Drew - Lake Tahoes Railroads

IMAGES
of Rail

LAKE TAHOES
RAILROADS

In this view looking down from the bow of the SS Tahoe is the diminutive morning train of the Lake Tahoe Railway & Transportation Company, fresh in from Truckee with its load of passengers for the day trip around the lake. The daily summer arrival of the narrow-gauge freight and passenger train on the Tahoe Tavern Wharf was an essential component of Lake Tahoe tourism during the first quarter of the 19th century. (Roy D. Graves collection.)

ON THE COVER: The Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company train crew volunteered for Sunday picnic duty. Photographer R.B. Middlemiss had the locomotive pause at Devils Gate at Lower Pray Meadows, just up from Glenbrook on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Locals and visitors pose for the July 1896 photograph, but it is Ralph Barrett (left), Zelma Griffin (center), and Milton Keyser, the three youngsters in the foreground, who steal the show. (California State Railroad Museum.)

IMAGES
of Rail

LAKE TAHOES
RAILROADS

Stephen E. Drew

Copyright 2016 by Stephen E. Drew
ISBN 978-1-4671-1737-1
Ebook ISBN 9781439657683

Published by Arcadia Publishing
Charleston, South Carolina

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935825

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To Naomi and Eleanor, so you will know what grandpa has been working on.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A loosely knit group of Virginia & Truckee Railroad enthusiastsJon O. Nagel, the late James C. Dunn, and Fred Barberconvinced me early on about the value of letting the artifacts talk while walking the remains of the Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company switchback trestlework some 50 years ago. Another generation of dedicated researchersRichard C. Datin Jr., Michael A. Collins, Charles D. Siebenthal, Dale B. Darney, Thomas B. Smith, and Kent K. Kristianssonhave since joined in keeping all of us immersed in primary source materials.

The staff of several institutions have been repeatedly generous in making their collections available, including the Bancroft Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the California State Railroad Museum, Lake Tahoe Historical Society, Special Collections at the University of Nevada-Reno Library, Nevada Historical Society, the Nevada State Museum, and the Nevada State Railroad Museum.

Conversations and correspondence over the years was also invaluable to the research in hand with Grahame H. Hardy, David F. Myrick, William W. Bliss, William A. Oden, Christopher C. de Witt, Harry R. Kattelmann, and the late Edward R. Yerington, great-grandson of Henry M. Yerington.

I am particularly grateful for the generosity and kindred esprit de corps of colleagues Kyle K. Wyatt of the California State Railroad Museum and Wendell W. Huffman of the Nevada State Railroad Museum. Without these dedicated museum curators, this work would not have been possible.

Unless otherwise noted, the pictures and historical documents are from the collection of the author.

INTRODUCTION

The Big Lake, the Lake of the Sky, and the Gem of the Sierrathe names themselves conjure up something of the enormous grandeur and majesty of vast Lake Tahoe. Perched atop the northern Sierra Nevada at 6,225 feet above sea level, Lake Tahoe and its surrounding mountains and valleys are the results of millions of years of geologic evolution. The resulting lake is 21.2 miles long, 11.9 miles wide, 75.1 miles in circumference, and 1,645 feet deep, making it the third-deepest lake in North America.

For several thousand years, Lake Tahoe was the home to Washoe Indians during the snowless seasons of the year. In February 1844, John Charles Frmont and his second government expedition of some 40 men became the first Americans known to view the pristine lake.

The Mormons settled in western Nevada in the 1850s, but the real stampede to the area did not occur until the Comstock Lode, one of the worlds greatest gold and silver mining camps, was discovered east of Lake Tahoe in 1859. The paying ore was not accessible by simple panning but required hard rock, underground mining with significant corporate investment, large quartz-reduction mills, and wage-earning miners. As the subsurface mining works descended to several thousand feet, rooms of pine timbers were left to shore up the earth where tons of rock had been extracted.

All manner of forest products was in demand. The mining companies used 12- and 14-inch square timbers to shore up the earth deep under the communities of Virginia City and Gold Hill. Building lumber was needed for the commercial buildings and residences of the nearly 40,000 Comstock inhabitants. The mine hoisting works and many of the early reduction mills were steam-powered and they had an insatiable appetite for cordwood as boiler fuel. The first bonanza was in full swing by the time Nevada became the 36th state in October 1864.

The nearby forests of the Carson Range supplied most of the timber, lumber, and cordwood consumed during the 1860s. But heavy snows made the harvesting of timber a seasonal operation. Roads for wagons and teams of oxen became almost impassable during wet months. The 18691872 construction of the 52-mile-long Virginia & Truckee Railroad (V&T) between Reno on the Truckee River, the new state capital at Carson City, and Virginia City soon provided the needed transportation link. The V&T afforded a dependable and more economical mode for transporting vast quantities of wood products, mining machinery, and merchandise to the Comstock. On the return trips, the V&T transported the extracted ore to the nearby steam- and water-powered quartz mills. The demand for timber products was never-ending, going on 24 hours a day. But the forests of the Carson Range were soon exhausted, and the French Canadian lumberjacks began eyeing the vast forests of giant pine trees surrounding Lake Tahoe. The lake basin would become an invaluable timber resource for continuing exploration of the Comstock Lode.

Maine lumberman Capt. Augustus W. Pray built the earliest large sawmill on the lake at Glenbrook in 1861. In November 1873, V&T general superintendent Henry Marvin Yerington, former Gold Hill banker Duane LeRoy Bliss, and Glenbrook mill superintendent James A. Rigby organized the Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company (C&TL&F). The trio borrowed money from Bank of California financier Darius Ogden Mills and others. They acquired Captain Prays mill, several other sawmills in the vicinity, and the companys initial 7,000 acres of timberlands along the lakes south shore. Lake Tahoe was about to see its first big-time logging operations and it earliest railroads.

The C&TL&Fs Lake Tahoe Narrow Gauge Railroad began operations in 1875 from the sawmills at Glenbrook up to Spooner Summit and the head of the Clear Creek wood flume running down to the V&T yards at Carson City. The C&TL&F was the largest operator at Lake Tahoe, and it spawned affiliated and competing wood, lumber, and railroad ventures around the lake. Matthew C. Gardner had a short standard-gauge railroad at Camp Richardson, as part of a contract to harvest logs for Yerington and Bliss. G.W. Chubbuck had a rail line at Bijou, on Tahoes south shore, and a contract to deliver logs to the C&TL&F Company. The two contractors railroads delivered logs wherever they could be rolled into Lake Tahoe, chained together into log booms or barges, and then towed by C&TL&F steamboats across the lake to the companys sawmills at Glenbrook.