The North State

Right...understand Northern California?  How about understanding tragedy?  As a Native Son of Redding here are things you should  understand:

1.  Redding has a hard glint to it, a meanness that many “newcomers” comment on.  It goes back to the gold rush days, when Old Shasta was the Queen City, where the gold was and Redding was called poverty flats.  The reason for its current  name  was when the railroad came through and the clerk at the train station was a  guy named Redding,  and he got credit for the town that was originally called Poverty Flats.  That’s right, Poverty Flats!

2.  And Poverty Flats is the core of Redding and of Northern California.  Northern California was where the gold ran out, where miners went to find more, and ran straight into the Native Americans who were not welcoming.  The miners turned to cattle ranching instead, clashed with the Natives and a genocide ensued.  And the killings were paid for with bounties.  Killing people for money is a hell of a way to start a town but that is in fact what started it.

3.  My mother was a dirt farmer.  Now there is nothing wrong with that, but every one was.  And there was no money in Redding once the gold rush petered out; after destroying the watershed and leaving a environment disaster the gold mining corporations (who really mined the gold) simply left the streams and rivers and the mounds of rocks where they had blasted them with hydrological mining and took off.  The North State was an ecological disaster; punctuated with a copper mining boom around what is now Shasta Lake that gave off such toxic fumes that it turned residents hair green; and killed hundreds.  The economy of Redding in the early twentieth century was truly victimized by corporate mining that destroyed it.

4.  Logging became a mainstay after WWII and the completion of the Dam.  Redding became a economic opportunity and the population rose for about 8 thousand to 90 thousand over the decades.   The Dam, its called “The Dam” by locals, had provided thousands of jobs during the Great Depression and literally saved the town.  It also created a conflict between the Dam “Busters” workers who followed the Federal Dam Projects and the locals.  This often resulted in violence, locals fighting the “aliens” in the gutters of California Street, known for its prostitution, gambling and sin.

5.  Then the logging ran out.  Many blamed the “spotted owl” and the “feds” for the economic  catastrophe the run down of logging brought to the north state.  At about the same time, the Cold War stopped and thousands of “immigrants” from the L.A. Basin moved into Shasta County, bringing with them two things:  conservatism and evangelical belief.

Now, Redding had never been a particularly religious town, but in the span of a few years became home to the North Valley Baptist Church, a conservative dynamo that displaced the former New Deal liberal Democrats who ran the town from the 30s to the 70s.  The south state’s  religious conservatism rushed into take the place of the loggers who moved or retired as the wood products industry died.  Union members were replaced with church members.

6.  The last Democrat to win the Congressional Seat was Bizz Johnson who retired in the late 1970s leaving a long string of increasingly conservative representatives that endures to this day.  While the rest of the state reveled in the digital revolution, growing into the fifth largest economy in the world, Redding stayed in the Poverty Flats stage, in fact shrinking in size as thousands of Bay Area residents look for cheaper housing.  They avoid Redding because the economy and political atmosphere is toxic!

7.  And the State of Jefferson madness developed out of this; the evangelicals who once again are trying to run the town, taking the place of the Baptists with the Bethel “movement” that promises redemption if you believe in spirits and particularly white straight people.

8.  Redding always was suspicious of “outsiders”.  But it has got worse.  The “boat people” from Vietnam came to Redding in the late 70s and met with a white supremacy racism that was  very ugly.  The Orange County refugees we called the white ex-defense industry workers, who had fled the south state because of “those people” now had “those people” going to school with their kids and did not like it.  The hard edge on Redding citizens turned into white backlash, as once again the “feds” were blamed for the intruders.

9.  And now Redding sits as a conservative bastion in a North State that is a mix of marijuana farmers, a small liberal faction and the rest wack nut conservatives.  

10.  And global warming, that the conservative faction thinks is bunk, will literally melt the North State away in the coming years with fires and heat that is impossible to live in.  Even with air conditioning you can’t work and live in 120 degree heat.  And solar power, a few have it, but the city who owns its power company refuses to use it, again caught in the conservative malaise.

I finally had my fill of it, my family is a Pioneer Family, my father an ex President of the Shasta County Historical Society.  I taught Shasta Country History.  But when the town twice  turned down a much needed small tax increase to replenish the recession ravaged police and fire departments, the opioid epidemic has turned Redding into a crime ridden zone where no home is safe, I had it.  I had attended Sac State for my credential and Masters and we relocated to Sacramento.  It is my second time here, but the atmosphere, even though a “Big City” was like a breath of fresh air.  The diversity is startling, but refreshing.  And Sacramento has its problems as well.  But there is a strong commitment to governing, to working for diversity and yes the American Dream that Redding once had, when I was a poor kid growing up in a town that had “money” from logging and provided me with the opportunity to rise and attend Stanford University.

And the State of Jefferson?  The lunacy of this movement is beyond belief, it would in one move reduce Redding to the Poverty Flats it used to be.  Redding has already turned its back on the state of California politically but to actually do it economically would end the town.

Finally, a small mention in this article tells it all, the population in Redding is in the low 90,000s.  It was projected to be well over 100,000 ten years ago.  That tells it all...Redding is starving itself to death with in its conservative malaise, the global warming it refuses to acknowledge and the poverty flats designation it can’t or won’t escape is a death sentence.