2) Twain claimed that he was with General Tom Harris of the Missouri Militia at the time Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Florida, Missouri, with Union troops. However, this would have put Twain in Missouri when we believe he was already on a stage headed west.
3) Lake Tahoe’s official name for many years was Lake Bigler named after the third governor of California. The once-popular governor made himself unpopular by supporting the southern cause during the Civil War.
4) Bill Stewart is proudly remembered by Nevadans as the last man to shake Abraham Lincoln’s hand. The senator had stopped by the White House to introduce a colleague, but Lincoln told him to come back at ten the next morning, because he was just off to the theater.
5) Warner Brothers made a Western called “Virginia City” in 1940 about the struggle for the town’s wealth at the time of the Civil War. The movie was not a great success, even though it starred Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart.
6) The “Bonanza” TV Series had an episode called “The War comes to Washoe.” Two of the characters in the episode were Bill Stewart and Judge Terry.
7) There is a museum in Havana, Cuba, that had two Mark Twain skulls on display. One skull when he was a child and the other when he was an adult. (Twain would have been delighted by both exhibits!)
8) Nevada is the only state that has Halloween as a state holiday.
4) The Chinese & the Railroad (Jung Lo)
The Jung Lo story is fictitious but the Chinese contribution to building of the Central Pacific can only be understated.
In a time after my story is set, it became a common practice to sink vertical shafts down from the exterior granite rock and build tunnels from the inside out. Pushing in opposite directions from within toward the headings, this would have left the guess work out of whether the tunnels were aligned or not. This would have also provided constant shelter from the elements and removed the need to clear snow. On the other hand, the explosions within a confined space may have been even more dangerous. It is hard to imagine that the Chinese were continually retreating up the narrow shaft each time charges were primed and lighted. The estimated number of Chinese who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad varied anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five thousand.
The Union Pacific, working west from Omaha, employed many men who had drifted west after the horrors of the Civil War. As the Union Pacific inched westwards, a series of sin camps attached themselves to the ever-moving end of the line. There was no shortage of liquor, con men, and prostitutes. Gambling and fighting were commonplace, keeping the men sober and on the job was a perpetual headache. There were no such problems with the industrious Chinese; they never fought, were tee-total and although gambling is a favorite Chinese pastime, they entrusted their money to chosen guardians from among their own.
In October 1865, an interesting report was written by Leland Stanford (president of the Central Pacific) to President Andrew Johnson, regarding the employment of the Chinese as railroad laborers. In the report below, Stanford seems to be justifying the employment of the Chinese, which may indicate that Johnson probably had some concerns over so much foreign employment:-
“As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical. Ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work required in railroad building, they soon become as efficient as white laborers. More prudent and economical, they are contented with less wages. We find them organized into societies for mutual aid and assistance. These societies can count their numbers by the thousands, are conducted by shrewd, intelligent business men who promptly advise their subordinates where employment can be found on most favorable terms. No system similar to slavery, serfdom or peonage prevails among these laborers. Their wages, which are always paid in coin each month, are divided among them by their agents who attend to their business according to the labor done by each person. Their agents are generally American or Chinese merchants who furnish them supplies of food, the value of which they deduct from their monthly pay.”
Leland Stanford, Sacramento
October, 1865
Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker were the founders of the Central Pacific and known as the Big Four. It was Huntington who had gone to listen to young railroad engineer Theodore Judah give a lecture on a possible railroad across the continent. Judah had been the chief engineer on the first railroad of the Pacific Coast from Sacramento to Folsom. It had been this young engineer who surveyed the original route for the Transcontinental Railroad. Although taken aboard by the four associates as chief engineer, Judah was unhappy that too much attention was placed on speed of construction rather than on quality. On his way to Washington, D.C., via Panama, possibly to look for new investors to buy the Big Four out, Judah contracted Yellow Fever. He died in 1863, at the age of thirty-seven. Judah was subsequently proven right, because much of the railroad had to be reconstructed over the following sixty years.
Postscripts
1) Mian Situ’s painting The Powder Monkeys – Cape Horn – 1865, shows the Chinese working a year before the Jung Lo story. Jung Lo came to work when the Chinese had already progressed just short of the summit. Mian Situ’s painting is of the building of the railroad bed around a rocky precipice above the north fork of the American River, just east of present day Colfax. This rocky precipice was nicknamed Cape Horn, because it presented a challenge to get around, just as the sailing around Cape Horn was for nineteenth-century sailors.
2) It is author’s opinion: that going through the granite rock of Donner Summit was the most challenging part of the Transcontinental Railroad. The part around Cape Horn was certainly a challenge too, but at an elevation of 2500 feet (as opposed to Donner Summit’s elevation above 7,000 feet) there was very little in the way of snow at Cape Horn. Still, as shown in Mian Situ’s painting there was a near-vertical drop of thirteen hundred feet into the American river, it marvelously shows the intrepid Chinese as they go about their work chipping out a railroad bed.
3) There were quite a few Chinese in California before the railroad. They had been gold mining the Sierra foothills in the early 1850s. The Placer County population in 1852 was estimated at just over ten thousand; more than three thousand were Chinese.
4) Leland Stanford went onto become California governor and the first locomotive of the Central Pacific was named “The Governor Stanford.” He also founded Stanford University as a memorial to his son, and went on to serve in the US Senate.
5) On May 10th 1869, the Central Pacific met the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, and the journey from coast to coast was reduced from a matter of months to a matter of days. Of course, it was Leland Stanford who hammered in the Golden Spike.
6) Fifty years later in 1919, it was decided that the two railroads met at Promontory Summit and not at Promontory Point. Promontory Point and Promontory Summit are about thirty miles apart. This has caused some confusion, but experts now say that the railroads met about a mile west of Promontory Summit.
7) The Virginia Truckee Railroad built, from 1869 to 1872, joined the Comstock silver mines and Carson City to the Transcontinental Railroad. Running south from Reno through the Washoe Valley to Carson City, it was the VT Railroad that hauled cut timber up to Virginia City.
8) In the 1870s, there was mass unemployment through-out San Francisco and anti-Chinese sentiment grew violent, as the immigrants were accused of taking jobs from the white workers.
9) In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which postponed any further Chinese immigration and denied the Chinese rights to US citizenship; the Act was not repealed until 1943.
10) One of Lake Tahoe’s earliest steamers was also named The Governor Stanford.
5) The Flooding of the Comstock and
the Sutro Tunnel (The Hole in the Lake)
The inventive story of “The Mystery of the Savage Sump,” (the original name for the story) first appeared in 1901. Sam Davis got his inspiration for the story having heard a ru
mor of a hole in the lake. In all likelihood there is no hole in Lake Tahoe, but it was a fact that the mine shafts of Virginia City used to flood. Some of the mine shafts were sunk horizontally into the side of the mountain, and others went straight down. Those mines that went the deepest had less air, less light, more stress on the supporting timbers, more chance of cave-ins, a greater chance for explosions and a greater chance for flooding! Flooding was a particular problem for the Savage Mine, because at more than two thousand feet, it was the deepest mine on the Comstock.
So where did all the water come from? No, it did not come from Lake Tahoe (well at least not directly.) There is only one outlet for Lake Tahoe, and that is the Truckee River. The Truckee River flows out of the lake at Tahoe City, flows north for fourteen miles, and then makes a right-hand turn just before it reaches the town of Truckee. It flows east for another sixty miles through the town of Reno and then makes a left-hand turn and flows north to Pyramid Lake……., a distance of a hundred and fifteen miles from beginning to end. Pyramid Lake, thirty-three miles northeast of Reno, has no out-flowing river. This situation is repeated all over Northern Nevada: lakes with no out-flowing rivers, or rivers that just disappear into the ground. Both the Carson and Humboldt Rivers flow into their respective sinks; none of the local rivers flow to the sea. Northern Nevada is part of the Great Basin, not because it looks like one but because it acts like one!
It was the natural underground water that flooded the silver mines. With geothermal activity throughout the local area, this was quite often hot or even scalding water. A five-mile tunnel was built by Adolph Sutro to drain all the flooded mine shafts; it was built at the base of Mount Davidson, underneath the Comstock, at 1750 feet below the surface. As the water funneled its way out of the tunnel, it then found its natural way to the Carson River. Water which flooded the even deeper Savage Mine was collected into an excavated sump and was pumped up to the Sutro tunnel.
Postscripts
1) At the time of “Hole in the Lake” story, Carnelian Bay on Tahoe’s northwest shore was known as Cornelian Bay, after the blue cornelian stones once found there.
2) Nevada’s Mount Davidson is the highest peak in the Virginia Hills, at 7,864 feet. California’s Mount Davidson is also the highest peak in the San Francisco Hills, at 938 feet. Ironically, it was Adolph Sutro who planted trees on Mount Davidson in San Francisco.
3) It was estimated the Sutro tunnel drained four million gallons of water a day. It not only drained water but provided much- needed ventilation to the lower mine shafts. The five mile tunnel took nine years to complete from 1869 to 1878.
4) Adolph Sutro went on to become San Francisco mayor from 1894 to 1896. An avid reader, Sutro built up a magnificent library of more than three hundred thousand books, considered to be one of four best libraries in America in the late 1890s.
5) In 1896, Sutro built the best remembered version of the Cliff House (The Gingerbread Palace) overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just south of San Francisco,
6) In conjunction with the Cliff House, Sutro opened the famous Sutro Baths. Advertised as the largest salt water natatorium in the world!
7) Sutro died in 1898. Fortunately he was spared some grief. Part of his library was destroyed in the Earthquake and Fire of 1906. In 1907, the Gingerbread Cliff House burned down and in 1966, the Sutro Baths burned down.
6) Emerald Bay (Three-Toed Island)
I have taken the liberty to mention the island in the title, yet hardly mention it in the story, and I apologize for this.
After his near-death experience in 1870 Captain Dick built a small wooden tomb for himself on the island at the bay. Had I continued my story to the demise of Richard Barter, you would have learned that the captain repeated his folly of that winter’s night three years later. He had gone shopping for vittles’ and returned again into the teeth of another storm. But sadly, that night in 1873, he was lost. His friends found wreckage of the boat he called The Nancy, and (I like to say) in among the wreckage they found the three pickled toes. But most of our beloved captain sunk to Lake Tahoe’s bottom. His friends interred the toes in the tomb on the island and therefore you have the title of the story.
Some would have you believe that Dick Barter did not sail but rowed the boat all the way to the Tahoe House in Tahoe City. This would have been an extraordinary thing for the Captain to have even contemplated in the winter. The round-trip distance to Tahoe City from Emerald Bay by boat is well in excess of thirty miles. A captain used to sailing round the Horn and having lived at Tahoe for many years would not have treated our lady with such little regard to her foul tempers. He may have been drunk on his return journeys but we have no reason to believe he would have started his weekly expeditions in that state. Anyway, I have set my story, as I have always done, with the captain sailing his boat to the south shore. With a prevailing westerly wind, the Captain would have made good use of the sail, certainly on the outbound journey.
Leaving the conjecture aside, this is a true story. The captain was a very sociable hermit. He had at least three dogs, plus the bald eagle to keep him company during his periods of solitude. Despite all those hours spent alone, we believe the captain enjoyed the company of his fellow man. He must have felt he was truly blessed, waking up to the sight of the bay every morning. It is hard to feel lonely when you live so close to God. With a cathedral of surrounding granite, and its own alter made of rock rising up from the middle of an emerald-green floor, he was as close to paradise as any mortal could have been. It was not until 1913, that the road was completed around Emerald Bay, and the bay would then become one of the most photographed places in the country.
In the 1920s, Laura Josephine Knight fell in love with the bay. Thinking the bay was also an image of Valhalla, she had her own Viking’s Home built on the bay’s shoreline. This wealthy lady, we are reliably told, was the main sponsor for Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of Saint Louis aircraft.
The bay was used as the setting for the “Indian Love Call,” between Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in the 1936 film Rose Marie. It is said the ghost of Rose Marie can still be heard singing for her lost lover, when the wind moans around the bay. And when Rose Marie sings too loudly she can bring the mountain down. This is why the road is often closed during bad winter weather, the road is susceptible to rock slides and avalanches, Two big slides occurred in 1954 and 1967; the earlier slide closed the road for eighteen months.
Postscripts
1) Most often called Fanette island, the island has had several other names. It is sometimes call Deadman’s Island after the captain.
2) The shell of Laura Knight’s tea house is the small stone structure on top of the island. Captain Dick’s wooden tomb survived for a short while but has now totally disappeared. Emerald Bay is now California state property. The Viking’s Home is open for tours during the summer season.
3) The state marker at the bay, “The Hermit of Emerald Bay” dedicated to Dick Barter, states that Barter rowed all the way to Tahoe City, and also that he only amputated two of his toes. (This is still disputed by your author.)
7) Jim Stewart and the Timber-Cutting Days
(The Dreaded Evening Drink)
Tahoe City’s Trail End Cemetery is located just behind Tahoe City’s golf course. Jim Stewart’s grave is a simple one; its inscription reads “Jim Stewart Outlaw killed in gunfight at Tahoe City 1872.”
We do not know much about Jim Stewart other than he was a lumber jack and he was paid extra money to work alone. His nickname “The Silent Terror” was possibly due to his unprovoked anger toward others. A lot of disaffected men came out west after the Civil War. A few had an understandable bitterness over the turmoil and ruin of their previous lives. The fact that there were people like Jim Stewart was not amazing. It’s probably more amazing that there were not more men like him. Still, the West had much to offer men who were leaving the horrors of war and seeking a chance at a new life. Those that missed out o
n the Gold Rush had the opportunity of employment on the railroads, in the silver mines, or cutting timber. Being a lumber jack around Lake Tahoe would have been preferable for many of these men.
There are more than six hundred miles of tunnels beneath Virginia City, and every few feet there were Tahoe timber supports shoring the shafts up from possible cave-ins. Tens of thousands of Douglas fir, Jeffrey, Ponderosa, Lodgepole and Sugar pines were cut, hauled, shipped, and shaped at Lake Tahoe for the Virginia City silver mines. All types of conveyance were used in the transporting of lumber from ox wagon to steamer and from train to flume. Without Tahoe lumber, the fortune that came out of Comstock could not have been mined. Systematically, acre by acre, the hills and mountains of Lake Tahoe were laid bare.
It was a vast operation and there were several different lumber companies in the Tahoe area during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, by far the biggest lumber operation was that of the Carson Tahoe, Lumber and Fluming Company, at Glenbrook owned by Duane Leroy Bliss. For his lumber company, Bliss bought up tracks of land on three sides of the lake. He remarkably bought Meeks Bay, on the west shore, for as little as $250. The best solution to get the cut timber from the south and west shores of Lake Tahoe was to bring it down to the water. Ox wagons were used to get the felled trees to the water’s edge, the cut timbers were then floated on the lake, chained, and towed over to Glenbrook.
Several steamers were used to tow the logs over the lake. Among them were the SS Truckee, the SS Emerald and the SS Meteor (the launching of which was mentioned in the book’s introduction.) In the Glenbrook sawmills, the timber was cut and shaped. Prior to 1875 the logs were hauled to Spooner Summit by ox wagons. In the late 1860s, a series of V flumes, fed by water from Marlette Lake, were built to carry logs and cut timber down to Carson City. Running twelve miles down the Carson Range, the flumes dropped two hundred feet in every mile of flume. The logs reached an average speed of sixty miles an hour as they rushed along the churning water inside.
The Ghosts of Lake Tahoe Page 15