Jesse Travers is injured by a redwood

Jess Traverse’s injury by a falling redwood turns an act of labor intimidation into a family history carried across generations. The tree was prepared to fall during a baseball game, where Traverse was playing center field, and its deliberate placement made the injury a public warning as well as a bodily catastrophe. Its consequences endured in his wife Eula Becker’s activism and in the family’s insistence on remembering who had cut the tree, and why.

Organizing and the attack

Traverse was organizing loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte Counties. During a baseball game, he played center field beside a row of redwoods at the edge of the field. One of the trees had already been sawn partway through. The crowd heard no saw, noticed no loosened wedges, and paid no attention to the trunk’s slow creaking as it began to separate from the neighboring trees.

The attack was attributed to Cracker Scantling, known as Bud, who was working for the employers’ Association. The setting made the falling tree a warning delivered before many witnesses: Traverse’s work organizing loggers had made him a target, and the danger was meant to be seen. When someone finally shouted, he had time to dive clear enough to survive, but not to save his legs. The redwood crushed them and drove him halfway into the ground.

Injury and failed accountability

The employers’ Association left cash compensation in a bag in Traverse’s car, and he received a small pension; insurance also paid out. None of it was enough to support the family’s three children. The money could acknowledge the injury without undoing it or replacing the livelihood Traverse had lost.

A local lawyer handled the case, but the account emphasizes that he was no George Vandeveer. Scantling escaped punishment. The gap between the scale of the injury and the meager practical remedy left the family with more than a damaged body to live with: the man responsible had evaded justice, while the economic burden remained theirs.

Eula Becker’s response and family memory

Eula had joined Traverse’s dangerous, itinerant life after meeting him at an Industrial Workers of the World hall in Vineland. She had chosen the road and his commitment to a broad workers’ union, accompanying him through bleak mill towns, speaking to workers, and being arrested during free-speech fights. After Traverse was crippled, she understood that years of struggle had brought her to a state of cold fury. The injury did not erase her political commitments; it sharpened the sense of what the family had lost and what the community must not forget.

When Sasha Gates later left home, Eula said that she and Traverse had little left to do in town except stay and endure. Their presence, she explained, would make people who saw a Traverse—or a Becker—remember the tree, the person who cut it, and the reason. In her account, remaining was itself a form of testimony, more effective than a statue in a public garden.

A legacy carried forward

The injury entered the family’s political inheritance rather than remaining a closed episode in Traverse’s life. Sasha Gates went on to take part in labor organizing and related struggles; as a child, Frenesi Gates heard stories of workers’ battles from before the war. The family’s recollections placed Traverse’s maiming alongside a wider history of union conflict and employer-backed violence.

Hub Gates later measured his own fear and political choices against Traverse’s example. He recalled that Traverse took a stand and was brought down for it, and contrasted that courage with his own fear of being killed. Years later, Zoyd Wheeler’s work as an ununionized, casual subcontractor strained his relations with Traverse and Becker relatives who were proud union survivors. The redwood’s fall thus remained more than a past injury: it supplied a concrete standard by which later generations judged courage, compromise, work, and the cost of labor activism.