West Coast lumber trade

The West Coast lumber trade was a maritime trade route on the West Coast of the United States. It carried lumber from the coasts of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington mainly to the port of San Francisco. The trade included direct foreign shipment from ports of the Pacific Northwest and might include another product characteristic of the region, salmon, as in the schooner Henry Wilson sailing from Washington state for Australia with "around 500,000 feet of lumber and canned salmon" in 1918.

The trade was instrumental in founding shipping empires such as the Dollar Steamship Company in which its founder, Captain Robert Dollar, emigrated from Scotland, worked in the lumber camps of Canada and, after moving to San Francisco in 1888 and buying timber tracts, founded a shipping line that extended to China.

As late as the California Gold Rush, New England lumber was still carried 13,000 miles around Cape Horn to San Francisco. But that started to change when Captain Stephen Smith (of the bark George Henry) established one of the first west coast lumber mill in a redwood forest near Bodega, California, in 1843. The first lumber mill on the west coast was established by John B. R. Cooper in Rancho El Molino near present-day Forestville, California. By the mid-1880s, more than 400 such mills operated within the forests of California's Humboldt County and along the shores of Humboldt Bay alone.

...
Wikipedia