Ten days before 31-year-old newspaper editor Ralph Sidney Smith was shot and killed by an angry reader on the streets of Redwood City, he enjoyed a final visit to his favorite place on Earth.
In November of 1887, as editor of the Redwood City Times and Gazette, Smith escorted a party of state officials deep into the redwood forest of Big Basin in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. He was well acquainted with what he called the “savage beauty” of this lush, rugged landscape. Growing up on the Peninsula, he escaped to the forest every chance he got – to fish in its creeks or to ramble amongst the towering trees, some more than 300 feet tall and older than the Roman Empire. He wanted to convince the state to purchase acres in either the Pescadero or Butano creek canyons to create a public park for the benefit of future generations.
Like other early environmental activists, including John Muir, Smith used his writing to sound the alarm about rampant logging that was destroying California’s coastal redwoods, telling the public and the politically connected — including industrialist and US Senator Leland Stanford — that the state was on the brink of losing a vital natural resource. “At least 100,000 acres of this land is forest primeval,” he wrote about Big Basin. “It ought to be saved, and it can be saved, if the attempt is made in the right way – NOW.”
Dramatic news accounts of Smith’s life and death portray him as a hometown hero who initially left San Mateo County to establish his career. He enjoyed early success as a young reporter and editor in San Francisco and Honolulu, but returned to Redwood City to run the Times and Gazette in 1885.
As editor, Smith prioritized covering logging’s widespread destruction of ancient redwood forests throughout the state. The industry exploded after the Gold Rush, as people coming to California relied on local forests’ seemingly infinite supply of lumber to build their homes and businesses.
In articles that garnered national attention, Smith said his travels in California’s far north counties showed him forests decimated by logging. The “most flawless of Western landscapes” had been left as a little better than “a bedraggled wraith of (their) former loveliness.” He argued that the Santa Cruz mountains still had a chance, where the trees in an old-growth forest along Butano Creek were “veritable monarchs.”
The authors of a history of the Sempervirens Fund, as it came to be called, suggested that Smith wasn’t a pure “nature preservationist” because his ideal public forest would be a self-supporting tourist attraction, with roads, hotels, camping grounds and “streams stocked with trout.” Smith clearly believed it was important to tout the economic potential of protecting forests from logging when appealing to industrialists, bankers and politicians. But he still foregrounded the long-term benefits to the environment and to “the inspiration and education of present and future citizens.”
However, Smith’s community spirit and reported “love of justice,” which made him such a passionate defender of the redwoods, arguably put him in harm’s way. He and his wife had taken an interest in helping a local impoverished widow, who was struggling to raise “many small children” in a home she rented from a San Francisco-based former doctor. Unfortunately, the “industrious” widow had to deal with the doctor’s property manager, his ne’er-do-well dentist brother-in-law, Llewellyn Powell.
Smith wanted to come to the widow’s defense and infuriated Powell by writing an article that revealed his “unbusinesslike” conduct toward her. He said that Powell, a Southerner and Civil War veteran, came to Redwood City a year earlier and talked up his grand scheme of opening a “superior” dental practice and starting a local factory to build iron fences. But Powell actually spent most of his time in saloons, drinking “to the verge of intoxication” and abusing his “betters,” Smith wrote.
Smith said the widow had responsibly paid her rent to Powell but he then failed to go to the city to pay the water bill, as part of the widow’s rental agreement. When her water was cut off, she had to come up with the payment herself to have it turned back on.
For the next few days, Powell told several people he would kill Smith, according to a San Francisco Examiner report. When Smith returned from a brief trip to San Francisco, he heard about Powell’s threats, including from his wife, but refused to arm himself, saying, “What is the use of pretending to uphold the law if we violate it?”
The next afternoon — Nov. 29, 1887 — Smith and Powell bumped into each other outside a Main Street drugstore. Smith tried to approach Powell to discuss the article but Powell called him something nasty, which prompted Smith to strike him. Powell hit back, Smith held up his umbrella to deflect the blow, and the two men began to fight. As Smith moved into the store, Powell whipped out a .32-caliber pistol.
The first of three shots struck Smith in the back with what turned out to be a fatal wound. Two doctors soon arrived. Still alert, Smith begged them to not tell his wife, but to telegraph his mother to say he was hurt, “but not seriously.” The doctors had a different verdict, shaking their heads as they determined that the bullet had nestled near the spine and would kill the father of a 2-year-old son by midnight. Smith was carried by mattress to his home four blocks away, telling his wife as he arrived, “I didn’t do as you told me to, Nellie.” He was given anesthetics to ease his pain.
Powell fled the store, but a form of frontier justice prevailed. The suspect was detained by citizens who marched him to the county jail. There, an Examiner reporter amazingly secured a jail-house interview, with Powell insisting that he shot in self-defense and was certain Smith had a gun. But Powell stopped talking and grew “sullen” after the reporter told him he had killed Smith.
The murder dominated Bay Area headlines for several years. People packed courtrooms for each of Powell’s four trials – one of which took place in San Francisco after intense public attention prompted prosecutors to ask for a change of venue.
Powell’s claims of self-defense apparently kept a jury from reaching a verdict in his first two trials in San Mateo County. His attorney objected to his case being moved to San Francisco, where a jury there found him guilty of manslaughter and a judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Following an appeal, the California Supreme Court in 1891 overturned Powell’s conviction and ordered a fourth trial, back in San Mateo County.
Powell was acquitted – largely because of a stunning new twist in the case, according to a 1921 News and Gazette report. For some reason, the widow changed her story about what she said to Smith about Powell’s treatment of her, raising the possibly that Smith had no basis in the first place to write the story that triggered his death.
Today, Smith’s name is largely forgotten. But state parks historians mention him as the person who planted “the seed” of an idea that was soon picked up by other eminent Californians, notably San Jose photographer Andrew P. Hill and others in the Sempervirens Club. Big Basin became the state’s oldest state park in 1902.
Around that time, the 10-year-old Sierra Club celebrated the memory of the “gentle, generous-hearted” Smith, with an essay penned by another well-known Peninsula naturalist and author.
“Few of us realize as yet what it will mean to have one of the most beautiful untamed parks in all the world, unique in the character of its forests, its mountain slopes visible from our windows,” wrote Rev. William A. Brewer of Burlingame’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. “Ralph Smith the poet dreamed of this years ago, and Ralph Smith the skillful editor and intelligent man of affairs set about to bring into actual existence what then seemed but the figment of his imagination.”
Tragically, Smith’s murder meant he didn’t live to see a state park established in Big Basin. But in his essay, Brewer preferred not to dwell on how or why Smith died but on what he set in motion. Smith himself declared that seeing a park in Big Basin would have been the “worthiest and most satisfactory act of his life,” to which Brewer said: “His whole life appears to have been but the preparation for the accomplishment of this one purpose.”
Veronica Martinez, news researcher and librarian for the Bay Area News Group, contributed to this story.
