Lumber Industry at Lake Tahoe

by:
Julie R. Stone
Copyrighted, used by permission.

 

Comstock Mines - “Tomb of the Sierras”

 

 

            It was Dan De Quille, (1881:174) Virginia City Territorial Enterprise editor and author of The Big Bonanza who said it best, “The Comstock Lode may truthfully be said to be the tomb of the forests of the Sierras. Millions on millions of feet of lumber are annually buried in the mines, nevermore to be resurrected.” The history of lumbering at Lake Tahoe is the history of the Comstock, since one would not have developed without the other.

 

            Not less than 80 million board feet of timber and lumber were consumed annually on the Comstock Lode, and more than 2 million cords of wood were burned as fuel at the hoisting works and by the mills. Eliot Lord estimated in 1880 that the 600 million board feet of lumber buried in the Comstock mines was enough to build a town of six-room houses for 150,000 people (Galloway 1947:101).

 

            First logging efforts in the Tahoe Basin were small and provided adequate amounts of wood for pioneer building and ranching needs. “The First Records of Carson Valley Utah Territory” in 1851 encouraged, or rather pressed pioneers to set up mills. The 11th Article reads, “ For a such as the bulk of the timber is confined to the mountains which surround Carson Valley, All timber shall be Considered common property, except shade trees or trees kept or planted for ornament, and all the citizens of Carson Valley Shall be free to use as they may think propper (sic) any timber contiguous to their claims reserving [left blank in original] Acres of wood land to individuals or companies who shall erect saw mills.

 

Resolved that the 11th article of these Regulations, be so altered as to allow any person, who will construct a Saw Mill in the Valley, to locate one section of Timbered Land, to be selected by himself, and to have and to hold the same for his own individual benefit reserving only to persons who may live immediately in front thereof whatever timber they may require for the benefit of their farms.  E.L. Barnard, Recorder.”

 

The first sawmill to run in the Tahoe Basin was built in 1855 by Orson Hyde, leader of the Mormon settlement at Franktown. His $10,000 water-powered mill stood half a mile west of the settlement and included two saws, one circular and one upright. (Galloway 1947) Hyde returned to Salt lake City at the beckoning of Brigham Young in 1857 and rented his mill to Jacob Rose, a Carson River trader. In 1862, Hyde returned and attempted to reclaim his mill, now valued at $20,000 from new owner R.D. Sides but was unsuccessful.

           

Four years later, upon the discovery of the Comstock, logging turned from a family business to a major industry. But neither would have prospered without the other. In 1860, one year of its discovery, the Comstock was faltering. it posed unique mining problems that had never been faced before. Since the surrounding ground tended to shift and the ore bodies were also soft, the lives of miners were in constant danger of cave-ins. German engineer Phillip Deidesheimer was summoned to assess the problem and determine a solution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deidesheimer invented the square-set by watching worker bees constructing a comb. His system shored up and planked the mines into a safe state of operation. It was so successful that it was adopted throughout the Comstock Lode. Dimensions of timbers were specific at seven feet in length and sixteen inches wide. Lodgepole pines, white firs and red firs were most suited for the square-sets. Had he patented his invention, Deidesheimer would have received millions in royalties, instead he accepted a superintendent position on the Ophir mine. Deidesheimer died in San Francisco on July 12, 1916.

 

To the benefit of the era, some of the most astounding engineering works were devised in order to feed the insatiable appetite of the mines. One of these inventions was the flume. Cutting began at close reach in the Carson Range. Once close-at-hand resources were demolished, loggers reached to the higher slopes of the Sierra. At first they spread to the east and north shores of Lake Tahoe and as those resources diminished, to the south and into California on the west shore.

 

Typical harvest to market procedures included skidding to the head of a log chute by oxen; delivery of logs by horse chute and/or gravity chute to Lake Tahoe or a narrow gauge railroad; thence transported by rail or steamer to the mill. It was the transportation of logs that posed the greatest production problem. The higher reaches of the mountains around Lake Tahoe proved tough in a vain attempt to hold onto her forests. Greased flumes were designed to slide logs down the hill and into the lake, usually trailed by fire and smoke from the friction.

 

 

            

        Ox teams were used to haul logs to the mills. Note the diameter of the logs.

 

 

In addition to shoring up mineshafts, wood was also the primary source of fuel. Mills, hoist works and railroads all ran on wood to fuel their steam engines. As the industry boomed, competition for labor generated between the mills and the mines. The lumber industry opened jobs to Blacks, Washoe Indians and immigrated Chinese. Mill crews were mostly imported from Maine, and loggers came from Canada, woodchoppers were French, Canadians, Italians and Chinese. Black fared many flume-tender jobs and Washoe worked a variety of the occupations, as they were skilled.

 

 

 

Job descriptions of the lumber era were quite colorful but involved serious work.

 

 

Lumbering jobs included:

 

 

 

Logging methods used were derived from Canada and the eastern United States. Trees were felled by saw and ax, bucked, and the trunk cut into lengths of 16-40 feet. If a mill was nearby, logs were dragged to it.

 

Early logging enterprises were perfect for the entrepreneur. The March 17, 1860 Sacramento Union wrote “The price of lumber at Virginia City was $100 per thousand board feet; a month later the price had advanced to $300 per thousand.” Even the famed Mark Twain came to the Tahoe Basin in search of “green gold.” Twain staked out a timber claim near Glenbrook in 1860. An unattended campfire devoured his claim as he watched in fascination and later wrote about it in his novel Roughing It. The consequence of his brief sojourn on Lake Tahoe’s shores left the nearby mountain slopes scorched. Twain abandoned his timber prospects after that.

 

            The first serious operations, however, included those at Spooner Summit and at Glenbrook. Michele E. Spooner settled on various portions of land on and around what is now Spooner Summit and engaged in partnerships and business dealings with a number of independent logging and fluming entrepreneurs. In 1860, he and Simon Dubois acquire 640 acres about three miles east of Lake Tahoe in 1860 to form the Spooner Ranch. In 1861-1865 Spooner partnered with a gentleman named Cache and had holdings together north of the present day junction of US Highway 50 and State Highway 28. In 1870, Spooner and John Lockie controlled 1840 acres at Summit running a shingle mill and sawmill on their lands.

 

In 1863, the same year that Nevada was established as a Territory, Captain Augustus W. Pray, C.R. Barrett and N.D. Winters started the Lake Bigler Lumber Company at Glenbrook. Pray, originally from Maine, went by the title of Captain from his former days of sailing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In 1862, Pray bought out his partners and increased his timber holdings in the Glenbrook area by 700 acres. He built a home on South Meadow. Pray bought an additional 160 acres near Round Hill, and 160 acres near Zephyr Cove in 1870.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In its first year of production, Pray’s mill employed twelve men and turned out 20,000 feet of lumber in 24 hours. The mill originally ran on water flumed from Glenbrook Creek, ¾ mile away. With uncertain flow of the creek, Pray had difficulty keeping up with the lumber demand. In 1864, he spent $8000 to convert his mill to steam power. Transporting logs was a difficult task. Teams of horses or oxen were used to skid logs from stump to mill. Pray also used ox teams to haul lumber to Carson City over the newly completed Kings Canyon Toll Road that went from Glenbrook over Spooner Summit in 1863.

 

Delivery of lumber and other milled products was the greatest challenge to early loggers. In August 1866, J.W. Haines and C.A. Gorden built the box flume. An inter-connected web of wooden planks that was designed to move logs along with a stream of water. However, the perpendicular sides caused wood to jam at a sharp turn and water to overflow eroding the earth below. Bullion production of the Comstock that year was $14,907,000 and the cry rang out for more and more wood.

 

Two years later, Haines perfected his invention with the design of the V-Flume. In      V-flumes, materials were floated in a very small amount of water that that acted as a lubricant; it filled the trough to about ¼ of its volume. Jammed boards tended to push themselves out of the V-flume before becoming lodged. If the lumber did jam, the water would rise and release it.

 

Victor Goodwin described the detail of a V-flume in Washoe Rambler; “A typical V-flume consisted of a V-shaped wooden trough supported by simple wooden props or trestlework where it crossed ravines. Each side consisted of pine planks, two to three inches thick, 24 to 32 inches wide and sixteen to thirty-two feet long. Each section overlapped the next but after more development, the sections were butt-jointed.”

 

 

 

   

    V-flume from Spooner Summit to Carson Yard

 

 

 

 

Flumes were actually built to any length and at varying gradients. V-flumes were engineered to operate on a regular grade of about 20%. The grade was maintained by following a meandering course. Flumes could transport lumber up to 16 inches square and forty feet long. Haines patented the V-flume on September 20, 1870. 

 

Nevada’s Surveyor General reported in that same year that there were in existence of 25 miles of flumes in Nevada. Nine years later Surveyor General, Andrew J. hatch, reported 10 flumes in Douglas, Ormsby and Washoe Counties of over 80 miles in length, that transported 171,000 cords of wood and 33.3 million feet of lumber annually (Bancroft 1809, Galloway 1947).

 

In 1863, brothers Thomas and John Elliot bought a 162 right-of-way for a V-flume that originated at Summit (Marlette) Lake through North Canyon, south to Spooner Summit and east down Clear Creek Canyon into Carson City. On January 15, 1868, the brothers formed The Summit Fluming Company. Within one year the company had constructed twelve miles of the flume. The Glenbrook mills took full advantage of the Summit Flume soon after its completion. Two branch flumes leading north and south to Spooner Summit and a reservoir at Summit (Marlette) Lake fed the flume.

 

Ox teams transported log only as far as Spooner Summit, the flume carried them the rest of the way into town and at a much faster rate. The Summit Fluming Company sold their Clear Creek V-Flume, the Kings Canyon toll road, Summit (Marlette) Lake and the North and East Canyon flume and ditch extensions to the Carson Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company (CTLFC) in 1872. CTLFC extended the flume to 12 miles with a drop of 3000 feet in 1875. The flume provided 500,000 feet of lumber or 700 cords of wood daily.

 

    

                                 Summit Flume winding through Clear Creek Canyon

 

 

Lumbering at Lake Tahoe had become a lucrative industry with a seemingly stable future. The Editor of the Washoe Times described it in 1863, “At present the timber and lumber capabilities of the borders of Lake Tahoe seems illimitable” (Strong 1984). Meanwhile, the Comstock production roared on. Bullion valued at $16 million was mined in 1864. That year Nevada was admitted to the Union. The State motto “Battle Born” indicates the contribution of Comstock silver made to the U.S. Civil War effort. The greatest amount produced by the Comstock in one year was $36,301,000 in 1877 (Datin 1978).

 

 

Other factors besides the Comstock also contributed to the need for lumber. The winter of 1866-67 was one of those factors. It was a very harsh winter and six feet of snow halted all transportation in the area and created exceptional demands for fuel wood. Prices for a cord of wood rose to such a peak that shipments from California were sought. Local Chinese jumped at the opportunity and sold roots of previously cut tree from $40 to $60 a cord. Although their exploitive efforts were chastised at the time, the Territorial Enterprise gave them credit for saving the population of Virginia City from freezing that winter.

 

The “Yellow Jacket Fire” of 1869 also called on demand for high yields of lumber. The fire started in the Yellow Jacket mine on April 7th on the 800-foot level. It had burned for several hours without being detected. When the morning shift was lowered down, a mass of charred timbers in the stopes broke under the weight of the roof that sent a blast of deadly gas and smoke throughout the mine. Thirty-seven men were trapped underground and lost their lives.

 

The mine, which had been one of the most productive on the Lode, was practically ruined. The caved stopes smoldered for months and yielded poor quality ore afterward. Mass amounts of lumber were used to rebuild the square sets of the shafts and the operations resumed until another fire on Sept 20,1873 on the 1300 foot level took the lives of six men. Again, lumber was used to rebuild the Yellow Jacket mine.

 

Another fire nearly destroyed the entire town of Virginia City on October 26, 1875. This fire was started in the basement of a boarding house and quickly spread. There had been no rain for six months and the town was tinder dry. Thirty-three city blocks burned to the ground. Property loss was estimated as $10 million; many hoisting works devastated. The mines were still flush at this time and the town rebuilt immediately. Reconstruction of the city brought an unprecedented demand for wood and lumber.

 

It was the “Big Bonanza,” the richest silver strike in U.S. history, in 1873 at the Consolidated Virginia mine that brought the greatest demand for timber from Tahoe. Comstock bullion production increased by $10 million from the previous year and lumber was being buried in this mine at a rate of six million feet a year (De Quille 1947). From this need, two timber giants emerged. The Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company (CTLFC) and the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company (SNWLC).

 

The largest, the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company (CTLFC) was based out of Glenbrook and owned 50,000 acres of timberland on the shores of Lake Tahoe. It is estimated that within twenty years, CTLFC denuded approximately 1/5 of the entire Lake Tahoe Basin (Goodwin 1971:75). The Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company was based out of Incline and owned 65,000 acres. A total of 30 million board feet of lumber a year was shipped from the Glenbrook and Incline Mills (Galloway 1947).

 

 

Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company

 

 

Duane L. Bliss and H.M. Yerington had great vision when they formed the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company (CTLFC) in 1871. Bliss set out to devour small lumber operations and combine their assets to develop a business large enough to accommodate the Comstock. By 1873, they had acquired 7000 acres of timberland, Spooner’s Ranch, the Summit Fluming Company, and Pray’s operation.

 

 

An extensive network of wood camps and flume camps and auxiliary mills were placed in strategic locales to construct and maintain an expensive system of flumes and reservoirs, and a labyrinth of haul roads, skid trails and log chutes, along with wagon roads, pack mules, oxen and horses. They were now ready to proceed on Tahoe's most ambitious lumbering venture.

 

One of CTLFC’s greatest assets was the Summit V-flume they acquired when they bought out the Summit Fluming Company operations. The primary purpose of this flume and its supply reservoir was to stabilize the water supply to float lumber and cordwood down the Clear Creek flume to Carson City. The Marlette Lake to Spooner V-flume ran through North Canyon and was initially constructed in 1870 by the Summit Fluming Company, who also constructed the dam at Marlette Lake.

 

The original Marlette Basin was a meadow containing a small lake at its northwest end. In the late 1860s, the Elliot brothers developed the Marlette Basin by constructing a primitive dam to provide water storage for their Clear Creek [Summit] Flume. By 1871, the lake covered 500 to 600 acres. CTLFC rebuilt the dam with a 24-foot high dam of dirt fill and stone.

CTLFC also gave rights to the Virginia City and Gold Hill Water Company (VGHWC) to take water from Marlette in whatever quantity required for a period of 10 years. VGHWC raised the dam in 1875 to 37 feet and to 213 feet long and 16 feet wide. The lake swelled to about 2 miles long and ¾ miles wide and was said to contain 2 billion gallons of water.

 

The other asset of the CTLFC was the construction of a narrow gauge railroad to haul logs to Spooner Summit. In 1875, Yerington and Bliss completed construction on the Glenbrook Railroad, also known as the Lake Tahoe Railroad. Construction was difficult over treacherous terrain, and costs of construction reached $30,000 per mile. Forty-five cars and two engines were purchased upon its completion. Costs to operation and maintain the railroad were enormous as well averaging $3000 per month.

 

The Lake Tahoe Railroad rose 910 feet above its namesake. It followed North Canyon Creek out of Glenbrook, wound through the canyon, negotiated several switchbacks, crossed over ten trestles, passed through a 487-foot tunnel, and terminated east of Spooner Summit at the mouth of the Clear Creek Flume. Formal operations consisted of six daily trips to the summit. All cars could hold up to 70 tons of freight up the grade at a speed of about 10 miles per hour (Lindstrom 2001:37).

 

 

     The Lake Tahoe Railroad at Spooner Summit. Note the denuded hills in the background.

At Spooner Summit, a large receiving yard was the core of the system. Here the railroad delivered the lumber to the flume. Logs were slid off the cars into a staging area for the flume. To supply the flume with water, two feeder flumes were built along the mountainsides to catch the upper reaches of the mountain streams. To stabilize the water supply a stone and earth dam was built at Marlette Lake to form a reservoir. From this reservoir a V-flume six miles long came from the south. Three small ponds were formed at the summit by low dams of timber and earth. Water from feeder flumes was collected and drawn when required.

 

The 14-mile narrow-gauge railroad carried the mill output to a yard at Spooner’s Summit. Logs were then transferred to a V-flume for a 17-mile journey to another large lumberyard with spur tracks from the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (also owned by Bliss). At the very end of the route, logs were then railed to Virginia City. Completion of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (V&TRR) in November 1869 eased transportation of lumber and relaxed prices from $15 a cord to $9.00.

 

By the end of their operation, CTLFC employed 500 men, owned three mills in Glenbrook, a box and planning mill at Carson City, a telephone system, boom for logs and barges for hauling, breakwaters, three logging railroads and one freighting railroad, locomotives, freight and log cars, a large lumber yard at Spooner Summit and one in Carson City and a shop for equipment repair and maintenance.

         

            Bliss had brought prosperity to a small mill town. By 1881, Glenbrook had two hotels, a store, a saloon, railroad, machine shops, several sawmills, a livery stable and both an Express and Post Office. Glenbrook was also one of the first locations in the West to have a telephone installed. It was a private line to the Bliss home.

 

When CTLFC began operations in 1873, lumber was coming out of Douglas County at 906,000 board feet annually. By 1875, that number rose to 21,700,000 feet. An average daily production was 125,0000 feet per day. (Angel 1881:381) In 28 years of operation, CTLFC had cut 750 million board feet of lumber and 500,000 cords of wood in the Tahoe Basin (Lindstrom 2001). Nearly 10,000 acres of forests owned by CTLFC had been stripped of its timber along with 7200 acres purchased from the Hobart Estate. Timber leases elsewhere along the lake amounted to over 30,000 acres denuded. Barely 950 acres of usable pine stands remained by the end of the century (Scott 1957:289).

 

                                                  Flume terminus in Carson City.

Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company

 

 

Walter Scott Hobart and Seneca Hunt Marlette open the Excelsior Mill in Little Valley in 1873. Two steam-powered saw cut a daily average of 25,000 board feet. It was the Excelsior Mill that cut the boards and planks used for the VCGHWC box flumes. Hobart was a State Senator from Storey County and Marlette was the first Surveyor General of Nevada. Summit Lake was renamed after him. The Excelsior closed in 1878, however, Hobart and Marlette had new aspirations.

 

 

That same summer they began building the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company (SNWLC) mill at Incline on Mill Creek. The mill began operations one year later, in 1879 with John Bear Overton as its General Manager.  It produced 75,000 feet a day. SNWLC Incline operations started out with 60 workmen but expanded to 250 by the fall of 1881 (two years later). Within one year the company controlled more than 10,000 acres of timber and cut 8 million feet of lumber and 50,000 cords of wood (Scott 1957).

 

The greatest feat of the SNWLC was known as “The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada” or “The Great Tramway of Tahoe.” To move logs from their mill at Incline, Overton engineered a narrow gauge tramway to run straight up the side of the mountain gaining 1400 feet of elevation. The double-tracked incline railway was powered by a 40-horsepower steam engine, and 12-foot bull wheels to hoist logs up the steep grade.

 


 


            Incline Mill

 

Loaded cars were hauled up the mountain on the north track and returned empty on the south track. A maximum of 300 cords of wood, or lumber equivalent, could be carried up the grade each day. Two carriers pulled up the mountain by a hoist and cable while empty carriers descended on an adjoining track, their weight assisting the overloaded steam engine (Scott 1957).

Overton was also Superintendent of VGHWC and provided SNWLC access to its system. Water from the Virginia City and Gold Hill Water Company’s north flume supplied the company’s V-flume. At the top of the Incline, logs were placed in the V-flume and floated 1-½ miles from the tram’s top terminus to a 4000-foot long tunnel that dropped 20-30 feet through a cut in the Carson Range. The lumber V-flume passed just above VGHWC’s open water flume below. From the Tunnel Creek Station, wood floated down to the flume dump at Lakeview above Washoe Lake. No less than five spur tracks of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (V&T Railroad) ran from the Lakeview lumberyard to Virginia City (Lindstrom 2001).

 

In the spring of 1881 the company surveyed and installed a rail bed that led south from the mill two miles. It curved around the eastern crescent of Crystal Bay to Sand Harbor at the base of 8800-foot high Incline Mountain. Another two miles of thirty-pound narrow gauge track continued west along the lakeshore known as the Hobart Line (Scott 1957). Reports filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission indicated the length of the railroad to be nine miles in 1888, and thirteen miles in 1889-92 (Lindstrom 2001).

 

SNWLC acquired the steamship Niagara in 1880 for use as a towboat. In 1881, logs were assembled into a V-boom and rafted nearly 20 miles to Sand Harbor from SNWLC operations in South Tahoe. At first, off-loaded logs were cable-dragged by teams of oxen out of the water and up ramps to the waiting rail cars. Later the narrow-gauge flat cars ran out over the water on piers. In the summer of 1891, the narrow-gauge railroad operated at the rate of 75,000 feet of logs each day.

 

Mill production slowed in 1891 along with yield of the Comstock. Barely $2 million of low-grade ore was pulled out of the mines in 1892, placing Nevada into a depression. CTLFC closed down its northern lumber camps and then its south camps two years later. In 1894, Hobart sold the majority of his holdings to Bliss. The Comstock could hardly choke out a million in bullion that year.

 

By the summer of 1896, SNWLC concluded operations at Incline. Mill machinery, rolling stock, rail iron and other equipment were moved lock, stock and barrel, across the lake on wood barges. Hobart reassembled his operation as Hobart Mills, seven miles north of Truckee. In the fall of 1897, nothing remained at Incline but stripped forestland, the deep scars of logging roads, and a maze of crumbling flumes and rotting chutes.

 

During the sixteen years of production, SNWLC produced 200 million board feet of lumber and over a million cords of wood to the Comstock (Scott 1957). Their lumber holdings were so extensive that the California Illustrated Times reported on December 25,1877, “the number of acres of forest they own may be computed in the tens of thousands.” Hobart actually owned approximately 55,000 acres of timberland in the basin (Lindstrom 2000). Marlette and Hobart marketed a total of a billion feet of timber. Between their operation and the CTLFC operation produced nearly one-sixth of the total estimated wood cut in the basin.

 

By 1895, all lumber operations in the basin had been abandoned. “At the south shore of Tahoe, logging camps, mills, flumes and railroads lay abandoned among the stumps of cutover land. Nearby acreage, littered with discarded equipment and logging waste, sold for no more than $1.50 an acre” (Strong 1999). The surrounding hills were denuded. Only the inaccessible upper slopes of original forest remained untouched.

 

 

 

 

 

Second growth returned as mostly Red and White fir by 1904 and now dominates most forest stands along the east shore of the lake in the Carson Range. Jeffrey pine, Lodgepole pine and Ponderosa pine exist now only as second growth after the denudation of the species during the Comstock-era timber operations in the mid-1800s. Native Incense cedar, Mountain hemlock and Sierra juniper survived mostly unscathed by the Comstock enterprise.

 

In 1902, U.S. Geological Surveyor John Leiberg reported on the forest conditions of the Tahoe Basin and gave a startling prediction of the state of the forest today. “…The general condition of the forests at the end of the century, or even fifty years hence, will be about as follows: The…basins will have been wholly denuded of large timber, and in its place will have come a sapling growth, heavy and close set in some places, open, under sized, and brushy in others. Most of it will consist of white fir, for the yellow pine which has given the present forest its chief value will form a comparatively small percentage of it” (Lindstrom 2000).

 

Civil Engineer and conservationist Marsden Manson wrote, “Around Lake Tahoe the timbered areas have been entirely swept off… The mountainsides…and nearly all of the moraines and flats around the south and east side of the lake have been denuded. These areas, bereft of timber, are now ready to be abandoned to the State, large tracts being for sale at 50 cents an acre. The railroads, which were constructed to carry logs to the lake, have been torn up, and the region, shorn of its wealth and beauty, has been partly burned over to give a few sprouts to hungry hoards of sheep” (Strong 1984).

 

By the turn of the 20th century, the Lake Tahoe Basin had been mostly stripped of marketable timber, and large-scale cutting ceased. Approximately two-thirds of all merchantable timber in the Tahoe Basin had been harvested by this time, with an estimated 60 percent of land in the Lake Tahoe watershed clear-cut (Lindstrom 2001).

 

“In the post-Comstock era, land values plummeted, so that cutover tracts could be purchased for back taxes or for no more than $1.50 an acre. Timber tracks were sold for as little as 50 cents per acre. Roads were neglected and became impassable, inns and post offices went out of business, and logging camps, mills, flumes and railroads lay abandoned and deteriorating among the rotting stumps of the cut-over land” (Strong 1984:309).

 

Archaeologist Susan Lindstrom reported in her Archaeological Survey of 1,830 Acres Between Spooner and Marlette Lakes, Lake Tahoe Nevada State park, Volume I: Results, “Evidence suggests that logging interests did little to conserve the natural environment, and for the first several decades, logging practices were unregulated. Yet, the entire Tahoe basin was not clear-cut. At least 38 old-growth stands have been located within Tahoe’s upper and lower Montane forests. Inaccessible stands, excessively large trees, and deformed trees were left due to difficulty in transport or milling. Stands around resorts were preserved for aesthetic reasons.”

 

Bliss and Hobart had purchased their land in large blocks offering unique opportunities for preservation of the Nevada Tahoe Basin through National Forests and Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park.

 

 

      

 

 

Works Cited:

 

 

Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 1890, History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming

 

 

Datin, Richard C., August 1978, “Chronology of The State of Nevada”

 

 

De Quille, Dan, 1947, The Big Bonanza

 

 

Galloway, John Debo, 1947, Early Engineering works Contributory to the Comstock

 

 

Lindstrom, Susan G., November 2001, “Draft Archaeological Survey of 2,489 Acres in Lake Tahoe State Park, Nevada Volume I: Report”

 

 

-February 2000,  “Lake Tahoe Watershed Assessment”

 

 

Scott, E.B., 1957, The Saga of Lake Tahoe

 

 

Strong, Douglas H., 1984, Tahoe: An Environmental History                             

 

 

- 1999, Tahoe: From Timber Barons to Ecologists

 

 

Photo credit: Nevada Division of State Parks Historical Archive