Sierra-Nevada Lakes

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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SIERRA-NEVADA LAKES

George and Bliss Hinkle

Edited by Milo Quaife

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 6

AUTHORS’ PREFATORY NOTE 8

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 9

MAPS 10

Chapter 1 — Writ in Water 13

Chapter 2 — The Captain and the Cannon 23

Chapter 3 — Phantom River and Legendary Lake 28

Chapter 4 — Donner Lake: Prelude to Disaster 39

Chapter 5 — Donner Lake: The Forging of Fiction 55

Chapter 6 — Gold Lake: Fable and Humbug 69

Chapter 7 — Honey Lake: The Elusive Meridian 85

Chapter 8 — Honey Lake: The Sagebrush Secession 104

Chapter 9 — Pyramid Lake: Blood on the Borderland 122

Chapter 10 — Mono Lake: Borax, Bullion, and Borrasca 136

Chapter 11 — Mono Lake: The Sagebrush War 151

Chapter 12 — Webber Lake: The Shores of Pleasure 170

Chapter 13 — Meadow Lake: The Lost Metropolis 189

Chapter 14 — Lake Tahoe: A Problem in Longitude 202

Chapter 15 — Lake Tahoe: The Shadow of the Comstock 221

Chapter 16 — Lake Tahoe: Thrall of the Big Bonanza 242

Chapter 17 — Lake Tahoe: The Triumph of the Tourist 267

Chapter 18 — The Fading Chronicle 284

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 288

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 289

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 292

DEDICATION

To MOTHER

WHOSE LIFE HAS SPANNED MUCH OF THIS EPOCH

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

JOHN AUGUSTUS SUTTER was a German adventurer who found his way to Spanish California in 1839 and there began the development of a baronial principality. James W. Marshall was an ailing settler of northwestern Missouri who in 1844 was advised by his physician to go west for his health. He arrived at Sutter’s establishment at present-day Sacramento in the summer of 1845, and two years later entered upon a partnership with Sutter to construct and operate a sawmill, Sutter supplying the capital and Marshall the superintendence of the enterprise.

The divinity which frequently shapes our ends rough did not overlook the new partners. On January 24, 1848, while engaged in deepening the tailrace of the sawmill, Marshall exhumed some metallic flakes which proved to be gold. As consequences of the discovery the sawmill was forgotten, Sutter was ruined, and a momentous chapter in the history of America and the world was begun.

There followed the gold rush of 1849. The fortune hunters who journeyed overland to California must traverse almost 2,000 miles of wilderness, at whose western end lay the desertlike Great Basin. Its crossing was a journey of fearful hardship which afforded the ultimate test of the gold seekers’ endurance. At its western rim the forbidding Sierra towered skyward, as if seeking to guard from intruders the treasure concealed in their bosom.

This was the goal of the fortune hunters, many of whom entertained extravagant visions of nuggets and gold dust to be easily shoveled up by the barrelful. Overnight, as it were, somnolent Spanish California was transformed into a roaring mining camp, and in 1850 the Commonwealth of California was born. Today, a century later, it is crowding close upon the heels of Pennsylvania as the second most populous state in the Union. Long since, the output of gold from the mines became relatively unimportant, but in its stead, from the orchards and farms of California pours annually a far greater stream of wealth.

The gold seekers, however, laid the foundations of American society and government. They explored every river valley and mountain glen. Although many of the mining camps they established were soon abandoned, others evolved into the towns and cities of the present day. The pioneers who transform the wilderness into a seat of civilization are commonly too preoccupied with the task to devote time to recording their deeds for the information of future generations, and California is so young that the Sierra region still awaits its historian.

The Sierra range is dotted with lakes, and the rivers which flow down its eastern slope into the Great Basin have there created others which, historically speaking, are even more important. Around them centers much of the history of California and Nevada, and until now no comprehensive effort has been made by anyone to narrate it. The human history of many of the mountain lakes, indeed, is as yet a complete blank, while even that of Lake Tahoe, one of the natural wonders of America, has been only sketchily told.

Only rarely does the historian find a virgin theme awaiting exploitation. Such has been the good fortune of Dr. and Mrs. Hinkle, who are well-nigh ideally equipped to delineate the fascinating history of the Sierra lakes and their near-lying Great Basin neighbors. Both are the descendants of long lines of pioneer forebears. Both were born and grew up in Truckee, the main gateway of the transcontinental route between Nevada and California. Both are inheritors of a great love for the region and of a great mass of family and traditionary lore concerning it. Both are trained in the employment of bibliographical and historical tools for the writing of history. Finally, as husband and wife, they constitute a well-geared, smoothly functioning literary team, each member of which reinforces and supplements the labors and perceptions of the other.

The temptation is strong to enlarge upon the family background of our authors. Dr. Hinkle is descended from pioneers who throughout three centuries of time have occupied successive frontiers from Nantucket and Sankatty Head to Whiskey Diggings and Shirttail Canyon. Tales of stockades beyond the Alleghenies, of hand presses in ox-drawn carts, of sacraments to the Iroquois, and of uniforms under clerical robes were the stock entertainment of his boyhood. One grandfather left Sutter’s Fort in the early fifties to live for years the nomadic life of the placer mining camps. Another grandfather was a circuit rider of the Nevada-Sierra region with a parish of 2,500 square miles, who often made his best collections in honky-tonks and gambling halls. Dr. Hinkle himself can remember productions of Shakespeare and Camille in the Opera House above Bill Hurd’s saloon in Truckee. He remembers, also, an uncle who ran a famous faro layout in Virginia City when the Comstock was giving its last dying gasp; the uncle died, still gambling, a mining operator at Silver Peak.

Mrs. Hinkle’s background is no less interesting. One grandfather migrated from Pennsylvania to California in 1849, where her mother was born in Yankee Jim’s, one of the notable early placer mining camps. Her father was taken to California in early childhood, and his career was a succession of sensational episodes. His major callings were practicing law and editing newspapers, but along with these he dabbled in astronomy, entomology, hydrography, fish culture, and inventions. He refined the Roman catapult, raised frogs, devised a collapsible bird-feeding tray, and sounded Lake Tahoe with a champagne bottle years before the Geodetic Survey undertook to determine its depth. He owned and edited the Truckee Republican, which changed ownership several times over the poker table. He wrote the history of the Donner party and in doing so developed lifelong friendships with many of the survivors. As correspondent for a Sacramento paper he covered the trial of the notorious John D. Lee, and wrote a classic series of dispatches on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He briefly edited the Santa Barbara Press, writing inflammatory editorials with a gun on his desk, his predecessor having been slain in a political feud. When, in 1893, he finally decided to settle down, he built on the Truckee Rocking Stone an architectural curiosity for a museum, with a house to match, joining the two by a wooden bridge. To it came all sorts of people seeking local information, from John Muir to Henry Ford and Gutzon Borglum. Such was the home which constituted Mrs. Hinkle’s youthful background.

Dr. Hinkle’s chief scholarly interest lies in the subject of the trans mission of folk legends as they affect history. These things, he writes, have often reminded me of the history of this region, perhaps the most fertile breeding ground of fable, except the lower Rio Grande, in America. Moreover, I’ve long thought that the synthetic legend of pioneer character is a pale creation compared with the realities behind it and the blend of fiction, passion, and yearning that drove the pioneer on. My part in the writing of this book is full of the pleasure that comes from turning specialized information and training into channels of general human interest, and from joining both to scenes and recollections which are an intimate part of my own life. That is a pleasure that does not often come to those who write books.

In similar vein Mrs. Hinkle writes: Somehow, many people have thought that I was the inheritor of my father’s stock of local lore, and the most oddly assorted persons have sought me out for curious bits of information. My husband and I have had perforce over the years to piece out and sort out the mass of impressions and firsthand reminiscences with which we both grew up, and we have become students of Western history by necessity as well as birthright. For this reason, there is little ‘research,’ in the usual sense of the term, in the present book. We came in a perfectly natural way to absorb the meaning of the little world we are trying to describe, and we have resorted to books and documents merely to make that world intelligible to the average reader. In a double sense, this is a work of recreation.

It would be strange if Dr. and Mrs. Hinkle were not imbued with a deep love for the natural and scenic beauties of their homeland. They deplore the insensate destruction of the wealth of timber and water with which Nature originally endowed it. This is a story all too common to America, as the successive volumes of the American Lakes Series have sufficiently disclosed. Their publication and widespread reading should help to alert the public mind to the dangers which the destruction of our natural resources entails, and to a keener realization of the pressing need for a more vigorous and united effort to conserve them for the enjoyment and use of both the present and succeeding generations.

M. M. QUAIFE

Detroit, Michigan

AUTHORS’ PREFATORY NOTE

THE authors owe some explanation of the plan and scope of this book, both to the general reader and to those geographers, geologists, and alpinists who might pick it up.

In the interest of strict accuracy, the title might well have been Lakes of the Northern Sierra and Western Great Basin, but the cumbrous label would have been commercially fatal. Actually, nearly all of the lakes discussed here fall within the geographical limits of the Basin, rather than within the Sierra proper, and those which do not are closely related historically to Nevada.

In keeping with the general plan of the American Lakes Series, the emphasis is historical rather than descriptive, and the writers have chosen to introduce each lake in the order of its emergence as a factor in the developing chronicle of the region. Much later data of extreme interest, especially on the Honey and Mono Lake areas, is necessarily omitted. This rather rigid pattern of organization will explain the emphasis on such matters as the background of the boundary dispute and the development of the Comstock. The relationship between such things and the lakes is a reciprocal one.

This plan limits the region under discussion to the area between Honey Lake and Mono, the historically decisive segment of the Sierra and Basin country, and excludes even mention of the great galaxy of lakes in the High Sierra. It also excludes reference to hundreds of interesting smaller ones of the Northern Sierra, especially those in the vicinity of Tahoe. The location, nomenclature, and lore of these smaller waters, many of them secluded and not even mapped, form proper material for a lakes gazetteer—a much-needed adjunct for the study of California history and geography.

G. H.

B. H.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Walker Lake

Frémont howitzer at Glenbrook

Stage stop at Glenbrook, Nevada

Pyramid Lake, from site of Frémont’s campground

Pelicans at Pyramid Lake

Squaw with Basket, Pyramid Lake

Donner Lake, from top of the Pass

Donner Lake resort

Gold Lake

Miner’s cabin at Nelson’s Creek

Honey Lake, from the air

Fort Defiance, Roop’s log house at Honey Lake

Honey Lake, from Thompson Peak

Peter Lassen

Isaac Roop

Upper or Little Sardine Lake

Lower Sardine Lake and the Sierra Buttes

Mono craters, from the Tioga Pass

Aurora, Nevada

Truckee in 1870

Webber Lake

Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe, from a point near Emerald Bay

Steamer Meteor, Lake Tahoe

The old Emerald, Lake Tahoe

Steamer Tahoe, Lake Tahoe, 1906

Steamer Tahoe, Lake Tahoe

Cave Rock, Nevada side of Lake Tahoe

MAPS

Frémont’s Route, 1843-1844

Donner, Independence, Webber, Meadow, and Lola Montez lakes

The Gold Lake Line

The Region of Honey and Pyramid lakes

Mono Lake Region

Tahoe Region in the Seventies

SIERRA-NEVADA LAKES

Chapter 1 — Writ in Water

OF THE world’s famous mountain ranges, the Sierra Nevada is one of the most spectacular in the number and variety of its lakes. From Lassen Peak in the north to Mount Whitney in the south, the crest and Banks of the great barrier are flecked with the blue of thousands of them—there are 429 in Yosemite Park alone, and in a single area of 220 square miles at the southern end of Lake Tahoe there is a galaxy of more than a hundred. These ice-blue pools lie casually in the most unexpected places—in bleak cirques well above timber line, in river bottoms, in densely timbered canyons, and on the summits of boulder-strewed passes. They range in size from navigable bodies of 300 square miles to small glacial ponds of a few acres. Almost every imaginable geologic origin is represented somewhere among them, as well as some unimaginable freaks of contour. As John Muir was probably the first to point out, theirs is the charm of the unpredictable.

To the amateur of lakes and streams this most obvious surface feature of the Sierra displays endless topographical curiosities. One of the fabled Gold Lakes of the northern half of the range is a source of the Feather River, while Upper Salmon Lake, scarcely more than a mile away and at nearly the same elevation, empties finally into the Yuba. The outlet of Sierra County’s little Saxonia Lake describes a large arc, only to debouch into the Yuba at a point within three miles of the source of the lake itself. Nevada County’s Warren and Paradise lakes lie about half a mile apart, but the waters of Warren end in the Nevada desert, while those of Paradise flow to the Pacific. The outlet of Tahoe, the Truckee, which once flowed directly into the ancient Lake Lahontan, now meanders northeastward to end in Pyramid, a desert lake about as large as Tahoe itself. As for Tulainyo in the southern Sierra, the highest lake in the continental United States, it has no outlet at all. Alpine County’s Blue Lakes, and their near neighbor, Lost Lake, lie west of the great Alpine pinnacles; but Blue Lakes send their waters southward as the sources of the Mokelumne River, which crosses California’s Mother Lode, while the waters of Lost Lake flow northward to join the Carson, a stream that brawls its way down the eastern slopes of the Sierra to end ingloriously in an alkaline sink below Mount Davidson and the great mines of the Comstock.

In fact, the lakes of the Sierra form a certain tenuous link between California and Nevada, between the sea and the desert. The wayward courses and strange destinations of their waters lead to the most violent contrasts, but these only serve to emphasize the aloofness and detachment of the mountain range itself.

The most ardent Junior Chamber of Commerce could scarcely exaggerate the neatness and symmetry of the great river system west of the Sierra. The lakes feed ten romantic and history-laden streams—the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American, Cosumnes, Mokelumne, Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced—which flow down the slopes at nearly equidistant intervals and in parallel formation. From the northern and southern ends of the range, respectively, the large rivers of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin bend around with all-embracing arms to take the outlets of these ten lesser streams and to meet and merge in the flood plains of Suisun Bay. Few of the designs of Nature have been so orderly, so sedate, so sensible, and so pleasing to the eye.

On the other hand, nothing could better symbolize fickleness and impermanence than the waters on the eastern side of the range, with which the mountain lakes are so closely connected. The Truckee bends sharply northward near Reno and is engulfed in landlocked Pyramid. East of Pyramid the Reese River runs northward as a tributary of the Humboldt. The 350-mile length of the Humboldt itself flows directly westward toward the Truckee, only to veer suddenly southward at last and end in a brackish swamp. The Carson winds an erratic course northward, then eastward, to find its grave in a desert sink. No less than forty lakes along the eastern escarpment of the Yosemite unite to feed the Walker River, which describes a vast semicircle, only to form a deathtrap in its own hill-girt lake. Dozens of other small mountain tarns send their waters over the moraines to die in round, semi-volcanic Mono.

Because of the inverted bowl and rim of the Great Basin, there is not a drop of water in Nevada north of the 38th parallel and west of the 117th meridian that ever reaches the sea. That shrewd and well-informed journalist, Dan De Quille, the chronicler of the Comstock, once aptly quoted an anonymous prospector on the subject of these random-coursing rivers and dying lakes:

The way it came about was in this wise: the Almighty, at the time he was creatin’ and fashionin’ of this here yearth, got along to this section late on Saturday evening. He had finished all of the Great Lakes, like Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and them—and made the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers, and, as a sort of wind-up, was about to make a river that would be far ahead of anything he had yet done in that line. So he started in and traced out Humboldt River, and Truckee River, and Walker River, and Reese River, and all the other rivers, and he was leadin’ of them along, calkerlatin’ to bring ‘em all together into one big boss river and let it empty into the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of California, as might be most convenient; but as he was bringin’ down and leadin’ along the several branches—the Truckee, Humboldt, Carson, Walker, and them—it came on dark and instead of tryin’ to carry out the original plan, he jist tucked the lower ends of the several streams into the ground, whar they have remained from that day to this.{1}

If Dan De Quille’s old prospector never existed, he would still be an admirable invention. His account of Genesis in the desert illustrates the characteristics of an entire region. The western edge of the Nevada Basin, with its vanishing rivers and evaporating sinks, is a land of endless caprice and uncertainty.

Above it towers the Great Divide, sharp, final, and remote, itself a region of uncalculable perils and sudden vagaries. Its waters, wherever they fall, spell the destinies of men. It is water, of all the elements, with its fluent promises of Golconda and its enchanting mirages, that best bears the tale of the frenzied search for treasure in and on both sides of the Sierra.

The striking isolation of the Sierra communicates itself at once to the traveler, whether newcomer or old-timer. If he ventures a mile from a high-speed highway or two miles from a night club, he has the odd and pleasing sensation of detachment from space and time—that greatest luxury of the contemporary mind. And even if his imagination is sensitive to the past, he seldom thinks here of the events which he has come to identify with the main current of California history—with Drake’s Bay and New Helvetia, with Monterey and Murderer’s Bar.

But this detachment is independent of mood or temperament. It is a stark physical fact, which actually shaped the episodes, sometimes tragic, sometimes seriocomic, sometimes fantastic, associated with the mountain and desert lakes.

The Sierra Nevada proper roughly parallels California’s eastern boundary for some four hundred miles, with an average breadth, above the 3,000-foot mark, of from fifty to eighty miles. On the west it slopes gradually, although with few easy and natural defiles, to rolling foothill country. But on the east it presents an abrupt and formidable escarpment throughout almost its entire length. The mere sight of this dark, towering barrier was enough to arouse misgivings in such tough and seasoned adventurers as Walker, Frémont, and Bruff, in the thirties and forties, and it has much the same effect on the belated traveler today, especially at dusk in early winter, when the clouds mass and the snow banners begin to unfurl from the peaks. These jagged pinnacles, rising from seven to ten thousand feet in the northern Sierra to nearly fifteen thousand in the southern, soar above a complex of rocky gorges, blind canyons, and winding ridges. Washington Irving’s account of the experience of Captain Bonneville’s men in this once trackless maze was paraphrased in decades to come in the diaries of scores of emigrants:

For three and twenty days they were entangled among these mountains, the peaks and ridges of which are in many places covered with perpetual snow. Their passes and defiles present the wildest scenery, partaking of the sublime rather than the beautiful, and abounding with frightful precipices. The sufferings of the travellers among these savage mountains were extreme: for a part of the time they were nearly starved.{2}

Frémont and his company, on a frosty February morning in 1844, after breakfasting on a roasted camp dog and three snowshoe rabbits, paused to take the measure of the blank battlements of the present Alpine County:

...Six or seven thousand feet above, the peaks of the Sierra now and then appeared among the rolling clouds....Our Indian shook his head as he pointed to the icy pinnacles, shooting high up into the sky, and seeming almost immediately above us....The people were unusually silent, for every man knew that our enterprise was hazardous and the issue doubtful.{3}

As for Bruff, a man of unusual fortitude of mind, he merely heard of the dangerous pass of the Truckee and turned north to flank the range entirely. He had seen the elephant.{4}

Below timber line this rugged range is covered with pine, fir, hemlock, juniper, spruce, and cedar, but with practically no forage. Its thin soil is veined and strewed with basalt and volcanic debris. Its weather is as fitful and unstable as the winds that scour its surface: It can produce blizzards of prolonged violence; it can produce bland skies and warm sunshine on New Year’s Day, thunder and lightning in midwinter, and eighteen inches of snow in mid-June. It is a difficult, beautiful, and silent land, still full of hazards for the unwary. Not even the best efforts of John Muir, its most affectionate pleader, could make it appear a hospitable one.

Such is the Sierra.

It extends over a good half of the length of the state, and stands as a perpetual rampart before the gold-bearing regions west of it. The famous Mother Lode runs parallel to it, at a distance of from forty to fifty miles from the crest. The Lode begins at the southern boundary of Mariposa County and extends northward to a point due west of Lake Tahoe. Beyond it lies the line of the great Tertiary-stream gravel deposits, which follows the Sierra to its northern terminus. Along this auriferous belt lay the famous placer camps of the early fifties, the scenes of some of the wildest prospecting in the history of Western mining.

East of the Sierra, and generally coinciding with California’s 250-mile gold line, lies its long counterpart, the treasure-laden western rim of the Great Basin. This is the land of bullion, borrasca,{5} and the Big Bonanza. From Silverpeak northward the line is dotted with the still obvious monuments of one of the last of the great frontiers—Aurora, Bodie, Esmeralda, Genoa, Carson, Gold Hill, Virginia City, Reno, and the Black Rock Bad Lands.

In this eastern strip the transcontinental emigrant trail broke and spread fanwise for a series of frontal assaults upon the bastion of the Sierra, through some seven or eight major passes of from five to nine thousand feet in elevation. Thus the section between the headwaters of the Feather River and the Tioga Pass became the most historically decisive portion of the range. It divided emphatically not only two distinct geographic entities but the theaters of two of the world’s most memorable struggles for treasure. And it was the standing obstacle to two migrations—the westward one following 1848 and the localized but no less intensive eastward one which began less than a decade later. By its very nature, this country of desert playas and mountain lakes became, to the thousands who crossed it, one of strange chances, where anything could happen. But the impress of events faded quickly. The land remained essentially one through which men toiled to reach another, striving always for the big strike and leaving in the sage and manzanita only the most legendary traces of their passage.

The most tangible markers of the gold rush and of the two decades of exploration that preceded it should be at least the remains of some wayside resting place or outfitting post. But from Susanville southward to Mono Lake, a distance of some two hundred miles, and from Reno westward to Auburn, more than a hundred miles, there is not a trace of an emigrant shelter or of a single community that originated in the overland march, Susanville dates from 1854; Quincy from 1850; Beckwourth from 1852; Downieville from 1850; Sierra City from 1852; Truckee from 1868; Markleeville from 1864; and Bridgeport from 1863. Of these, the most remarkable example of belated settlement was the town of Beckwourth, founded as an afterthought of Jim Beckwourth, mountain man, one-time chief of the Crow Nation, and voyageur, who had accompanied Kit Carson to western Nevada as early as 1833. Of the towns east of the divide, Reno was not established until 1868, despite the fact that its midtown point had been for years the site of an important ford of the Truckee; Carson dates from 1858, and Genoa, the oldest Nevada town, from 1856. Placerville, on the west slope, the Dry Diggings of 1848, was born a mining camp rather than an emigrant station. Of all the towns, Genoa is the only one that can claim a settlement contemporary with the westward movement, and its first house was a trading post stocked with provisions brought back over the mountains from Sacramento. Understandably enough there was no spot between the Washoe Valley and the California foothills inviting enough to tempt the emigrants to a prolonged halt.

Along the Sierra and adjacent to its eastern slope lie six important lakes, Honey, Pyramid, Donner, Tahoe, Walker, and Mono, which were the principal landmarks of the expeditions that preceded the overland companies. Yet not one of them became even the approximate site of an original emigrant settlement. The fact is perhaps unprecedented in the history of migrations. The most insignificant oasis usually shows some tangible evidence of the thousands who have rested and provisioned there. A river ford or a horse trough becomes the nucleus of a village or even of a city. But for all the remains of early habitation they show, authentic or traditional, these lakes might have been mere points on the map for the men who first passed by their shores.

This circumstance explains in part the vagueness and misinformation in almost all of the early references to the lakes. With one possible exception, the early expeditions, from Joseph Walker’s to Peter Lassen’s, looked on lakes as they looked on deserts and mountains—as things to bypass or to get away from as soon as possible.

Walker, in 1833, came down from the Humboldt Sink to the lake which bears his name, and skirted Mono at its southern end on his way to the headwaters of the Merced River. But the most reliable accounts of his journey give no hints of any memorable experience at either place.{6}

The Bidwell-Bartleson party also passed Walker Lake en route to the Sonora Pass in 1841. But the only reference to the lake itself suggests that the leader, Bartleson, nearly starved there, after he had separated from the rest of the company.{7}

Frémont, in 1843-1844, discovered first Pyramid Lake and then Tahoe. He paused long enough at the former to note its most striking topographical feature, the pyramidal island, but with all his professional interest in terrain he later mistook the Carson River for the source of the lake. Years later, in 1881, he was still convinced that Lake Tahoe formed the headwaters of the American River.{8}

Beginning in 1844, a number of parties went through the Truckee (Donner) Pass in rapid succession—the Stevens-Murphy party of 1844, and the Sublette, Swasey-Todd, Griggsby-Ide, and second Frémont parties of 1845. Every one of these seems to have mistaken Donner Creek for the Salmon Trout River, to have failed to see the main canyon of the Truckee, one mile from the trail, and to have remained altogether ignorant of the existence of the great lake less than fifteen miles southeast of the pass.

As for Honey Lake, definite reference to it is non-existent before 1850. But it is difficult to believe that Peter Lassen had not discovered it as early as 1848. Certainly Frémont passed within thirty miles of it in 1844 without noticing it, and it does not appear on the Topographical Engineers’ map of 1850. Its position is by long tradition oddly miscalculated on many maps of half a century later.

In short, the fact that hundreds had preceded them gave little understanding of a harsh and dangerous country to the thousands who crossed it at the peak of the great rush. The marks of the trapper, explorer, and trader were too meager and nebulous to form any cumulative body of topographical data. Even such sensible and helpful handbooks as Ware’s Emigrant Guide to California of 1849 and Jefferson’s annotated Map of the Emigrant Road of the same year confined themselves to the hazards and exigencies of the trail, with no temptation to linger over details of landscape. Behind the long trains of men, women, and children, the country closed down, and bivouac, foraging point, ford, and watering place came to hold only the most transient vestiges of their passing.

Today this lonely region has lost little of its essential character, even where the hand of man has meddled with it most. Once freed from the passing tourist traffic, the lakes yield quickly to the enclosing quiet of what is still in effect a wilderness. It becomes difficult to say whether their impressive solitude is a cause or an effect of the discontinuity of their history.

The evanescence of all human imprints on these mountain and desert marches is a characteristic which persisted long after the wheel marks of the first caravans had vanished. The great western trek had scarcely reached its peak when men began swarming back up and over the mountains. This countermovement began in 1849, under the widespread prospectors’ delusion that the fountainhead of placer gold lay somewhere in the high places. And it mounted steadily to its climax, the silver stampede of the fifties and sixties. This was the real period of settlement along the Sierra and on its eastern side. But in the camps and towns, vanished and still intact, there are illustrations of every stage of the inevitable decline forced upon feverish human enterprises by the fatal influence of the barrier land.

There were the diggings which are no longer even memories, and which exist only as disembodied place names. The term ghost town, as generally used, is a misnomer. It could be far more effectively applied to a town whose mortal remains have been translated into thin air. Red Dog, near Nevada City, for example (a camp named after a mongrel belonging to one Ranty Doddler),{9} was booming in 1852, with no less than five hotels; the water supply suddenly vanished in 1853, and today there is not a stick standing to prove that there was such a place. The fabulous Horseshoe Bar, up the north fork of the American, was in 1854 a veritable metropolis of the North Fork placers; untold thousands of dollars in dust were taken from the river, and in the town’s heyday Lotta Crabtree entertained miners in one of the most famous of early mountain theaters; today Horseshoe Bar is only a bend in the river. One of the most isolated of all such camps was Elizabethtown, center of the Red, White, and Blue Mining District north of Tahoe and appropriately near a draw called Monte Carlo Canyon; it drew hundreds of miners, produced assay certificates of from $500 to $7,000 a ton for ore samples, and advertised town lots at $200; today it cannot produce a log sill to identify its original site.

These are the authentic ghosts of the Sierra. Hundreds of them haunt its ridge and both its slopes.

There are the still visible remains of towns which have long since ceased to move and breathe, and in which the process of mortal decay may be observed from day to day. These are not ghosts. They are merely the indubitably dead. The once hell-raising camps of Bodie and Aurora on the eastern slope are now reduced to wastes of rutted streets and windowless buildings and tottering walls, their population shrunken to a few families of caretaker status. Meadow Lake, the one-time Excelsior not far from Donner Summit, was in 1866 a city of thousands, with brick churches, stores, and banks, streets eighty feet wide, and eight stamp mills going full blast; it is now wasted to a few heaps of foundation stones, the visible parts of its cadaver waiting, as one writer put it in the eighties, for the time when the trumpet of some scientific Gabriel shall sound its resurrection.{10} Whiskey Diggings, one of the great camps of the Blue Lead gold channel of Sierra County, now shows only a few bleached bones. Boca, on the Truckee, a populous logging center of the sixties, which once supplied the mines with 6,000,000 feet of lumber annually and produced some of the best beer in America, is now wasted to two or three buildings and a railroad flag station.

Just as it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the dead and the moribund in such a region, so it is often difficult to distinguish between a dying town and a merely aged but still agile and vigorous one. There are scores of the latter along the range and throughout western Nevada. By some miracle they survived the hazards of the prodigal and insubstantial mining era and settled down to some degree of economic stability. They are important as transportation points, or as centers of dairy farming or lumbering, or as county seats; and nearly all of them thrive on an increasing volume of tourist traffic. But stable as they are, they pay a yearly toll in flesh and blood to fire, dry rot, and the inevitable slow contractions of age. The once important lumbering town of Verdi, Nevada, despite its stubborn vitality, has burned disastrously almost every year for more than forty years. Each year at Virginia City sees another brick monument of the Comstock sink into rubble. Genoa, once the busy and noisy capital of Nevada Territory, and now affectionately cherished by Nevadans and tourists alike, has declined to a tiny, sleepy hamlet of less than a hundred persons. And not long before these words were written, the courthouse in already fire-scarred Downieville burned to the ground, with many of the county records.

The lakes are even more striking reminders of this impermanency than the vanished or decaying towns. With the milling thousands laboring back over the mountains, they assumed a new importance. They were no longer the passing scenes of hardship, starvation, indecision, and defeat. Their names became the passwords of rumor and they themselves became the centers of the restless movement and countermovement to new diggings and new enterprises. Sometimes their hold on the imagination of prospectors led to the discovery of hundreds of square miles of rich deposits; sometimes they became the actual sites of minor rushes; sometimes they controlled and decided the fierce struggle for territory and power which continued to mount as men calculated further and further the resources of a largely unexplored region. But when the turmoil subsided, leaving scars and debris around their shores, it left little visible record of the play of human passions behind it.

This is to be expected, in view of the close affinity of the lakes for the land. Lakes are the most ephemeral surface features of the earth. They are born, they fluctuate in life, and they die, with every possible geologic change and chance; and they generate even more myth than rivers or the sea. As for the land, its fleeting remains of human occupancy, together with its remoteness, its bizarre contrasts, and its massive obstacles, make it a world of uncertainties, fertile only in hearsay and legend. In it rumor became both the cause and the effect of men’s actions. The thousands who crossed and recrossed the Sierra and delved in its canyons and arid approaches were driven constantly by wild surmise, airy report, and remote tradition; and almost everything concerning them lies beneath a thick layer of lore and fancy. The mountain mists rising from the lakes combine with the phantoms and fictions of the land, to give an air of unreality to the most sober facts of history—often to obliterate them altogether. The Sierra lakes, unlike the Great Lakes or Utah’s Salt Lake, can show no living and enduring monuments to the creative industry of man: their story rests upon the most urgent and one of the most unstable of all human drives; and it is told in a series of brief and luminous episodes, through which runs the most improbable stuff of fable.

Chapter 2 — The Captain and the Cannon

THE story of the lakes really began with the westward expedition, in 1843-1844, of John Charles Frémont. Others had preceded him across the Great Basin and over the Sierra. But from the westward thrusts of Hudson’s Bay Company trappers as early as 1828 through the crossing of the Bidwell-Bartleson party in 1841, the country remained completely out of