Video: 2011-11-17 - Lake Tahoe, Beneath the Surface with Scott Lankford (60 minutes)

Full Transcript of the Video:

Welcome, welcome. I'm Daniel Sketchard. You know, sometimes I get here every month, I start rattling away and I can tell you who I am. I'm the president of the Nevada County Historical Society. We put on this monthly function. It's the third Thursday of every month except December. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's coming up next year, because we're already working in the program today. We have a few business items to go through first, announcements, and then we're going to get rolled right into the program, which will last about 45 minutes or so. Thank you for all coming tonight. It's wonderful to have a full house. I think the last time we had to have the Indians here. Have you ever, for all Cunningham came and spoke to us about two years ago? We were at a packed house for that, so. Uncle Miller, 61, that was another good one too. So we'd like a full house. Thanks for doing this today. A couple announcements. I want to thank our refreshment crew for bringing cookies and beverages tonight. We do have cookies and refreshments in the end, so please stick around. We'll clean up the chairs. No reason to rush off. We'd like to have you linger and partake of the refreshments if you can. We have a raffle basket tonight. If you have a bunch of raffle tickets, please consider purchasing a raffle ticket. That's actually how we came for the room this evening. Want to hold that up back there, James? Show the crowd when we can hold it back there in case you didn't see it. A beautiful bottle of wine and candles and pepper jelly and crackers. That's all of it. A nice trip in here. Excellent. You go home with that tonight. So, where is it at? Now it's an announcement about the River Museum coming up. The River Museum, of course, is part of the Mennon County Historical Society. They have an annual day-long Christmas affair, which you'll hear about shortly. I just handed out approximately 2,000 of these little guys. They're printed on both sides. One side doesn't matter. The other side still has to be about the Christmas Eve. It's Saturday from September until 3 on the 3rd of December, 1st Saturday of July. If you ever lived in a big city and you went to look at the window just to raise a Christmas at the Baby Art Institute, this is like going inside instead of looking into the lights. And there's three Santa Clauses here that don't tell what you can. They all take turns because we had almost a thousand people. And it's a wonderful experience along with the silent auction. And all kinds of beautiful kids who smell cookies and punch. Raise your smallest fingers, however, because they don't know how many kids were going to have. How many cookies? It's always a surprise. We look forward to seeing you there. These will be on the back table. You're welcome to take one and share because I'm down to just these in case anybody needs them. Thank you. Thank you, Annette. Now where are we meeting tonight? This is called the Madeline Hellion Library. Madeline, do you have anything else to add to that? Madeline Hellion is the director of the railroad museum. I don't know what else. It's very fun. It's big time for us. Is it a fundraiser for the railroad museum? It's our meeting fundraiser. We've got a lot of good silent auction items. And it's a happy, warm day. And our little railroad mail bus will run if the weather permits. And that's fun. Even the adults enjoy having a little trip on our little rail. So look forward to seeing you. Thank you, Madeline. So how many of you remember the old Etz-a-Sketz games as kids? I think it came out in the '60s probably. So you scratch off and you have a clean slate. And then how do you work? Well that's the way it is with volunteering for cookies. I have a clean slate for next year. But it's vacant. It's blank. And if you can volunteer to bring some cookies over a month of your choosing, except August. And I'll tell you why. We'd love to have two or three volunteers help with our freshmen. Help you in the back of the table. And please feel free to participate if you can. So let me tell you about what's coming up next year. Just a little tidbit. How many of you know Bill Calcone? The leader of the game? Okay. How many of you know how a town site in Nevada City originated? Some people do. Well we're going to hear more about that because Bill is going to come to us in January and tell you a little bit about how properties originated in Nevada City. So we're going to talk about the town site and some of the history and origin of Nevada City. Let's see. Where's the rest of my program committee? What do we have for February? You all remember? Carolyn, this is a test. February. I forget. March is the gentleman, John, if we could say his last name, with the dog. That's going to be really cool. Oh yeah. John Graven Kimper will be sharing with us on that is, let me describe it, Delcadilly. The agri-finding dog. So historic for the agri-finding dog. We think we're going to tie that in with a field trip to a cemetery. So that should be rather interesting. [laughter] Actually, in February, some of you may have participated in what I did a couple of years ago when this gentleman presented at Sierra College on the origin and the creation of the Cape Horn of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which is over in Polvax. It was quite an engineering feed and construction feed, as he's going to be sharing with us about. His passion is the development and the construction of the Cape Horn track. So he'll be here in February. He has a really good video presentation to go with that. Looking ahead a little bit, we're going to be talking about the history of Nevada County Airport, its origin and history. We're going to be talking about water wheels, some historical photography, and how many of you have heard of the, I'll be after the Jones Hospital in Grass Valley? Now called what? The Swann LeBean House. Well, Peggy and Howard will be sharing with us a history of that structure in which they now own and they run into the Swann LeBean House. That's coming out. Then October, which is my particular favorite month because it's Halloween, we're going to be facilitating a, we'll probably not have a speaker's night, we'll have a field trip to a cemetery on a Saturday where you'll come and learn about some of the presidents there. We'll take you on a tour of a local historical cemetery. You'll be here in town. And you'll tour around with docents and hear some special features about the residents there. How many of you have ever wondered about Indian baskets, the Native American Indians that made baskets here that could actually hold water? Have you ever wondered how they actually made that and what they made them with? Well, come in November and you'll find out about that with a speaker on how they actually made those baskets and how they still make them today. So that's a cool overview of what we have coming up. Wayne, you want to talk about August? Do you want to share that at all? Our field trip? Nope. No speaker's night in August. We don't have the date nailed down, but we're going to try to put together a field trip to Kentucky Mine Museum. How many of you visited the Kentucky Mine Museum? I think so. Actually, it's at the operating stamp mill and you're there and you can tour the coast and you actually run the stamp mill. So it's a little hard in the hearing, but that's okay. It's very impressive. So that's the game plan for August. So a little test here. How many, who's the farthest person that came tonight? I want to hear how far did you travel besides your speaker because he's been way far away. One in the back named Jean, my sister Jean. Look at that. Jean Fosley hails from Winters, California. She drove a flare across the valley. Anybody else here came further than that? Besides her speaker. So welcome my Jean, sister Jean, tonight. She was selling the tickets back there. We also have book sales. We only have how many books do we have left? One book. The morning sold out. Can you imagine that? We have a way to announce that. We're going to talk about that. If you want to buy more online, I bet you can probably do so. So if you like the topic, you want to hear more about it, well there's a way of buying those books. I think we've covered all the business items. Any other further? I'm sorry, Priscilla. We've got Priscilla. She has a special announcement about it. This isn't about the historical society, but it is about history. Because there's an organization called OCTA, Oregon, California Children's Association. And I've been a member of it for a lot of years. In fact, a couple years ago we had a guy from there that did a movie about the diners. And I think some of you saw that. Anyway, I have another film to tell you about. A couple years ago, this organization got a grant to make a documentary of teenagers crossing the Oregon Trail. And so they rounded up kids from all over the country, several states, and they started, they bused them all to, starting in Wyoming, eastern Wyoming, with unload covered wagons across for two weeks, and they ended up in Oregon. And they had to wear authentic costumes, they had to eat trail food, which was rice beans and oatmeal, which was very boring. And they had to do everything, every experience they had that was tough, was something that had really happened in the Oregon Trail. So this is what the documentary is going to be about. And it's quite interesting. And the reason I'm interested is, I have a granddaughter that was in it. She was only 13 then, and she's 16 now. But anyway, I'm going to show it Monday right here at this place at 7 o'clock. And it's free, so if anybody wants to come and see, there were 24 teenagers in this movie, and three teachers. And it wasn't, it's like a reality show. It wasn't scripted, they're just doing their reactions when they had to cross the river because there was too much, I mean the trail went through the water, and all kinds of traumatic things happened. So it's kind of interesting. It's going to be here, Monday at 7. Thank you for showing. Our last piece of information that I was handed to this before the program is a seminar coming up on how to weatherize historic windows. If you have a historic home and old wood-stash windows, you might want to partake of this, there's a flyer at the back table tonight. So, I'm going to ask Gary Conaway to introduce our speaker tonight. You were here a couple years ago or so? March, really? March, really? Okay. Gary was a presenter here, an excellent program, and he was kind enough to actually introduce us to the speaker tonight. And I'd ask Gary to give a little tidbit. Thank you, Gary. Thank you. It's great to be back. A good-looking crowd. How are you? A lot of you too. I am absolutely delighted to be here to introduce you. Our speaker tonight, Scott Langford. The reason is that Scott's book, "Tahoe Beneath the Surface," is co-published by the Sierra College Press. And I'm the editor-in-chief of the Sierra College Press. So, I'm the publisher who came to check out the author. So, you know, he's been here. So, I'm very, very pleased to do this. We ran out of books, and so how we're going to do this, if you're interested in purchasing a book, you can pre-pay it, get your name, get your name, how you would like Scott to autograph it, and your phone number, and then ship a bunch of books, signed books here, correct? And then you'll call him? Then we're hoping we can maybe work something out with the railroad museum, that we can have the books there, and then make it come back to them. But we'll work it out. We'll call you and we'll work out how they can do it. Okay. So, we'll pass this around, and then we'll take this from there. Well, let me tell you a little bit about Scott. As Scott likes to say, when he was on his way from back east to go to Stanford to get his Ph. D. He has a doctorate. His dissertation was about John Muir. When he was on his way from back east, which by the way I should mention too, he was an entertainer. He was a singer-songwriter. He performed back on the New England professional circuit, what I call the clam chowder circuit. And on his way to Stanford, as Scott likes to say, he got lost. And he ended up in Lake Tahoe. And he fell in love with the place, and he stayed there for how many years? Ten or so years. And worked a variety of jobs and absolutely fell in love with this extraordinary lake in the sky. He teaches at Foothill College. Today he made, what was it, three presentations? Three classes. Three classes and a presentation and came up from Foothill College, which is a Los Altos. He came up here tonight, and tomorrow night he's speaking at the Sierra College Truckee Campus. So he's going to be in the snow. So I'm very, very pleased to introduce Scott. He's going to tell you a story with a very special name. He has a doctorate, but he has a doctorate in something very special, which he's going to tell you about. I'll write that. So, ladies and gentlemen, Scott. [applause] Okay, and I think you can hear this on the mic, right? There we go. Big voice. Thank you very much for being here. It's exciting to see like standing only. Wow. I always get this for books. And thank you, Gary, Gary as a publisher and co-publishing with Haiti Books. They've been the most amazing team. And I owe them everything, including this beautiful cover that's by Tom Killian, who's probably the best known Sierra artist that we have right now. So, I do have a PhD from Stanford. That was what I was supposed to be doing for those ten years. But instead, I spent most of the ten years at Lake Tahoe, which is one reason it took ten years. I wrote my dissertation about John Muir, but I now call myself a doctor of topology as well. I have a PhD and a THD. So you are now enrolled in Tahology 101 or 102 or 103, because usually when you talk to historical societies, this is the honors class, right? So here we go. So my goal is to try to tell you some things about Lake Tahoe that you've never heard before. I do want to mention that this book won the Nature Book of the Year Award Bronze Medal from Forward Magazine, which is the national magazine of independent publishers. And what I love about that, in addition to the recognition, is that it underlines the major theme of the book. The theme of the book is that Lake Tahoe is absolutely pivotal to American history. In ways that none of us, including me, until I wrote the book, are much more pivotal on a national scale than most of us have ever realized. And that's really the frame that the talk is given. Now when I say Tahoe, I include the whole watershed all the way from Lake Tahoe itself, Donner Pass, all the way down to Pyramid Lake. Of course, this turns out to be a big part of the Tahoe story, the Tahoe that's flowing to the Pacific. I think you all have noticed that, but you might be surprised how long it took other people to notice. So that's part of the talk tonight. And of course we know that this talk also has a lot to do with keeping Tahoe blue, which it absolutely does. So I'll tie that in as well, including the sadly declining quality or clarity of the lake. When Mark Twain came, you could see down some 160 feet, 130 feet perhaps, now maybe about half of that. So we lost half the clarity already, yet it is still one of the great spectacular world heritage, I think it should actually be a world heritage site, and I hope that it will be someday. But it's still one of the great gems on the planet. And we live in this time now, in 2011, we can in fact see beneath, physically beneath the surface of the lake. This is the USGS math of what the lake looks like beneath the surface. But to tell you the truth, my book is not mostly about geology and hydrology. Some people assume that it is from the title. I use beneath the surface as a metaphor. This is an actual principle going down, in this case, a fallen leaflet. I use Tahoe beneath the surface as a metaphor for history itself. And since you're a historical society, you should understand what I mean. And that gets back to my little bet. I'm betting that I can tell you, even though you're loyal members of the historical society here, I'm betting that I can tell you some things about Tahoe that you didn't know. But let's find out, alright? Because it's a scary audience that way. The stakes are high here. I'm a gambling guy in Tahoe, here I go. So things that you, a lot of this had to do with me, as I said, the short form, I was coming out from Williams College to go to Stanford to get my PhD. Got lost or found, I suppose I should say I got found at Tahoe, and spent most of the time that I was supposed to be down in Palo Alto at Lake Tahoe at the San Fransira camp. It is part of the origins of this book because I was studying for my contraceptives and my orals and reading everything while I was at Lake Tahoe. And that tends to make you ask, what does this book have to do with Lake Tahoe? What does this book have to do with Lake Tahoe? The astounding thing is that there's a huge answer to that question, an answer that I have not dreamed of. And that's what I'm here to tell you about. And it does have a great deal to do with this weird borderline. I had certain questions that I wanted to ask as I wrote the book, and this has always bothered me. It still bothers me now. Who put that borderline in the middle of my lake? What idiot put that there? Who would do that to a lake? Why would you do that? Well, I'm going to tell you today. And it's a deep answer. And how do we end up with a wilderness area and high-rise casinos mere miles from each other? There's not a landscape on Earth that looks like this. It's an absolutely wonderful and bizarre landscape in many ways. And I'm going to talk to you about that. Why do so many tourists, including the Blues Brothers, you have to get the pun. The Blues Brothers come here by the hundreds of thousands each year, even millions of tourists. And of course, it's a four-season economy now, and that's part of the story, too. So I'll tell you about that. But what I really need to do is hurry up and turn the clock back. Because one of the things that I found out is I was in the process of writing the book and actually lived through in writing the book, is that the human history of the Tahoe, the wider Tahoe region, is at least 10,000 years old. 10,000, all the way back to the last ice age. And we know this because the mummified remains of a Native American just outside of Fallon, which is just outside the present-day watershed, larger watershed of Lake Tahoe, and another set of human remains that were at Pyramid Lake were literally pulled out of a drawer in the 1990s. They'd been in the drawer since the 1940s, and archaeologists thought, "Oh, well, these things are, you know, one or two thousand years old. We'll put them in the drawer. We'll study them later. " Radiocarpet mating comes along, and these remains don't turn out to be one thousand years old or two thousand years old. They turn out to be nine thousand six hundred years old, plus or minus a hundred or two. That's back to the last ice age. I mean, we're talking woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roaming the Tahoe region, literally, right? And these remains, after which one I'm fishing here, these remains are incredibly well-preserved, including the woven mats, including the rabbit-skin rows in which this fellow was interred. So this is still remains today. This was front-page news, the New York Times, when this came out. Front-page news, because this headline was, "Oldest. " It reset the clock on human history in North America in many ways. It was an astonishment to archaeologists and anthropologists at the time, and it remains. It's not the oldest remains, but it's by far the best dated, most accurately dated and best preserved of all the old remains. So my claim in the book, and I think it's completely valid, is that American history starts at Lake Tahoe in many, many ways. Human history in North America, in terms of what we've dated, starts in Lake Tahoe. This was a very inaccurate, as far as I'm concerned, and very controversial model. I just think that they made it for me, so I just want to have a question from Sam Letts here. It's not, you know, maybe that's why I had to write this book, but no. But that's part of the story. Another part of the story, you turned the clock back 6,000 years. This was, again, front-page news, national geographic covers, all this kind of stuff. It turns out that there are forests underneath Lake Tahoe, and there are actually forests underneath all of the major Sierra Lakes. And so there's the photographic evidence. And these, again, the radiocarbon data comes up on these 6,000-year-old submerged trees. Now, how do you explain that? And it's still a head scratch for geologists. But the only reasonable explanation, the consensus explanation at this point, is that the lake had to have fallen due to a prolonged drought long enough for a tree of that size to grow, and then be submerged again. And this is not just at Lake Tahoe. So you can't just say, "Oh, this is some sort of strange subsidence at Lake Tahoe. There was a forest in its hand. " No, because this is true at Follnay Flake. It's true in Tuolumne. It's true all the way up and down the spine of the Sierra. And we know this because this fellow, Phil Catarino, did a lot of his early research, and here he is. I think that actually is under Tuolumne Lake down in Yosemite. So this is a pattern up and down the spine of the Sierra, and what this means is that climate change, which is, of course, a pretty hot topic right now, massive climate change, massive climate shift 6,000 years ago, enough to drop the level of these Sierra lakes so far down the forest, so long, that up and down the spine of the Sierra, trees of that size grew. And then we're once again submerged when the climate shifted back again. Now, again, we don't know this for sure, but this is definitely the scientific consensus at this point. So that's part of what I mean by Tahoe beneath the surface as well. This astounding depth of human history and the amazing history of massive climate shift, which, of course, is carried forward today, another thing that I didn't know when I started writing the book, was that Tahoe is a major site of petroglyphs. And I think petroglyphs is out there somewhere in the desert, right, in Nevada, that kind of petroglyph, out in Nevada and Utah. But as it turns out, the Tahoe region is a rich, rich site of petroglyphs. And these are the ones that are just, I always get it wrong, above or below, just above the Rainbow Bridge, if I'm getting it right. Right next to the road, literally, you can get out and see them. There's a plaque there now. Please don't walk on top of them, because they're very fragile. I don't know if you can see this. Here's legs, torso, head, etc. , etc. And there are all kinds of beautiful sites, not just this one. But Tahoe is a very rich site of petroglyphs. We don't know for sure how old these petroglyphs are. They could be as old as Spirit Cave, man, the mummy that I showed you. They could be quite recent. But it's a rich, rich site. So in other words, the human history at Lake Tahoe goes back 10,000 years to these mummified remains in the wider region, 6,000 years of climate change, also 6,000 years at King's Beach. If you're an archaeologist or an anthropologist, you will know that the King's Beach Complex, as it's called, is one of the richest sites of Native American artifacts in the West as well. They have major conferences at King's Beach every once in a while, because it's such a rich site. So again, at the lake itself, right beside the water, 6,000 years of human history, 6,000 years since you're a historical audience. I won't do what I do for the students, right? When I do this for the 20-somethings, I have to say, look, it's a big difference. I mean, you know, 1849, when we got 170-some years since we've been here standing in the United States. So do you want 170 bucks or do you want 10,000 bucks? In other words, the scope, the scale, the scale is almost, you can't even wrap your head around how long 10,000 years is. And that's what we're talking about with Lake Tahoe. And of course, Native Americans are still in the region. So one of the chapters that I have is, I'm proud to say that I spend maybe a third of the book on Native American history. And that's not very proportional. If you think about the 10,000 versus the 170. But I spend one-third, I use this woman, Sarah Winamaka, to talk about the history of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe. I am a professor of American literature now, and she's one of the founders of Native American literature in this country. She was born at almost exactly the point of contact with her tribe, with outside Western civilization, with Anglo-American civilization. And I'll tell you more about that in a while. This is what Pyramid Lake looks like today. It's actually, it's about 40 to 60 feet lower than it was at the time of contact, because we've sucked so much water out of the system. So the lake has actually been shrinking and continues to shrink. That's part of the story, too. But the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe is still here. And it's because Sarah Winamaka, hopefully I've got one slide ahead of myself, it's because Sarah Winamaka, while working as literally a house slave for the Ormsby family, same Ormsby as this Carson City, as working as a house slave for the Ormsby-Ormsby family, mastered English to the point that she wrote a book that she took to Washington, D. C. Copies landed on the President's desk, on the Secretary of Interior's desk. She met Emerson. She met anybody who was anybody. And because of the eloquence of her lobbying efforts, I called her a "ward warrior. " Her people came back from where they had been exiled to a reservation in Oregon, another one in Washington. She brought her entire tribe home to where they'd been for 10,000 years. And that's an extraordinary achievement. She's also one of the major founders of Native American literature. Her book was the first book written by a Native American west of the Mississippi in English. It's also the first book written by a Native American woman in English. It's a foundational text in American literature, and Native American literature in particular. So that's part of the history of the Tahoe region as well. Of course, this is where Tahoe's water goes. It goes to Pyramid Lake. This woman, I also talk about the history of this woman who's also born at or around the period of first contact with American, white, Anglo-American civilization. Her name is Doxie Lally. She's one of the most famous basket weavers in North American history. Of course, her sum of her baskets are at the wonderful Gate Keepers Museum, many more at the Museum in Carson City. And you'll learn more about the art of basket weaving, but she grew up in this traditional culture, and now her baskets sell for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. So it's not just in my judgment that these baskets are extraordinary. This is in the judgment of world collectors with expertise on the best basketry globally. And their assessment of the value, the quality, the artistry of these baskets is that they are among the most extraordinary ever woman. Of course, she's not the only Washoe weaver. She's just the best known. But I use her life to talk about the history of the Washoe tribe, just as I use Sarah Winamaka's life to talk about the history of the Pyramid Paiute tribe. And what she went through, what she survived in her nearly 90 years on the planet, she didn't even start weaving these baskets for sale until she was in her 60s. And then she kept going into her 90s, producing basket after basket after basket after basket, and they are indeed great arts of art and valued as such, and well they should be. So if you've not seen them at the Gate Keepers Museum or Carson City, when you see them in person, there's something, you know, as with all great works of art, seeing them in person, incomparable, really incomparable, and something that you should give yourself. And of course, again, sorry. Well that's part of the story, as a matter of fact, I'm really glad that you asked. My angle on her, I mean of course many people have written about Datsol Ali, but I think, I mean this is literally woven out of Tom Ho. If you talk to contemporary weavers in the Washoe tribe, they'll say, well the stuff we have to work with now is just not what she had. Now one reason her baskets are so beautiful is that the materials that she used, the reeds and the natural dyes that she used, were growing in an ecosystem that was still healthy. And now they're growing in an ecosystem that is deeply unhealthy, that's been invaded by, you know, hundreds of exotic species that have pushed out the native grasses and ferns, the toxic things that are falling out of the air, out of the water in every other way. So this is literally woven into a basket just as when Amaka wove the region into words, in my view. And I think it makes it more powerful, I think this is literally at least contained, not just water, but the history of her tribe. Some of these baskets are the size of my thumbnail, by the way. And some of them are big enough for me to crawl into. Even a basket, even a basket of sort of, you know, standard basket size, you're talking about maybe 50,000 stitches. It's an incredible thing to have done. So of course there's still Washoe people in the region today. They don't have a single inch of land around the shore of Lake Tahoe, which was their sacred lake. But they are there and we're invited each year to this wonderful ceremony. How often do you get to see ceremonies that go back thousands of years? So this is a moment if you want to see the Washoe perform some of their traditional dances, if you want to talk to Washoe people about their history and their culture, there's an event at each June called Washoe Shoe Day, where outsiders such as ourselves are invited, by the way, if there's a Washoe person in the room, honored to have you here. And I'm sure that I may trample on some facts, but I do, I am proud that I spent a lot of time on the history of the Washoe. And it's an extraordinary thing to be invited to such a ceremony. So again, since you're locals, I highly recommend that you go out and experience this ceremony for yourself. And these are hard to see, but these are some of the original Washoe words rendered into English language lettering for this place that we now call Lake Tahoe. So I'm going to move now forward to how did this Lake Comapine come called Lake Tahoe? Because in the Washoe language, it was not Tahoe, of course, right? It was approximately, again, mangled by an English speaker, Donna O'Lanke. And I'll tell you more about how it acquired that. But now I have to tell you, I have to remind you, because this being the advanced class, you'll probably remember that John C. Fremont becomes the man who discovers Lake Tahoe on Valentine's Day, 1844. He is as far as we know the first white explorer to see Lake Tahoe. And he doesn't actually touch it, he sees it from a distance. It's the Stevens Murphy Party, a splinter group of those who actually get to the shores a year later. But he's the first one credited with everything to Lake. He called it just Mountain Lake, by the way. And this is in 1844, just right around the time when it seems that Dotsolali and Sarah Windermacher are being born into their respective tribes. He sees it from a distant mountain peak. This is a mural on the side of the South Lake Tahoe Museum, so you might recognize that. And it's a very obviously stylized, I always think he looks like he just came out of the coiffure or something. The truth is he was near death at this point. The truth is that they climbed the mountain because they were going snow blind. They were killing their mules for food. They were eating their dogs. They were eating their livestock to stay alive. The horses were up to their withers in the snow. It's a complete miracle that they got across the Sierra. It was a horrific gamble, but it did pay off because they did make it, unlike the Donner Party, so many of them perished. He didn't lose any men, but one or two, one more storm and they were goners. So the weather gods, in this case, cooperated. Now, you all remember probably the Fremonts and the discoverer of Lake Tahoe, but at least for me, I'd never put two and two together. This is the founder of the Republican Party. His crossing of the Sierra and his participation when he crosses it, he crosses it again a year later, he's one of the major leaders of the Bear Flag Rebellion. He's one of the major military leaders in the Mexican-American War. He's the first self-appointed governor of California, and he is the founder, in many senses, of the Republican Party. The first Republican Party candidate for president was John Fremont. Not Lincoln Fremont, four years earlier, and it was Fremont's success that launched Lincoln's eventual walk to the White House. The third party candidate did so well that the next time they went on the ballot, Lincoln actually won. But when it started, Lincoln was just a sideshow, and it was Fremont who made himself nationally and even world-famous crossing the Sierra. This is a Republican Party poster showing Fremont crossing the Tahoe Sierra, which is back to Tahoe's so much more important than we realize, right? So every poster on this fundamentally important American election, the posters across the United States were emblazoned with Fremont crossing the Tahoe Sierra. And people like John Greenleaf Whittier, the great poet of the time, used that as his kind of press vehicle to say that this was crossing into the promised land. And Fremont was also, of course, the first man to run for president on an abolitionist platform. So that crossing of the Sierra becomes almost like this Moses-like crossing. And it's enormous. And he goes on, of course, to become a Civil War general. Lincoln appoints him as a Civil War general, fires him because he writes an emancipation proclamation before Lincoln does. And Lincoln thinks it's too early and he fires him. So he's the first Republican candidate for president, the first man to issue an emancipation proclamation. Why have we not heard of him? Well, let me tell you a story. It's very interesting. Here's the map of this first expedition. And, of course, we knew nothing about what was in this territory. So he's mapping blank space. And he was supposed to go up here into Oregon, which he did, but then he dropped south into what was then Mexican territory. The story is that he just, well, he just thought he would. I mean, I think he was actually sent on a spy mission personally. And he comes into the Tahoe region right here. And I'll zoom in. So here he comes into the Tahoe region and he finds his way to Pyramid Lake. And pretty soon, oh, I'm sorry, back to, that's not Pyramid, that's Tahoe. So he finds Mountain Lake as he's crossing the Sierra. Pyramid's up here. He finds Tahoe crossing the Sierra to give to Sutter's fort. But look what's wrong with this map. There's two things wrong. And they're very forgivable errors, by the way. The first thing that's wrong with it is the Tahoe is too far to the east. I mean, sorry, to the west, not to the east, to the west. And the second thing is that here's the spine of the Sierra. And so Tahoe miraculously flows into the Golden Gate. And it was Fremont who named the Golden Gate the Golden Gate. But on his early maps, and even on later maps, this same error persists and persists. So here's a later map of the Gold Country, not by Fremont. Map of the Upper California Gold Country. Here's Mountain Lake. And here it is flowing into the Golden Gate. Whoops. Last time I looked, it doesn't do that. But this error persists and persists and persists. Here's another. Here it's being called Flag Lake. But look, it's still flowing through Sacramento and into the bay. Oops, oops, oops. So when Fremont becomes the leader of the anti-slavery forces in 1849 at the California Constitutional Convention, and by the way, our first constitution was bilingual, English and Spanish, in case you--I had forgotten until I did this research again. Fremont took his eternal credit as the leader of the anti-slavery forces, and I had no idea how many times California came close to being a slave state. Not just once, time and again. Several and several occasions, we actually voted, or came close to voting, to split the state in two. In fact, in the year that Lincoln was elected, California did vote to split itself. And the only reason it didn't happen was Washington wasn't in much of a mood to give half of California away to the Confederacy. So somehow that log got lost. But in 1849, the same thing was being discussed. And this is Fremont's--from a later Fremont expedition-- this is Fremont's own map. This is the map that they pulled out at the last minute when Fremont won the battle, keeps California as a free state. What the slave--what the pro-slavery forces wanted to do-- and they were very powerful, by the way, very, very powerful-- what the pro-slavery forces wanted to do was either make this whole region one massive slave state, which they knew would split up into smaller slave states and they would control the Senate forever. And we would still be standing in slave territory right now had that happen. I don't think there's much chance--I think that's what would have happened. Hypothetical's always been getting out of the game, of course. The other thing they were going to do was split California roughly in two. Southern California would have been called Colorado. Now, I'm from Colorado, so I take great offense that they were going to name-- first, they were going to steal the name and then they were going to put it on a slave state. And, of course, since we're northern California, we were proud that we were going to be the free half of this. But this--neither of these two things happened at the very last minute. Fremont somehow gained control of the convention, and it's very unclear how. I really worked hard, including--this was one place I did a lot of primary research. It's completely--it was clearly some sort of smoke-filled room, backroom maneuver. At the last, last, last minute, just as California looks like, it will be a slave state. Fremont somehow gained control of the convention, and we come out where we are. So he doesn't want to do plan A, which is to make a basket state, because he's right. He knows that they're right. I mean, that this will be split up into smaller slave states, and the game will be over. And he doesn't want to split the state in two. So he does what you would do. He takes the natural border of California in his own map, and he draws a line down there. And it's pretty much how we get the border, and this is a close-up of the same thing. But there's a problem here, and the problem is that this later map has the same error in it that it always did. And it looks like, it looks like once again that Lake Tahoe still flows into the Golden Gate. So the map that Fremont used perpetuated the error for which he was originally responsible. By this time, he's named it Lake Bon-Pombe after Humboldt's traveling companion, a famous explorer of the time. And so it perpetuates the error, and that's pretty much the story of how that line ends up in the middle of my end-year late. Now, that might be just really nice cocktail conversation, since you're all historical society people. Maybe that's a nice cocktail conversation, but I think it is so much more profound than that. You can just say, okay, and by the way, it's a very forgettable error. If you know anything about the history of mapping, fixing east-west position was incredibly difficult until we got to satellites and GPS, literally. Even into the 20th century, it remained very difficult to do. North-south is easy. You just do the sun with a sex hand. East-west, extremely difficult until we had satellite telemetry. So this is a highly forgivable error that he missed Lake Tahoe, because he was sure that he got the whole lake in and he thought it was going to flow. He thought he had the whole lake and all the water. And instead, he had two-thirds of the lake and none of the water. It all goes to what later became the battle. So that's either a trivia or it's something more profound. And what I think that line is, I think that's literally, I mean this from the heart, that's our freedom. I mean that line would not be there where it is, fixed in the original bilingual state constitution. That line would not be there, but if California had become a slave state, in fact, this whole thing, interestingly enough, Nevada and California and Utah and most of the intermountain west would have been quite possibly a slave state. And the whole history of the United States would have been different. So when I look at that line, I see my freedom and your freedom. And I see the onset of the Civil War. And of course it was, the compromise of 1850 was triggered by the fact that California came into the union as a free state, which completely messed up the calculus of the times. Okay, now I'm going to go very fast from this point forward. I do have a chapter about the Donner Party and my whole goal again is to tell you things you don't know. So I'm sure you know the history of the Donner Party better than I do. There's shelves of books by authors better than I am about this. But in most of those shelves of books, almost nothing is said about the fact that the Donners shot their Indian rescuers in the back and ate them, which is bluntly exactly what happened. And it is in all that shelf of books. If you go in there, you'll find that it is described, but it's almost always described in one paragraph and then left behind. Even though we spend 100 pages on other deaths within the Donner Party, we'll spend maybe a paragraph on the two Native American slaves of Mr. Sutter, who were sent to help rescue the Donner Party. So I spend a whole chapter on them. I want to know who were these two men? Who were Salvatore? And it turns out we know quite a bit about them because the missions kept such good records. So I can tell you quite a bit about who these two Native Americans were and the circumstances under which they died. And that's a little teaser to make sure that you buy the books. I'm going to move on now to talk about Mark Twain. And again, he's our most famous American writer at Lake Tahoe. He utters the most famous words ever written about Lake Tahoe. But I wanted to talk about things that people had not noticed yet about Mark Twain. So my take on it is that Mark Twain, when he was in 1849, 1850, when we're becoming a state, he's still age 15, age 16 years old. He's not old enough to go yet. But it empties out the town. And in fact, his family ends up in the newspaper business because the owner of the largest newspaper in Hannibal leaves Hannibal and sells his newspaper for a fire sale price because he wants to go to the gold rush. So from that point forward, somehow Mark Twain's destiny is linked with this. Mark Twain at the point that he begins to become a steamboat pilot. But of course, that's interrupted by the Civil War, which is in many ways triggered by California's entry into the Union as a free state. Compromised of the 1850 fugitive slave law, here we go. So by the time Mark Twain actually does arrive, having lost his career as a riverboat pilot with bullets flying through the pilot house, when he arrives here, it's at Tahoe and within the Tahoe region that Sam Clemens becomes Mark Twain. And again, this is a story that's pretty well known. Of course, most of you probably heard about how he burned down the forest that he thought he was going to get rich with. His very first get rich quick scheme was to be a timber baron at Lake Tahoe. It was a good scheme, but he kicked over the skill and burned down his whole timber claim and had to move on and become a well, a writer. So that's the story that I wanted to tell. But what you don't know is the story of Mark Twain and Lake Bigler. And maybe you have. By this time, the lake is called Lake Bigler. So we started out with Mountain Lake and Lake Lapland, Lake Lake and all these other kinds of names. By this time, everybody calls it Lake Bigler. So who is this guy Bigler? And most of you probably know. Bigler was the second elected governor of California. Why was the name Lake Bigler? It turns out that Mr. Bigler, our friend, Mr. Bigler here, there it is again, Lake Bigler, our friend, Mr. Bigler was not only the second elected governor of California, he was the turncoat Democrat who decided that California was going to support the Confederacy. He tried very hard to take California in on the Confederate side. So he was an openly racist, openly pro-slavery governor. He was a demagogue in my view. And so when you called it Lake Bigler, you were essentially calling it Slave Lake. By the way, there's a huge Slave Lake in Canada. But that was it. It was a highly politically charged name. And so if you liked the name Lake Bigler, it was an obvious, clear political code to anybody that you were pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery. You were a copperhead in the slang of the times. If you wanted to get rid of the name, then you wanted a different name. And that's, by the way, the short form of where the name Lake Tahoe comes from. It's invented by pro-Lincoln, pro-Union forces in the middle of the Civil War to get rid of the hated name Bigler and to put something else there. And they tried other things. They just didn't have the political firepower. They wanted to say, "Okay, let's call it Lake Fremont. " "No, couldn't get there. " "Let's call it Lake Lincoln. " "No, can't get there. " "Let's call it Union Lake. " "No, we can't get there. " "Let's call it Flagling. " "No, can't get there. " "Let's make up something. " "What did the Washoe call it?" "Dawaga. " And if you put enough chew in one side of your mouth and enough ear wax in here, "Dawaga" probably comes out a little like a wall. But in any case, the point is it's not so much that it's a corruption of the Washoe word as that everyone, everyone knew at the time that if you called it Lake Tahoe, you were pro-Union. And if you called it Lake Bigler, you were pro-Confederacy. It was as clear as me using the word tea party right now. And maybe in 150 years, people will not know what that code means, all right? And again, I'm not taking sides in this battle. I'm just saying there's a code that we now recognize. So maybe in 150 years, people will read some joke about tea party, and nobody will know what's going on. But this was just as crystal clear as that. So the wild thing is that Mark Twain, who goes on, of course, to become our greatest anti-racist writer, who writes his first, actually his second book about Lake Tahoe and his journey to Lake Tahoe and the better region, among other things, roughing it, and goes on to become our greatest American novelist in my view. I mean, I do think that the Huckleberry fan is the great American novel. I fight it out in my brain, or Moby Dick and Great Gatsby like the best of you. But it's certainly our great anti-racist novel of the 19th century. The problem is that this man at age 72, I'm going to go backwards here, is not this man or this man, right? He's not. So it turns out that Mark Twain, using this political code of the times, hates the name Lake Tahoe. And what does that mean? It means that at this age, having just deserted from the Confederate Army, having grown up in slave territory, and having, in his hard-cooled different ways, as we know, families were split time and again by the Civil War. So my thesis is that Mark Twain was still working past his racism, and that when he said he hated the name Lake Bigler, he meant that he was not a Union supporter. This was a particularly difficult thing since his brother was a political appointee of Lincoln. But, you know, younger brothers and older brothers have had little tips like this before. So that's my take on Mark Twain. You can judge for yourself. I am not saying that he's not this man, but this man, Huckleberry Finn, is written 25 years later. 25 years later. And I think the journey that Huckle goes on is the same journey that this man went on, his journey takes 25 years. That journey from racism to unlearning racism. And I think it begins at Lake Tahoe. I really do. Bonanza. Interesting, again, settings, the 1860s. When I went back, now that you can see this thing on YouTube, it's like, "Okay, so I grew up with that picture bursting into flame on my little color television screen. I was right there, you know, first color television all. I remember the whole thing. " It burned, literally burned into my memory. But when you go back and watch it on YouTube or Nickelodeon or whatever, it still reruns all over the world. I still have students from all over the world and I can say Ponderosa and they know what I mean. Which is amazing to me. All right. But, you go back and watch it, you will not believe how radical it is. It's so radical. It's so radical. I was just, I was astounded. I'll give you some examples. Our friend hops in here, and of course we know, I think most of us in the audience will recognize him. But did you remember how he got into the family? That he's beat up by racist mobs in Carson City and Virginia City, and they take him in off the street and they give him a home. And they defend him from the demogrobs who are running for mayor on anti-Chinese platforms. And by the way, this is all more or less historically accurate, which is part of my book also. I mean, most of us know well the story of the Transcontinental Railroad. This is not beneath the surface. This is the story we know well. All of us know by now that the Chinese did almost all the work in building that amazing railroad. As said, one of the great wonders of perhaps the greatest engineering feat of its time or of all time up until that point. It's done with Chinese labor. The part I didn't know is what happens to the Chinese labor after the railroad is finished, after the Golden Spike is driven in. And what happens is they're all fired instantaneously. So the largest Chinatown in the whole western United States is the Truckee. And by the time we get to the 1870s and a recession like the one that we're going through now, there's a massive anti-immigrant backlash. And the Chinese go from being the heroes to being driven out. And there's an amazing book by a professor named Gene Felzer called "Driven Out" that I relied upon. But much to my horror, I found out that this method of driving the Chinese out was known. Nationwide as the Truckee method. And riots across the United States, across the United States, and the deadliest race riots in US history, were based on the method that was developed by Mr. McGlash and the man who made the Donner Party famous in the first place. Now, of course, we know Truckee is a completely different place now. This is Maxine Hong Kingston, who writes a wonderful book called "China Man. " It's her second in the series, "Woman Warrior, China Man. " So I used her to tell the history of the Chinese railroad. And Amy Tan was right up the road from Truckee now. So I'm well aware that this is not Truckee now. But I think we need to be aware that Truckee then was the epicenter of some of the largest race riots in American history. And I think we have to own that history. And that's it. We also have to own the history of what happened in Tahoe at the same period of time. In the 1870s, 1880s, one billion war feet taken out of Tahoe. So when John York gets there, in middle age, hoping to heal his soul after having been a farmer down here, he comes up and instead of healing his soul, he confronts literally the rape of Lake Tahoe. And that's when he becomes a conservationist. He's a nature writer up to that point. He writes wonderful nature stuff. But it's not until he's approximately my age and he confronts what has happened in the Sierra since he was last there. He confronts the devastation of the Sierra. That's what turns him into a conservationist. That's when he founds the Sierra Club. That's when he starts working night and day for Yosemite National Park and all the other national parks. In fact, he wanted to make a Lake Tahoe National Park. And it's one of the great untold stories in Muir's life. You know, Muir biographers who I admire, I know many of them. But the reason that story gets left out, we came again, time and again, very close, within a few votes in the Senate of the Lake Tahoe National Park. We also lost the largest fisheries. The first great fishery in North America collapsed was this fishery. This huge trout that Fremont talked about, which once were all across all of northern Nevada, the largest trout in North America by far, up to 40 pounds. 40 pounds. Five pounds of whale trout, I would call them. He called them salmon trout. And they're not completely extinct by a kind of accident that I won't go into here. This is a 20-pounder. So the Paiute tribe at Pyraminta was taking the lead in trying to bring these things back. But we will never see fish of the size of the ones in Lake Tahoe again in our lifetime, because the holy college of the supported fish of that size has been disrupted. But these efforts are underway. So that's how John Muir becomes John Muir. I'm going to go really fast now because I'm watching the clock and I see it. I'm very close to out of time. That's how Muir becomes New York. Steinbeck writes his first novel at Lake Tahoe. His first novel. And by the way, you probably haven't heard of it. He works where I work with when he comes down to Sierra Camp. They're falling for a lodge back in the 1920s. And he writes his first novel at Cass Gate Lake, living in a little cabin for two long winters. And the reason you haven't heard of it is it's horrible. And he knew that it was horrible, but he learns to be a writer at Lake Tahoe. And he writes about that process of learning to be a writer, the necessary first novel. He also works in a fish hatchery and meets his first wife there. He calls himself a "ticing obstetrician. " It turned out to be a great place to flirt. So he meets his first wife there. Carol Henning becomes Mrs. Steinbeck. And his first novel is dedicated to her. You've got to love this. He's not a great writer yet. So instead of grapes or a raft, they come up with avocados and resentment. And lots of annoyance. Grapes of beef. Who knows? But it does become the book Grapes of Raph. I recently discovered-- this is not in the book-- I recently discovered that Dorothea Lange, who of course gave us the iconic images visually of the Depression, just as Steinbeck gave us the iconic images in the words of the Depression, was also at fallen leaf Lake. Not quite at the same time as Steinbeck. But both of these images essentially in some ways were birthed out of fallen leaf Lake. So her photos, which become Henry Fonda, which become the Hollywood movie based on the book, which of course makes Steinbeck an international figure and leads him to collect the Nobel Prize winner, two Nobel Prize winners. There it is. Richard Russell, our other top Nobel Prize winner, who comes to Lake Tahoe in the 1940s in the middle of the worst moment of his life at age 70, broke, blacklisted, unable to get a job. He writes a book called Meaning and Truth that relaunches his career and within 10 years he's collecting a Nobel Prize. He also becomes the founder of the anti-nuclear movement along with Albert Einstein. I'm sorry. Thank you. OK. So this is Einstein, this is Russell, and this is their notice to the world. They were the first anti-nuclear activists. The last document that Einstein signed, literally before his death, the last document with a signature is this manifesto, which is a letter to the leaders of the world from 12 of the world's great thinkers and scientists, Albert Einstein and Richard Russell, as the prime signatories. And that is the beginning of the anti-nuclear movement worldwide globally. And it also leads us to remember that from the ridges of up top, you can see the flashes of the mushroom clouds. Prior to the 1963 nuclear test bound treaty, that Russell was primarily responsible for inspiring. And this is where we remember that, of course, Jack Kennedy and Frank Sinatra became friends and they became friends at a moment at which Frank Sinatra took control of something called the Calumet in the casino, for which he lost his license because even though Marilyn Monroe was there and Franky was there, this fellow was also there, one of the great mafiosos of the time on the West Coast who remained as the manager of the Calumet Ball all the way through. The real owner was Momojin Kanan, who was essentially the mob, boss, the godfather of Chicago at this moment, Al Capone's heir. Frank came there to get a divorce. I'm going to have to go through these very quickly. There's more stories than I can tell you. Marilyn Monroe was last photographed on the deck of the Calumet just days before her suicide, or was it a suicide? There we go. So that's another story that I'll tell you. It turns out that Jack Ruby worked at. . . Can you guess? Calumet. So read more about that. But of course the Calumet was supposed to be the anchor eventually in this huge development that would become Incline Village. That's not the Tahoe Keys. That's what Incline Village would have become. So the story of clarity of Lake Tahoe becomes a battle against those who took, say, the State Line Club on the south shore and turned it into a high rise. And the other developers on the north shore had exactly the same idea. Of course, this is when the Olympics come through. These were the kinds of editorials and cartoons that were in our newspapers at the time. This is the birth of the TRPA and the California Nevada Compact that's currently under attack now. Not something that I'm happy about, I admit. So the question still remains, will it be a heavenly place? Will it be a heavenly urbanized place? Which future will we find for Lake Tahoe? Will it be a green lake or a blue lake? This is after the Angora Fire. Is that the future of Lake Tahoe? Or is this the future that's the opening of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center? These are Washoe elders with the leading scientists and the knowledge of the world, most of whom now come from Lake Tahoe. So I'm five minutes from being way over time, so I'm going to stop here. Thank you very much. [applause] [applause] If you want to take more about this, make sure that you, if you'd like to, of course you can always go support your local bookstore, I'd be delighted. But if you want my signature in a book, you can get on the little piece of paper. Thank you. You have to prepay and we'll mail it. The clipboard is back there. Thank you very much. I don't know that we have time. I use up all the time for questions. Your boss says it's okay. So any questions? Yes. Oh, yes. Listen to another name, Dan. They got caught just like the daughter of me. Yes. But they're too blind. Exactly. And we went up to the Forest Ranchew station that we found out of our friend. Well, yeah. We have the rest of the rest of our. . . Well, there's a Ranchew station and they took us up where they can't. And then they showed us the tracks in the rocks of the wagons where they scraped so many times. The rest is still there. The rest? And it just was so interesting to see all of them. Well, part of my gripe in the book, I mean, one gripe is that the emergency Native Americans, and we give them one sentence and we just attempt to know who they were or why they were there. But my other gripe is that the Stevens Townsend Murphy Party, who precede the Donner Party, and rather than murdering people, come through with literally new children born in the wagons and who stay together. And this is something that Kevin Starr calls the dystopian power of the Donner Party, to somehow eclipse the wonderful things that happened. Stevens Townsend Murphy Party is a great story. It is a true story of heroism. I am not one of these people who thinks that the Donner Party were heroic. The two Indian slaves were not the only two people murdered. By the way, they murdered each other. There were several murders along the way before they ever got to the Sierra, before they got to the point of shooting these two rescuers in the back and eating them. So I'm not a big fan of the Donner Party. I'm a huge fan of the Stevens Townsend Murphy Party. And by the way, it's quite possible the splinter group that came to try to find another way went up the Truckee River and over the Rubicon, what we now call the Rubicon, and did make it down to Sutter's Board, they were the first Anglo-Americans that we know to actually touch the lake, and there were women in that party. So it's actually possible that the first westerner to touch the lake was not a man, but a woman.