Lake Tahoe, Nevada – Description & History, from The Complete Nevada Traveler by David W. Toll
Complete Nevada Traveler Contents
Lake
Tahoe
Travel Info
Book
a Room in
Lake Tahoe
GeWithin
20 years of its discovery in the virgin wilderness by John
C. Fremont in 1844 Lake Tahoe was a major western vacation
destination.
The Nevada
Travel Network
Description and History of
Lake
Tahoe
by David W. Toll
Tahoe
Queen
From The Complete Nevada Traveler, the Affectionate and Intimately Detailed Guidebook to the Most Interesting State in America. Buy the Book Here
Tahoe
lies at the back of California’s neck, just where Nevada’s elbow
juts into it, a bright blue eye staring upward
from its granite socket like an outsized parody of Picasso. At
an elevation of 6,229 feet it is an alpine sea ranking with the
most spectacular mountain lakes in the world. The lake encompasses
nearly two hundred square miles in this mountain grandeur well
over a mile above the level of the ocean. To the west of Tahoe
the peaks of the Sierra Nevada rise up to 4,000 feet above the
lake, and to the east
the craggy summits of the Carson Range soar even higher. Tahoe
is cupped between them, nearly forty cubic miles of water, in a
pine-blanketed setting of such compelling majesty that within twenty
years of its discovery in the virgin wilderness (by John C. Fremont
in 1844) the lake had become one of the West’s leading vacation
spots.
Today, after more than a century of development, Tahoe and its basin rank as
one of the finest all-season recreation areas in the world, but the matchless
scenic beauty of the region has been exploited at such a pace that the sight
of the lake through the pines is as likely to inspire depression as exhilaration.
Lake Tahoe’s modern history began in 1844 when Fremont spied it from a pinnacle
in the Carson Range to the east. It accelerated four years later when John Calhoun “Cock-Eye” Johnson
connected Placerville, California, with the Carson Valley by a looping trail
across the Sierra that skirted Tahoe’s south shore. Mart Smith arrived in 1851
to open a small trading post at the present site of Meyers, California, and became
Tahoe’s first permanent settler — excluding the peaceful Washo Indians whose
claim to the region was considered no better than that of the other forms of
wildlife.
When the first trans-Sierra stagecoach run was made in 1857, it followed the
Johnson Cutoff trail with a stop at Smith’s Station. Two years later, with the
discovery of the Comstock Lode drastically swelling traffic over the road, two
competing stagecoach lines maintained regular schedules with Tahoe stops, and
when the Pony Express was inaugurated in 1860, it took the old Johnson Cutoff
route as well.
By 1861 the Comstock’s voracious need for timbers and fuel had prompted the beginning
of a logging industry in the Tahoe Basin. One of the early prospectors for productive
timberland at Tahoe was young Sam Clemens, who hiked the twelve miles up to the
east shore of the lake from Carson City in 1861. After locating what seemed to
be a goodly stand of trees, Clemens and his companions spent several memorable
days vacationing.
“So singularly clear was the water,” he wrote years later in Roughing
It, “that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so
perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was
even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout,
every hand’s-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder,
as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem
climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our
faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger.
But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could
see that when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or
thirty feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths,
the water was not merely transparent, but dazzling, brilliantly so. All objects
seen through it had bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every
minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same
depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong
was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness that we called these
boat excursions ‘balloon-voyages.'” Clemens left Tahoe to more business-like
developers after inadvertently starting a raging forest fire in his camp, and
rowing out into the lake for dear life.
By the middle 1860s, few Tahoe visitors took much time to admire the scenery.
Comstock-bound traffic past the lake from the central valley of California had
become incessant, and a string of hotels, corrals, stores, and businesses had
been established along the lake’s south shore to cater to the travelers. In a
single three-month period in 1864, 6,667 men afoot, 883 more on horseback, and
another 3,164 in stagecoaches paraded past the lakeshore. Plodding along with
them were 5,000 pack animals and nearly that many cattle. A daily average of
320 tons of freight was drayed past by 2,564 teams. One entrepreneur even drove
a flock of turkeys from California to Virginia City by way of Lake Tahoe. Hay
to feed this endless stream of beasts was grown, harvested, and hand-baled at
the west shore of the lake for delivery by two-masted schooner to the docks on
the south shore where it sold for as much as $250 a ton.
Tahoe’s first resort was built in 1863, at Glenbrook, to provide the leisured
aristocracy of the booming Comstock with a vacation spot conveniently located
at the head of the new turnpike to Carson City. It was a spa which could compare
with the celebrated Saratoga in New York for elegance, gaiety, and the beauty
of its surroundings. The first privately owned vacation “³cottage” was
built at the lake that same year at Emerald Bay, for stagecoach magnate Ben Holladay.
The phenomenal lakeshore traffic slowed to a trickle with the completion of the
transcontinental railroad in 1869, and the lake settled down to a dreamy existence
of summer frolics and winter hibernation. There was a prodigious logging industry,
centered at Glenbrook, but with crews working everywhere in the basin. Commercial
fishermen shipped trout by rail from Truckee to the coast and to the Comstock
at fifteen cents a pound. Otherwise all was idyllic calm.
These activities went largely unreported in San Francisco and Sacramento, and
as far as the outside world was concerned, Tahoe was for play. The elegant new
Grand Central Hotel, erected at Tahoe City in 1871, with walnut furniture, Brussels
carpets, and an ornate cast iron kitchen range that cost $800, eclipsed Glenbrook
House as Tahoe’s toniest resort the day it opened. The Grand Central was superceded
in its turn by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin’s Tallac House farther down
the beach.
As early as 1879, when Baldwin purchased “Yank” Clement’s hotel, the
property was one of the few which had not been logged by timber cruisers, and
by the early 1880s, Tahoe folk were remarking on the obvious decline in native
trout. They were affected both by the efficiency of the market fishermen (commercial
fishing was not outlawed until 1917) and by the effect of the logging and sawmill
operations on the spawning creeks, which became choked with sawdust, slash, and
other debris.
The first tangible demonstration of what the future held in store for Tahoe did
not arrive until 1900, but when it came it was right on schedule, shrieking and
clicking and belching smoke: a narrow-gauge railroad that connected Tahoe City
with the transcontinental railroad at Truckee. The arrival of the railroad prompted
construction of the marvelously gabled four-story Tahoe Tavern a little south
of town to set a new standard of elegance at the lake, and increasingly more
people enjoyed Tahoe excursions and vacations. The lake steamers glided across
the smooth summer surface of the lake as before, trailing languid plumes of black
smoke. Logging at the east shore had largely ended with the decline of the Comstock
mines, and conversion of the railroads to coal.
Just then, enterprising eyes began to focus on Tahoe’s water. In 1900 A. W. Von
Schmidt, president of the Lake Tahoe and San Francisco Water Works, proposed
to furnish the city of San Franicisco with a water system capable of delivering
thirty million gallons of Lake Tahoe water a day in return for $17,690,000. As
a matter of fact, he was agreeable to building a system which could deliver up
to a hundred million gallons a day, at a proportional increase in price. The
San Francisco County Board of Supervisors went so far as to visit the proposed
site of his diversion dam on the Truckee before allowing the idea to lapse. Three
years later a San Francisco attorney named Waymire proposed a tunnel through
the side of the Tahoe basin to drain the lake into the Rubicon branch of the
American River and thus supply limitless power and water to San Francisco. The
Waymire project made even less headway than Von Schmidt’s.
A third attempt to drain Tahoe was backed by the Department of the Interior,
and it nearly succeeded. The U.S. Reclamation Service, discovering it had made
massive miscalculations in estimating the amount of water required to make the
Truckee-Carson Irrigation District in Nevada a success, moved to acquire the
outlet dam and control gates in 1903. With control of the outlet, Reclamation
Service engineers could release whatever amounts of water were needed downriver,
and thereby wash the egg from their chins.
The Truckee Electric Company refused $40,000 for the property on which the dam
was located but made a counter-proposal. The company would present the Reclamation
Service with the dam and gates gratis, in return for rights to a guaranteed flow
of four hundred cubic feet of Tahoe water a second. The anxious Reclamation Service
engineers agreed at once.
Negotiations dragged, however, and it was not until after Taft’s election to
the presidency in 1908 that an amended contract was agreed upon. In it, further
concessions were granted to the utility company. The company could locate pipes
and reservoirs anywhere it might choose on public land. Most important, it was
granted the right to locate another outlet diversion at any depth below the lake¹s
surface. This concession amounted to blanket permission from the federal government
to drain Lake Tahoe into the Nevada desert for the purpose of generating electricity
for sale.
The chief forester for the Department of Agriculture got wind of the contract
before it could be signed, however, and waged a vigorous delaying battle against
it. In 1912, property owners at the lake succeeded in getting an injunction against
the power company to prevent it from cutting into the rim of the lake.
One side effect of the affair was to raise again the question of ownership of
Tahoe’s water. Not until 1935 was an agreement finally reached which provided
that the level of the lake was to be maintained at a minimum elevation of 6,223
feet above sea level and allowed to fluctuate upward to as high as 6,229.1 feet.
Thus the top six feet of Tahoe are in essence reserved for the downriver farmers
in Nevada — less the million and a half tons a day that are lost to evaporation.
An even more portentous herald of the future arrived at Tallac House in 1905
in the person of Mrs. Joseph Chanslor, a merry woman of almost oppressive determination
who had clattered and churned up over the summits from Sacramento, all alone,
in her chain-driven Simplex. She made the trip in the remarkably fast time of
eight hours. The automobile had come to Lake Tahoe. When Mrs. Chanslor sputtered
off toward Sacramento again, no one quite realized the significance of her visit.
Still another hint of the future was dropped in 1911 when lots were subdivided
at Tahoe Vista on California’s north shore. But to the horror of the developers,
the first purchaser of property turned out to be a notorious Sacramento madam
named Cherry de St. Maurice, and a pall fell over further sales in the “exclusive” subdivision.
Nevertheless, by 1927 Tahoe land was being subdivided in earnest. Forty thousand
lots were carved out of Robert Sherman’s holdings at King’s Beach, Tahoe Vista,
and Brockway, not for the Crockers, Yeringtons, and Birdsalls who had purchased
spacious lots at Idlewild in the 1880s, but for citizens of more modest means
who could afford $500 for a smaller slice of paradise. A hundred and five salesmen
were selling those lots, most of them never laying eyes on the property itself
but selling from maps set up in San Francisco hotel suites. By the time the stock
market fell to pieces two years later, seventeen thousand lots had been sold.
Most of them reverted to the subdivider when the new owners could not meet their
small payments during the Depression. In an awkward, painful way, the Depression
had saved the lake from wholesale exploitation, at least temporarily.
As early
as 1900, bills had been introduced in Congress to create a
national park at the lake in order to preserve it forever,
but not until the middle 1930s did the proposal reach even the
investigative stage. In 1935 an inspector for the national park
system reported his conclusions in Washington: “. . . in
its pristine state, the proposed Lake Tahoe National Park area
was worthy of recognition as a national park; however, under
the present conditions, I do not feel justified in recommending
this area for future considerations as a national park.” The
inspector cited as reasons the facts that: 1) more than 90 percent
of the proposed park area, slightly less than two hundred square
miles along the lakeshore, was already in the private hands of
about two thousand individual owners; 2) the speculative prices
on lake frontage made acquisition costs prohibitive; 3) “ruthless
commercial enterprises…have destroyed to a great extent the
natural character and charm of the most valuable portion of the
proposed national park site — the land immediately adjacent
to the lake.” Despite the urgings of other Park Service
personnel, notably wildlife technician Robert T. Orr, who saw
in the Tahoe basin a unique and relatively pristine alpine habitat “which
might well be considered as of National Park merit,” the
recommendations of the inspector were accepted and the proposal
for a Lake Tahoe National Park was shelved for good.
Still, at the end of World War II Tahoe still had only about a thousand permanent
residents in the villages and hamlets rimming the lake. After the War the 20th
century began to arrive at Tahoe with such rapidity and with such impact that
conditions at the lake went rapidly out of control.
By the late 1940s Tahoe vacation resorts were turning away customers, and new
ones were being built to accommodate the overflow. Skiing, never popular on
the West Coast except as a countrified pastime in isolated mountain communities,
became the fashionable wintertime equivalent of tennis. In the early 1950s
Tahoe’s recreation potential had caught the attention of everyone on the Pacific
Coast — including that of the Nevada gamblers. In 1956 Harvey Gross tore down
the little cafe-cum-slot machines he had been operating at the state line on
the South Shore and erected a gambling hall and hotel. The next year, Bill
Harrah built a big casino across the street, with its gambling rooms in Nevada
and its parking lot in California. At once the character of the adjoining California
shore began to change. With new weekend visitors driving to the lake from California’s
coastal and valley towns to gamble, hundreds of Tahoe property owners began
a scramble to provide them with the other services they required for a comfortable
visit: motels, stores, restaurants, and auto garages.
Logged-over land at Bijou, on California’s south shore, had sold for less than
two dollars an acre in the late nineteenth century. By the end of World War
II it brought as much as $150 per front foot, and by the early and middle 1950s
had leapt in value to $500 per front foot. A vacant lot which sold for $3,800
in 1954 increased in value to $18,000 by 1957, inspiring a San Francisco newspaperman
to write, “If you have some money in the bank, run — don’t walk — to
the south end of Lake Tahoe. More is waiting if you know what you are doing.”
At about the same time, ski developments began to multiply, gradually transforming
Tahoe’s “season” from a busy four-month summer to a brawling year-round
affair. When the 1960 Winter Olympics were held at nearby Squaw Valley, Tahoe’s
commercial exploitation accelerated in quantum jumps.
One consequence of this profitable activity has been the degradation of the
lake’s famous clarity.
But despite the development, despite the traffic, despite the drought, despite
the algae, despite everything, Lake Tahoe is still one of the most pleasant
and beautiful places on earth.
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