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. Lumber schooners 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. At first, the lumber was shipped in old square-riggers, but these aging ships were inefficient as they required a large crew to operate and were hard to load. Soon local shipyards opened to supply specialist vessels. In 1865 Hans Ditlev Bendixsen opened one of these yards at Fairhaven, California on Humboldt Bay adjacent to Eureka. Bendixsen built many vessels for the lumber trade, including the C.A. Thayer, now preserved at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. He constructed 92 sailing vessels between 1869 and 1901, including 35 three-masters. The lumber schooners were built of the same Douglas fir as the planks they carried. (Schooner Oregon Pine was named after the tree.) They had shallow drafts for crossing coastal bars, uncluttered deck arrangements for ease of loading, and were especially handy for maneuvering into the tiny, Northern California ports. Many West Coast lumber schooners were also rigged without topsails, a configuration referred to as being baldheaded. This rig simplified tacking into the strong westerlies when