By the time a wildfire devastated this quirky California town, government policy had already done most of the work of destroying it.
By the time a wildfire devastated this quirky California town, government policy had already done most of the work of destroying it.
O n September 2, with California still in the convection oven of late summer, a wildfire swept through Weed. Once an international logging hub, Weed is nowadays a small town of around 2,800 people living beneath a snowcapped volcano called Mount Shasta, about an hour’s drive south of the Oregon border. The Mill Fire, as it was soon called, burned through 4,000 acres and killed two people before it was finally extinguished on September 13.
News accounts of the wildfire were almost invariably refracted through the prism of race, hammering the round pegs of human suffering and government incompetence into the square holes of ethnicity. “Wildfire destroys historic Black section of Weed,” declared the Sacramento Bee. The San Francisco Chronicle’s sister news organization, SFGate, reported, “Historic Black Northern California neighborhood destroyed in Mill Fire.” The Bay Area News headline read, “Vital piece of Black history burns up in Mill Fire.” The New York Times joined in with “Wildfire destroys a piece of Black history in rural California.” And in case you were still uncertain about the racial significance of the Mill Fire, there was Ben Crump, the civil-rights attorney who represented the families of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, walking the streets of Weed, promising reporters that he’d win justice for “a marginalized community that again is facing tragedy because the warning signs were not adhered to.”
Reporting on the Mill Fire this way is like looking through a drinking straw and believing you’ve grasped the cosmos. Long before it became an exhibit in the case against America — a case involving racism and climate change — Weed contained things more remarkable than those dreamt of by modern philosophers. And it was destroyed not by fire or a volcano, but by government regulators.
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Let us begin as James Michener might, about 41 million years ago, with tectonic plates thrusting up the vast ocean floor to begin the creation of California and the Cascade Mountain Range. In the center of that range, magma heating deep below the Pacific and North American plates began erupting just 590,000 years ago, gradually building Mount Shasta up to its 14,179-foot height. Geologically speaking, this was a land of fire.
In the water and on the land, megafauna thrived. For millennia, saber-tooth tigers, dire wolves, and (a favorite among the region’s dinosaur hunters, perhaps only because of its name) a kind of fish–lizard called the Californosaurus thrived.
The first humans likely moved across the Beringia land bridge from Eastern Siberia, settling in the conifer forests around Shasta some 13,000 years ago. Because of the natural abundance of food, they rarely farmed. Instead, they fished, hunted elk, deer, and bear, and collected seeds in the forests surrounding the volcano. Among my favorite descriptions of this time before memory is California historian Charles Raymond “Buster” Clar’s. In his 1959 epic, California Government and Forestry from Spanish Days Until the Creation of the Department of Natural Resources in 1927, Clar imagined:
Through the long centuries there was just the pleasant rich land, the sunshine and rain, and the Indians who required such a little of the bounty around them for their simple sustenance. And there were the animals, countless thousands, probably in greater numbers, it has been said, than the world had ever supported elsewhere. The Indians hunted and trapped the animals, but most tribes went to the oak forests to gather acorns for their food supply. Others fished and some found their chief sustenance in seeds. The forests grew. Trees matured, became old and fell to rot and return their bodies to the forest soil. . . . It was a quiet world. . . . Sometimes there was fire. Generally, the fire was caused by the rather rare lighting storms. Sometimes the Indians, by carelessness or design, caused the forest to burn.
Five hundred years ago, after millions of years of volcanoes and forest fires and a few thousand years of human habitation, Clar notes, “the Imperial Court of Spain . . . laid claim to the land.” Among the most famous of the Spanish was the Franciscan priest Junípero Serra. Brilliant and energetic, Father Serra was an ardent defender of the indigenous population against the outrages of Spanish soldiers. He founded many of Spain’s 21 California missions before he died in Carmel in 1784.
“Less than two decades after Serra’s death, a different kind of vessel began appearing on the California coast,” write the historians Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz in Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary. “Ships from England and the United States began to call, first periodically and, over time, with increasing regularity.” In 1822, the flag of the Mexican Republic replaced the flag of Spain. Just 24 years later, in June 1846, a group of California rebels supporting the U.S. war with Mexico raised a Bear Flag emblazoned with the red star of Texas. Their California Republic lasted just six weeks, ending with the arrival of an American naval squadron. Mexico abandoned its claim, and in 1850, California was admitted to the union.
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Into this ancient land came a man with the Dickensian name of Abner Weed. As a 19-year-old at the outbreak of the Civil War, Weed had joined Company C, Eighth Maine Infantry Regiment. Fighting all the way to the brutal end of the war to end slavery, he was present for Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. A year later, he was married and, just 24, lit out for California, ultimately moving his wife and young children to the forests that swirled around Mount Shasta like a skirt.
There, Weed paid $400 to buy the Siskiyou Lumber and Mercantile Mill and 280 acres (110 hectares) of forest land. He built a hotel and named his land Weed. His holdings flourished, with wood cut from the surrounding forests fed through thousands of hands and into the towns and cities of a nation emerging as a global power. A Republican, he served as a California state senator from 1907 to 1911. When he died in 1917, the town that bore his name was a place of real diversity and opportunity.
Though remote, Weed attracted immigrants and migrants, especially black Americans looking for escape from the Jim Crow South. In his revelatory 2010 study, African Americans in the Shadow of Mount Shasta: The Black Community of Weed, California, historian James Langford explains why:
It was June 1923, when five young Black men set out in a Model T Ford from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, to a small town in northern California. They were following the sounds of promise they had heard in the words of a young hobo, recently returned from a trip to the West Coast. He told of a better life for Black people in this burgeoning lumber town. “He said there was a mountain right there close to Weed you’d see snow the year round.” These are the words of Danny Piggee, describing how he first heard of Weed, the town he was to live in for the next thirty-seven years. “Weed was a miracle for Black people for work.”
When he and his cousin, Jim Hopkins, and their three companions reached Weed at noon on June 19, 1923, after fourteen and a half days on the road, they ate dinner, went to the hiring office of Weed Lumber Company, then to the Weed Hospital for health checks, and started work the next morning. A common laborer in the Weed mill was paid $3.60 for eight hours. Piggee went to work taking down lumber on the yard with D. Grant, one of his Oklahoma companions, as his partner. Because Grant had previous experience in this contract work, Piggee made over $5.00 the first day he worked. As he thought to himself at the time, “Boy, I oughta been here for years back.” In describing the town of Weed as it was in 1923, he said, “You could just almost pick your jobs when I came here. And it was a lotta, lotta Black folks here.”
Weed didn’t attract only black Americans; immigrants came from all over the world. Mexicans descended from Spanish and indigenous people settled there, as did Chinese, Irish, Germans, and Italians, including — in what was almost certainly a joy to the mostly male community — a woman named Carmela Luigi.
“One of the first things her boyfriend did was to build an oven so she could make bread for the family,” says Adriana Dada, a historian of Italian immigration to Northern California. The oven became the town bakery. Carmela’s daughter opened Weed’s dry-cleaning store. Carmela’s cousin, Giuseppe, “left Weed for San Francisco to be a waiter at the world-famous Fairmont Hotel,” eventually working his way up to maître d’ before becoming a restaurant owner himself — from penury to propertied in a generation.
Weed wasn’t a utopia. The work was grueling and occasionally life-threatening. But the newcomers “had to earn their daily bread somehow,” Mariella Radaelli wrote recently in L’Italo Americano. The Italians “thought [they’d] find the streets paved with gold. But no, life was harsher than they expected for at least several years ahead.”
As if those material struggles weren’t bad enough, there was also racism to contend with, sometimes petty and sometimes worse, just as there is almost everywhere else this side of glory. When the young men from Broken Bow arrived, they got jobs — and directions to the Quarters, the segregated black neighborhood on the northern edge of town. In the 1960s, African Americans pressed “local employers to hire Blacks in a capacity other than clean-up,” notes Langford, Weed’s unofficial historian. In 1973, Langford himself became the city’s first black elementary-school teacher. But even with the indignities of segregation, Weed seemed far better to the new arrivals than Broken Bow or the villages of Northern Italy’s Massa-Carrara province had been.
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That continued to be true for decades, until the state stepped in and dismantled the cultural machinery that created economic opportunity in Weed like wine from water. In the 1970s, state and federal officials linked arms with environmental activists and began squeezing the life out of the Northwest timber industry, including the town that Abner Weed and tens of thousands of others had built. Blindly privileging such remarkable species as the spotted owl over the more common human person, California state and federal regulators locked down the forests.
The effects have been disastrous for the town. Regulating California’s lumber industry was supposed to save the planet. Instead, it’s done the opposite.
It began with the gradual, ceaseless piling up of federal, state, and local regulations. The pile is now so large, it is a kind of monument to human arrogance, a record of the government’s doomed effort to cover every eventuality, from “forest health, wildlife habitat, water and air quality, archeological sites, [and] land use patterns” to “respect for community sentiments,” as researchers put it in a 2005 study of the decline and fall of the California timber industry. Those “growing regulations have only created costlier sales, not ‘cleaner’ ones,” the researchers concluded.
Ironically, even as they’ve imposed higher costs on producers and consumers, all those regulations have also been bad for the forests they were supposed to preserve. Around Mount Shasta, the failure to harvest timber produced rising “fuel loads” — the fire-science term for denser forests and forest floors with mounding natural debris. More trees competing for water in a drier climate produces drier forests. Below Mount Shasta, kindling has stacked up ominously. Add a spark from any source to the late summer heat, and you get a murderous conflagration.
Yet when the Mill Fire burned through Weed, Governor Gavin Newsom didn’t acknowledge government’s role in creating the conditions for the disaster. Newsom instead blamed capitalism.
“The devastating impacts of our changing climate have never been more clear — and they threaten not just our future, but the history, places and communities that define our state,” the governor said shortly after the Mill Fire flared up. Later, UCLA researchers concluded that the state’s recent historic wildfires had “put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere as the total reduction in such pollutants in California between 2003-2019.”
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All of this is bad news for Weed, for California, for America, and for the world. In the 1940s, the city was home to the world’s largest sawmill. Since then, employment has fallen and the town has struggled. Government jobs picked up some of the slack. On April 20, 2019, hoping to leverage its name for economic development, Weed hosted its first marijuana festival. Even without the festival, people take the off ramp from Interstate 5 to visit Weed’s still-quaint downtown. They snap selfies in front of the long-established Hi-Lo Café, pose outside a store with a sign that says, “Sorry! We’re Stoned!” or, if they’re like me, buy a coffee mug that declares one’s love of Weed.
The city may appear little more than a truck stop now, a reprieve from driving through some of the nation’s most isolated and remarkable landscapes. But those landscapes are the record of thousands of years of natural and human creation. Sit quietly in the Hi-Lo and you can actually feel the weight of all that history: diners, cooks, and waiters following a timeless choreography inside the snug, big-windowed, ultimately temporary building with the forests rising up toward the snow-peaked volcano out back.