard a pin drop.
Drury had wanted one figure, three times over. It appears one of the three wired a different number, and that mismatch made the room believe it was hearing three separate piles of money, better than two million dollars, when the League had seven hundred and fifty thousand all told. The board voted unanimously for the League.
The forest was dedicated in nineteen thirty-one. Laura and James both died in nineteen thirty-seven, one soon after the other.
Eight hundred members at a quarter apiece, and a telegram with the wrong number on it. I think of that slip of paper whenever the light comes down through these trees. Seems a thin thing to hold all this up.
Photo: Daderot · CC0 (photograph); plaque is public domain, published without copyright notice (PD-US-no notice)