Laura Mahan and the Crusade to Save the California Redwoods

To stand before a redwood is to remove yourself from the context of space and time as experienced by human beings. Crane your neck up as high as you can, you will not see its top, some 350 feet above you. Try as you will, you cannot authentically fathom the lifespan of a creature potentially 2000 years old which considers the entire span of your life as you consider your Late Twenties. The tannins in their bark allow redwoods to withstand fire and infestation, growing straight and tall, supported by bases that can measure twenty feet in diameter. These are ancient presences, seemingly invincible against all elements and indignities.

And we came very near to wiping them off the face of the Earth forever.

In prehistoric times, redwoods and their close cousins could be found throughout the middle latitudes of the planet, but changes in climate had restricted them, by the time of human recording, to a range of some two million acres stretched along the California coast, existing in the primal state they had known since Jurassic times. Redwoods boast a vast arsenal of strategies to fight off fire and flood, and establish themselves, in areas where the climate is suitable to them, as the dominant local species. 

Then we humans came derping along in the 19th century, took a look at these impossibly awe-inspiring living beings, and thought, “Hey, we could make some good railroad ties out of these!” Because of the chemicals in their bark, redwoods are uniquely resistant to decay, which made their wood a sought after commodity for propping up grape vines and supporting railroad tracks, and lumber companies exercised no restraint in absolutely savaging the redwood ranges, the only limit on their deforestation practices being the relatively primitive state of 19th century logging technology.

Redwoods were suddenly on the menu, just as the US government created the conditions for their destruction. To encourage settlement out West, the United States allowed individuals to claim large tracts of land for little to no money down, a situation ripe for exploitation as the lumber industry created a small army of fake settlers to “claim” individual tracts of land from the government, which they then promptly sold back to the lumber companies, giving those companies almost total possession of California’s priceless redwood ranges virtually for free.

These deceptive practices were the core of the lumber industry’s behavior over the next century, as they exerted themselves to the utmost to prevent the state from taking back, for the public good, the lands that lumber companies had fraudulently grabbed. By the early 1910s, however, the people of California were beginning to push back against the clear-cutting of the state’s most irreplaceable resource, and that charge, in its opening two decades, was led almost entirely by organizations of women, spread out across first the state and then the nation, devoted to the principle that the California redwoods belonged to all of humanity, and should not be sacrificed to one-time consumption and profit. 

That we have the redwoods we do today, is down to the tireless efforts of the 1910s and 1920s of these organizations to protect them. There were thousands of women engaged in this effort, but the individual at ground zero throughout this time, the one who put not only her time, but her physical self, on the line to protect the redwoods and ensure their survival for future generations to enjoy, was Humboldt County resident Laura Perrott Mahan (1867-1937). 

She was born November 29, 1867, the middle child of three, to parents who were both California pioneers. Her father, William, joined a military ammunition escort heading West at the age of seventeen, and after it arrived at Salt Lake City in 1859, he simply continued westwards, working as a rancher along the way until he finally settled in California’s Humboldt County. There he met Sarah Jane van Duzer, whose family had moved by wagon train from Iowa in 1848. The van Duzers prospered in Humboldt, and when William and Sarah married, they established a ranch of their own adjacent to van Duzer land. 

William’s work ethic, and Sarah’s familial wealth, meant that Laura was raised with advantages that many young women of Humboldt County did not have. She was sent to Oakland (known at the time as the Athens of the Bay) to study at Mills College, and then attended the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, an institution which had sprung into life in 1893 when Edward Searles donated the Hopkins Mansion to the San Francisco Art Association for the purpose of housing a school of fine arts. Sarah studied art there, and the skills she developed would manifest themselves in her famous paintings of the redwoods later in life. 

We don’t know much about Mahan’s life between art school and her marriage, other than her reputation as being one of the bright spots of the Humboldt social scene who also had a propensity for stealing away into nature with her canvases to paint what she observed. Apparently, there was not much parental pressure placed upon her to marry, as she did not enter into that institution until July of 1908, four months shy of her forty-first birthday. Her husband, James Mahan, was an attorney only a few months younger than herself, who supported her in all of her lengthy endeavors to preserve the redwoods of Humboldt County. The pair were partners in the great effort, and when one died, in 1937, the other soon followed. 

Five years after their marriage, the first organized attempt by the women of Humboldt County to preserve their native forests got underway with a meeting in Carson Woods in 1913 attended by representatives of the eight principal towns of the county. There, in that majestic setting, the assembled women vowed to exert their personal influence and organizational abilities to save this pristine stretch of land from the loggers. At that time, only some 25% of the original redwood range had been logged, and it seemed like, with all the forest left, it would be possible to protect this one magical spot. 

Unfortunately, their efforts came to nothing, and today Carson Woods is no more, but a seed was planted, that women, acting in concert, could organize around conservationist ideals, and in 1919 Laura Mahan took the central role as leader of a new group, the Humboldt County Women’s Save the Redwoods League, which for the next decade and a half was to be the principle organization on the ground battling against the wealth and power of the Pacific Lumber Company to save the forests.

They would have to hurry. With the economic boom which followed World War I, demand in California for redwood products was higher than it had ever been, and improvements in logging technology allowed the lumber companies to slash with a vengeance. While the companies felled thousand year old giants, Mahan was busy inviting representatives from important women’s organizations in California and on the East Coast to come visit the redwoods and experience their entirely unique splendor for themselves, while sending a banner-draped automobile throughout the county to drum up local support for conservation. Her strategies bore fruit, and soon Save the Redwoods organizations were popping up all throughout the country, attracting the admiration of the country’s leading forestry and scientific officials, who added the weight of their prestige to the cause. Donations began pouring in, which Mahan hoped could be used to buy back the land that the lumber companies had pilfered from the state, and create a protected redwoods park.

Political support for her project accelerated with the completion of Highway 101, linking Oregon and Northern California. A long stretch of the highway went directly through the redwoods, making them a prime destination for environmental tourism which awed all travellers who took the road, just as the ugly scars left behind by the lumber industry on either side of the highway left a sour taste in the mouth. Some land was bought with the donations from Garden Clubs, Monday Clubs, Save the Redwoods Leagues, concerned scientists, and those interested in developing Humboldt County as a tourist destination - but the 3000 acres purchased by the early 1920s was a drop in the bucket of the remaining 1.5 million acres owned by the lumber industry and scheduled for destruction. 

When the industry refused to countenance selling more land, especially not in the Dyerville Flats forest that represented the most striking and rich segment of the redwood forests, Mahan’s group intensified their advertising efforts, raised money through the idea of Memorial Groves - sections of the forest that the wealthy could purchase in memory of a family member and then gift to the state for permanent protection - and began investigating the idea of condemnation. Conservationists threatened that, if the companies wouldn’t sell their lands at a fair rate, they would ask the state to condemn and reclaim those lands, without any compensation at all. This strategy led the industry to double down on their recalcitrance, and to even begin logging in regions where legal injunctions had temporarily prohibited their activities.

This defiant attitude led to the most famous confrontation of Mahan’s career when, in 1924, she and her husband received word that the Pacific Lumber Company had begun logging in the Dyerville Flats region. Mahan found their secret logging site and, while her husband raced back to town to bring a copy of the formal injunction to stop logging to the foreman, Laura stood in front of the logging crews, physically blocking them from continuing their work, an act of placing her physical person on the line in the name of the redwoods that would be echoed decades later by Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived from 1997 to 1999 in a tent atop the 1000 year old redwood named Luna to prevent Pacific Lumber from chopping it down. Both acts achieved their ends, and both Mahan’s forest and Hill’s Luna survive to this day.

Pacific Lumber’s next strategy was to try and create a split in the conservationist community by offering 300 to donate acres of forestland in exchange for a promise to never pursue the purchase of any other forests again. Of course, 300 acres was a paltry sum next to the over one million acres controlled by the industry, but there were those in the Save the Redwoods community who thought the deal should be accepted and even lauded as an act of responsible self-sacrifice by industry. Mahan resolutely kept to her position that all token gestures on the part of the industry were to be rejected, and that focus should be kept on the main prize, a series of large scale purchases of redwoods with the ultimate aim of creating a state park from them. 

Her influence and integrity carried the day, keeping the redwood movement focused until big fish donors could put their weight behind the effort. Rockefeller donated a million dollars to the cause in late 1924, allowing for the purchase of the Dyerville Flats after years of contentious negotiations, and in 1928, California voters approved, at a ratio of 3 to 1, a bond for $6 million to finance the creation of new state parks, with the redwoods of Humboldt the crown jewel of the effort. The original dream of a 20,000 acre state park was now well in motion, and today the Redwood National Park stands at some 139,000 acres and the Avenue of the Giants which Mahan’s early efforts succeeded in securing ranks as one of the natural wonders of America. 

In the 1850s, California possessed some 2 million acres of redwoods. Today, we have only five percent of that expanse left, a terrifying testament to mankind’s greed and zeal to chase a swift profit regardless of long term consequence. But it could be much worse. Had Laura Mahan not devoted herself so single-mindedly to the protection of the redwoods, utilizing every ounce of her influence and genius to bring the interest of those with money and power to bear on the protection of California’s rapidly dissolving forests, we might today only possess the 500 acres of the Muir Woods (given protected status by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908) and the 2500 acres of Santa Cruz redwood mountain forest purchased by Carrie Walter (1846-1907) and Josephine McCrackin (1839-1921) in 1901. Mahan could not have done the job of setting the Redwood National Park on its path without the thousands of women spread across hundreds of gardening and women’s clubs throughout the nation, but neither could the movement have kept its coherence and dedication to large-scale preservationism without Mahan’s steady hand.

Laura Mahan passed away in 1937, and later the grove that her physical heroism had helped save was incorporated into the Redwood National Park, and decorated with a plaque celebrating her act of defiance, and her and James’s years of service. Her mind and will had preserved the trees for future generations, just as her brush and genius preserved the trees around her in the state that she knew them to save that moment in time for our eyes, and those of the generations who come after us. She gifted us a world beyond time, and if the magnitude of that gift seems beyond the ability of mere verbal thanks to repay, hopefully the sight of generations upon generations of families looking up, up at the majesty of living beings almost beyond comprehension, and feeling true awe for the natural world, will do the job that mere words can’t.

FURTHER READING:

Mahan’s story, as well as that of dozens of other women who contributed to the redwoods movement, is contained in Laura and James Wasserman’s 2019 Who Saved the Redwoods? The Unsung Heroines of the 1920s Who Fought for our Redwood Forests. It draws on local resources as well as a host of histories of the forestry movement in California, including Susan Schrepfer’s indispensable 1983 The Fight to Save the Redwoods and John Dewitt’s 1993 California Redwood Parks and Reserves.