Harry Shouffleton, Forest Ranch Store Owner, sitting on the flume with an unknown woman, circa 1900 (Lederer, et al. 2003, Nopel 2003)
Chico was the pine capital of the West, thanks to natural forestation of what now encompasses the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve. American ingenuity, including the development and installation of telegraph wires, and the engineering feat of planning and building the successfully functioning Big Chico Flume also supported the timber harvest.
The telegraph lines that were installed along the 38- mile route of the flume, fostered communication with timber harvesting teams and their lumber herders, who tended to the flow of rough-cut lumber down the flume.
In the 1800s, the flume was a great technological feat that took the Butte Flume and Lumber Company from 1872 to 1874 to construct. The advances it contributed included off-shoots to the various mills to cut shipping costs significantly from the old way of shipping via horse-drawn wagons along Humboldt Road. The grading, or drop of the flume along with a constant flow of water made lumber flow down to the valley. The wooden trestle was implemented in some places, to account for large drops in the natural landscape.
As an undergraduate of CSU, Chico in 2003, R. Heath Browning compared the historical and archaeological records of transporting lumber from mills down the Big Chico Creek Flume (thanks to water and gravity) into the valley. Browning’s honors thesis put together all of this information in “The Big Chico Creek Flume: An Archaeological Reconnaissance” on the Big Chico Flume under the direction of Dr. Antoinette Martinez, the Department Chair & Undergraduate Advisor of the Anthropology Department at CSU, Chico.
The Big Chico Creek Flume is relevant once again, as the Department of Anthropology is sending archaeological field classes out to the site of the Flume, and also even to the Homestead Site this fall. The greatest points of interest as far as the Homestead Site is concerned are for the various occupants over the years, their use of the land, and such. The Big Chico Creek Flume, of course, brought inhabitants who tended to the flume and the lumber at every point in the day from 1874 to 1907, when the use of the flume was discontinued after Diamond Match purchased the land.
The lumber industry worked around the clock to harvest timber, and the lumber herders were housed on the flume to tend the flume and logs. Such efforts as Browning’s thesis, which scoured city, company, academic literature, and timber harvest records, are now proving particularly useful and germane.
