The history of Mendocino County is told in fits and starts, in family memoirs, old timer interviews and in whispered references to long-ago scandals only hinted at by the newspapers of the time.
“The Nelson Brothers: Finish-American Radicals from the Mendocino Coast,” is by Allan Nelson, the son of one of those radicals. This wonderful memoir fleshes out a pivotal chapter of early local history in a scholarly, fully documented manner. The only other systematic attempt to make sense of early Mendocino County history is “Genocide and Vendetta” by Estle Beard and Lynwood Carranco, the appalling story of the murderous campaigns against the Indians, one of those campaigns state-funded, by the first white settlers in the Eel River watersheds. That book, which says it all in its title, was litigated into silence soon after it appeared in the middle 1950s when it was successfully alleged by the descendant of an old Indian killer that the authors had used his grandfather's diary as a source for their book without permission.
In '“The Nelson Brothers,” Allan Nelson draws a fascinating portrait of his father, Arvid, and his doomed uncle, Enoch, whose unusual trajectories — tragic in Enoch's case — are illuminated by Fort Bragg-based scholars Russell and Sylvia Bartley, who skillfully explain the complicated revolutionary politics that cost Enoch his life.
As he tells the stories of his father and uncle, Nelson also gives us a vivid picture of Fort Bragg in the early 20th century when immigrant radicals, dreaming of a just world, were plentiful enough in Fort Bragg to establish their own institutions, a thriving community of socialists and independent idealists, people who worked hard, most of them Finns but with a fortifying admixture of Italian immigrants in a town whose contemporary “radicals” are mostly an incestuous crackpot crew of neurotics and exhibitionists.
Eagle's Hall, still standing at Alder and Corry, was erected by revolutionary Finns, and famous Finnish intellectuals made Fort Bragg a stop on their speaking itineraries. An early Rossi, we learn, was a communist and a great friend of Arvid's and Enoch's, and undoubtedly the first and only Fort Bragg Rossi hostile to capitalism as a form of social organization.
Eagle's Hall was then called Toveri Tupa or Comrades' Hall, and the Nelsons, some of whom, we learn, were born at Whitesboro and at Tunnel Hill east of Fort Bragg were active members.
There's a Whitesboro Grange on Navarro Ridge, but until about 1920 there was a thriving village of Whitesboro at Salmon Creek, just south of Albion, one of many disappeared settlements that once thrived in Mendocino County, along with little towns like Hop Flat near Navarro, Mina north of Covelo, and Whitesboro. The Finns called their village Kala or, in Finn, Fish, the Finns being great ones for getting right to the point. Their little town of Whitesboro was complete with a sawmill and a dog hole port and, at one time, an old country sauna Arvid Nelson built in his home for his mother.
The Nelsons arrived in America as the Poukkulas. If they hadn't simplified their name their descendants would have devoted part of each day responding to, “How do you spell that again?”
Arvid Nelson was a self-taught intellectual of the type once common in America when formal education was restricted to people who could pay for it. Immigrant Finns and Italians were lucky to get a few years of elementary education.
Arvid went on to become a well-known writer and illustrator for Finnish-language publications of the left-wing type. Enoch, a gifted engineer, also self-taught, joined the exodus of Fort Bragg Finns, inspired by the Russian Revolution, who returned to the motherland to devote themselves to building the new world. Enoch was eventually murdered in the Stalinist purges as “an enemy of the people,” but posthumously rehabilitated during the Kruschev era as a man who had been executed on the basis of zero evidence against him, one of millions to meet that sad fate.
The Bartleys' afterword carefully explains the complicated politics of the purges that claimed Enoch, whose earnest, American-nurtured idealism killed him in Russia, one of many West Coast Finns who'd gone home to make the revolution only to be eaten by it.
The Nelson family today, perhaps best known in the person of the late Don Nelson, a woodworker's union rep at the extinct Fort Bragg mill, still lived at the Nelson homestead at Tunnel Hill which, like Whitesboro, once embraced a whole neighborhood of Finns.
Dale “Crawdad” Nelson, a grand nephew of Arvid and Enoch Nelson, son of Don Nelson, and also a well-known writer who grew up in Fort Bragg, tells us that Tunnel Hill “is 1.9 miles out Sherwood-Oak from the main gate of the mill. It's called Tunnel Hill because the Pudding Creek-Noyo tunnel crosses under that point.
“I can say,” Nelson continues, “that Finns were instrumental in starting the commercial fishing industry out of Noyo, but I can't really say to what extent. I do know when those great uncles of mine were out of work in the Great Depression, they used a raft to fish for steelhead in the Noyo, near the tunnel, and salted the fish for sale in other markets. They were known for boat-building, for instance, the Cluny, a Eureka boat, was built by two Finn brothers who built a boat every winter during woods layoffs, and named it after the liquor they used for motivation during that particular job… The Maki family in Noyo is a prominent boat-building and fishing Finn family. Howard Maki always used to have a dragger under construction at the top of South Harbor Drive — I don't know if that's still going on, but they once built a steamboat for the City of Petaluma, and my sixth-grade class took a field trip to watch them christen the North Star around '69 or '70.”
The first Nelsons on the Northcoast grew up in an area dominated by the Union Lumber Company. To say that class warfare was intense understates the case. There were frequent strikes and even a shooting not far from Tunnel Hill, which apparently occurred when striking loggers, all of them immigrants influenced either by socialists or anarchists of the IWW, tried to return to their logging camp to retrieve their personal belongings only to be fired on.
Union Lumber shared the prevalent attitude of capital, circa 1910: “You shall employ no union man.” Socialists and the IWW were just as blunt: “Direct action will place the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters. There can be no harmony between employer and employee.”
These days, capital is as ruthless as ever but subtler at protecting its interests through front people like Congressman Jared Huffman, Biden-Harris, Mike Mcguire and both political parties.
A particularly self-righteous Fort Bragg banker, we learn, a man who went way out of his way to make life difficult for Red Finns, turned out to be an embezzler, and in that scandal Fort Bragg hasn't changed much. The town's subsequent history is replete with bribed city councils, arsons for profit, crooks in high places.
Much local history has been lost. This important book fills in some important blanks. It's a terrific story, well-told, and masterfully put into political context by the Bartleys. “The Nelson Brothers” is published by the Mendocino County Historical Society and the Mendocino County Museum in association with the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota.
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