Eel River (California) - History

History

Several tribes of the Eel River Athapaskan group lived along the Eel River before the arrival of American settlers. After the end of the California Gold Rush in the early 1850s, thousands of Americans from the eastern United States who did not manage to find gold settled in the state. Most of the early settlers along the Eel River were prospectors from the Gold Rush. The river's watershed was soon converted to agriculture and ranching purposes. A town was established on the Van Duzen River near the confluence with the Eel as a defense against Native American attacks from the northeast. Over time, the settlers established towns of their own, especially near the mouth of the river where there was more arable land than the steep upper canyons. The river's then-abundant salmon runs attracted fishermen to the region, and the generous supply of redwood trees allowed logging operations to prosper.

As part of the Potter Valley or Eel River Project, a pair of dams were built across the upper reaches of the Eel beginning in 1906 to divert water to the much more populous but smaller Russian River drainage area to the south, resulting in a much higher flow in the smaller river and a drastically decreased flow in the Eel.

In 1911 noted American engineer John B. Leonard designed Fernbridge, a 1320-foot all concrete arched bridge at the site of an earlier ferry crossing. Now listed on the National Historic Register, Fernbridge is the last major crossing before the Eel arrives at the Pacific Ocean. The last crossing before the Pacific Ocean is at Cockrobin Island Road a few miles to the west of Fernbridge.

In 1914, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad built a rail line running along much of the Eel River, and later, Pacific Coast Highway was constructed along the South Fork and along the Eel River downriver of the South Fork. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed in the 1960s to construct the enormous Dos Rios Dam (Spanish: Two Rivers Dam) near the confluence with the Middle Fork, to provide water storage (creating the largest man-made lake in California and the fifth largest in the United States) and to control flooding. The proposal was later defeated with public initiative to protect the remaining relatively wild rivers in the state. Nevertheless, the heavily changed ecology of the main stem downstream of the dam, combined with increased erosion from logging activities, almost wiped out the river's salmon run when several large storms hit in the 20th century.

In 1964, a severe Pineapple Express event, known as the Christmas flood of 1964, brought heavy rains to coastal northern California. The Eel River drainage area was particularly hard hit. As it lies close to the coast and mostly without dams, the storm produced a flow of more than 750,000 cu ft/s (21,000 m3/s), including 200,000 cu ft/s (5,700 m3/s) from the South Fork alone. Almost every river town was submerged, bridges were destroyed, and some were never rebuilt. The deepest floodwaters were nearly 70 feet (21 m) above the normal river level. The Eel River estuary and its bordering towns—Rio Dell and Ferndale—were particularly hard hit. Several thousand people were left homeless by the floods and hundreds of head of livestock were lost.