A viewing platform for watching seals and whales stands at Laguna Point, part of MacKerricher State Park and adjacent to the MacKerricher State Marine Conservation Area, about 3 miles (4.8 km) north of Fort Bragg and 1 mile (1.6 km) west of Cleone, California. For thousands of years the Northern Pomo and the Coast Yuki lived off the area’s natural resources, gathering seaweed, shellfish and acorns and hunting deer. In 1856 the federal government established the Mendocino Indian Reservation, a swath of land 10 miles (16 km)long and 3.5 miles (5.6 km) wide, home to people of the Pomo, Salan Pomo, Southern Pomo, Yuki, Wappo and Whilkut tribes. A sub-agent’s report from 1857 counted 722 Native Americans living on the reservation, though thousands more from these tribes passed through or were held there over its roughly nine years of operation.

Around 1862 Duncan MacKerricher, a mill worker, took a job assisting Indian Agent Enoch J. Whipple on the reservation. In 1865 the California Office of Indian Affairs discontinued it, and the tribes were forced to march roughly 80 miles to the newly established Round Valley Reservation. MacKerricher bought 1,000 acres (405 ha) of the former reservation land and started Rancho de la Laguna, where he grew potatoes, produced butter and raised draft horses, cattle and hogs. In 1883 the Dwelly brothers, Jedediah and Gilbert, acquired timberland and built a water-powered sawmill about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) upstream from the village of Laguna, now Cleone; like many small mill owners on the coast at the time, they ran an independent, family-scale operation of a kind larger firms such as the Union Lumber Company later absorbed. Two years later the mill switched to steam power, raising capacity to 40,000 board feet a day, and produced railroad ties, lumber and piling; the company also harvested tanbark, used in leather tanning.

Specialized “doghole schooners” carried milled lumber from the Mendocino Coast to San Francisco and other coastal towns. A “doghole” referred to a small shipping port along the coast with barely enough room for a schooner to load. Laguna Point was such a port, serving two mills, one at Laguna Creek (today’s Mill Creek) and another at Ten Mile River. Ships were first loaded by sliding cargo down an “apron chute” to the deck, but after winter storms washed away the chute and wharf in 1885, it was replaced by a “wire chute” that lowered lumber bundles on cables. In 1887 the Little Valley Lumber Company built a 2.5-mile gravity-driven tramway from its mill near Cleone to Laguna Point. Powered only by gravity, loaded cars coasted downhill to the shipping yard, while horses hauled the empty cars back uphill. When a “train” of two to four cars rumbled loudly through town, residents and shopkeepers had time to clear the way. The Laguna Creek mill and the tramway shut down in 1904 but ties and tanbark kept moving through the port until 1920, though most lumber by then was shipped from Fort Bragg. A truck road replaced the rail line in 1949, and the Lake Cleone trestle burned down in the early 1960s. Read more here and here. Explore more of Seal Rocks and Laguna Point here: