On January 10, 1854, a Humboldt Bay and Mad River Canal Company was incorporated for the purpose of taking the Water of Mad River in a Canal in order to open a communication between Mad River and a certain Slough well known to the Subscribers & leading into Humboldt Bay for the purpose of floating timber from Mad River into Humboldt Bay & for such other purposes as the same may be deemed practicable and profitable.By December of the same year the proposed canal was completed, and at that time it was thought that “the canal will take almost the entire stream and as there is considerable fall along the line it will become the permanent bed.”Curiously enough, no contemporary account of the construction or description of the canal could be found, albeit with the aid of an extant map of the times, plus some later descriptions, a composite approximation is feasible. As was the case with the proposed Eel River canal, the area where the river and the bay were separated by the shortest distance was chosen for the site, the declared intent of the builders being to divert the Mad River via the canal and a “certain Slough well known to the Subscribers and leading into Humboldt.”The slough in question was the present day Mad River Slough, the northwesternmost of the bay sloughs, which at its extremity came to within approximately one half mile of the Mad River at a location nearly one mile upstream from where it flowed into the ocean. We can find no reliable information on the dimensions of the canal, and can only speculate that given the intended purpose of floating logs and the relatively low capitalization a rather shallow (say six feet at the most) and narrow (perhaps double its depth, or twelve feet) would seem reasonable.Originally printed in the March-April 1986 and May-June 1986 issues of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society.Keep Reading
