Bøger af Ronald G Powell

LOMA PRIETA-the dark heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the Central Coast of California. Once a verdant wilderness barely touched by humans, it took only forty years for opportunistic lumber barons to deprive its redwood-studded southern flanks of millennia of growth. By 1900, the Aptos Forest was a desolation of stumps, and lumber crews were hungrily moving into the sprawling Soquel Forest. But as the cost of milling rose and the value of lumber steadily decreased, investors sought new opportunities. Some looked into cheaper means of harvesting timber, others envisioned thriving residential communities, and a few delved deep in search of oil. Yet all their efforts came to nothing. Eventually, the Marks family of Salinas and the Pelican Timber Company, tired of years of financial loss, sold their vast properties to form The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park and the Soquel Demonstration State Forest. This conclusion to Ronald G. Powell's monumental History of Rancho Soquel Augmentation explores the final evolution of Martina Castro's former Mexican land grant from an industrial wasteland into a bastion of conservation and sustainability.

THEY CAME WITH AXES.THEY CAME WITH OXEN.THEY CAME WITH GREED. In the forests along Aptos, Valencia, Corralitos, and Soquel Creeks in Santa Cruz County, California, miles of wilderness sat untouched by humans, a relic of Mexican land grants long neglected. But entrepreneurial and ambitious men saw in the endless tracts of coast redwood something valuable and ripe for exploitation. From the 1860s, they sent legions of fallers, peelers, sawyers, and lumberjacks into the hills above Aptos. Skid roads gave way to railroads as labyrinthine paths were carved through near-impassable terrain to reach the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This was the domain of the lumber barons, self-made aristocrats such as John Brown, Charles Ford, the Doughertys, the Grovers, and Frederick A. Hihn. Their activities in the late nineteenth century led to reckless deforestation, but they also sparked life. Rugged mountain towns arose in Loma Prieta and Valencia, communities with their own schools, businesses, and cultures. This is a chronicle of their lives and the golden age of the lumber industry in Rancho Soquel Augmentation.