Located behind the Siskiyou County Museum building are two painted murals. One describes the Yreka Creek Greenway Project, an environmental restoration project to enhance and protect wildlife habitat and water quality of Yreka Creek. This particular mural focuses on the people of this area who contributed in some way to make the community of Yreka what it is today. One of the painted representations on the mural is of Hallie Daggett, the first female Forest Service Lookout in U.S. history. There is a placard on the mural that states this and reads:
Women such as Hallie Daggett, the first female Forest Service Lookout, improved professional, social, civic and family conditions throughout the river basin.
I also located numerous websites highlighting Daggett's career. The usda.gov website contains a nice bio of Hallie here and it reads:
The first woman employed by the Forest Service as a fire lookout was Hallie M. Daggett (pictured here),who started work at Eddy's Gulch Lookout Station atop Klamath Peak (Klamath National Forest) in the summer of 1913 and worked for 14 years. "Some of the Service men predicted that after a few days of life on the peak she would telephone that she was frightened by the loneliness and the danger, but she was full of pluck and high spirit...[and] she grew more and more in love with the work. Even when the telephone wires were broken and when for a long time she was cut off from communication with the world below she did not lose heart. She not only filled the place with all the skill which a trained man could have shown but she desires to be reappointed when the fire season opens this year" [1914] (American Forestry 1914: 174, 176).
Hallie M. Daggett was the daughter of John Daggett owner of Black Bear Mine. He served as Lt Governor of CA and was Superintendent of the San Francisco Mint.
Another document (link below) describes Hallie's life in more detail and reads:
Hallie Morse Daggett was the first woman to serve as a USDA Forest Service fire lookout. She was hired by the Klamath National Forest in 1913 and served on the Eddy Gulch Lookout for 15 years. She was the daughter of John and Alice Daggett, a pioneer family. Her father was a successful miner who also served as California's lieutenant governor and superintendent of the U.S. Mint in San Francisco.
Hallie was a refined woman educated in San Francisco; however, her deep love of her childhood home at the Black Bear Mine near Sawyer's Bar, California, drew her back to the mountains. She learned how to hunt, fish, ride, trap, and shoot early in life--skills that came in handy at the lookout high abive the Salmon River.
In her later years (1951), Hallie's home town of Etna, California, built her a cabin on a Main Street lot next to her sister Leslie's home. She lived in this house until her death in 1964. The cabin was donated to the City of Etna by the Rosemary Holsinger family in 1993. The City of Etna, through a volunteer citizen's committee, moved the cabin to the city park and developed an historical interpretive site that was completed in 1996. This project was identified as a priority in the Etna community action plan and was funded by Forest Service grants from President Clinton's Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative and the Ore-Cal Resource Conservation Development Area. The project was also sponsored by the Native Daughters of the American West.
I also located a webpage on The National Historic Lookout Register for the Eddy Gulch Lookout Tower
here. The original lookout tower that Hattie 'manned' was replaced in 1926. Hattie retired from her fire lookout watch the following year. A third lookout tower replaced that one in 1958 and still stands and functions as a lookout today.