Routes
To Del Norte Co.,
California

Or...By land and sea...
both lead to Del Norte County...
But would you want to take either of them?

James Hill HALL came to Del Norte County before 1850, traveling overland from southwestern Illinois with Daniel Will BOONE. The following is a description of the "modern" modes of transportation almost 50 years later, in 1898.

Access to Del Norte County, California's northern most coastal county ajoining the Oregon border, was described in an article printed in "The Pacific Dairy Review". Although the article is published in San Francisco in March of 1910, the un-named
author describes the two routes of travel that he and a companion took in 1898 into Del Norte County...

"To get into Del Norte you have the choice of two severe and excruciating modes of traveling. You can go by way of Grant's Pass on the Oregon branch of the Southern Pacific and stage, thence over mountain and valley one hundred miles, and if your endurence is good for both day and night of the constant jolting and jarring, you will in due time arrive in Del Norte.

Or... if you are enough of a mariner to hang onto the masts, the railing or any other part of the anatomy of one of the small steamers plying occasionally between San Francisco and Crescent City, the port of Del Norte county, and all the while succeed in preventing your stomach, with all of its attachments, escaping by way of your teeth, you should take the water route.

We took one route in and the other out and know whereof we write..."