Ralph Sidney Smith

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. …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. …As editor of the Times and Gazette, Smith prioritized covering logging’s widespread destruction of ancient redwood forests throughout the state. …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’s reported “love of justice” put him in harm’s way. …Tragically, Smith’s murder meant he didn’t live to see a state park established in Big Basin.