TheTahoeWeekly.com
Who owns the water from Lake Tahoe & Truckee River? P A R T
I
BY M A R K M c L AU G H L I N
M
illions of people visit the Tahoe Sierra each year to enjoy and recreate on Lake Tahoe, Donner and Independence lakes, as well as the satellite reservoir system of Boca, Prosser and Stampede. All these storage basins are in California, but since the Truckee River system is part of Great Basin hydrology, none of the streamflow reaches the Pacific Ocean. I frequently get queries, especially during a drought, regarding our regional water management. It seems that few people realize that these reservoirs, including Lake Tahoe, are regulated primarily for Nevada interests. Many are also unaware that a significant portion of this desert-bound water is dedicated to Fallon, Nev., one of the driest parts of the driest state. In that sunbaked landscape, water-intensive alfalfa is irrigated with Tahoe-sourced water to feed herds of dairy cows, with the bulk of the milk being dehydrated for export to China and Asia. This is the story of the Newlands Project, which turned water into gold for the Silver State. It likely never occurred to indigenous peoples who inhabited the Tahoe Sierra for thousands of years to confront the natural fluctuations of Lake Tahoe and the regional lakes. American Indians in the Great Basin survived by living within the natural cycles of the seasons, hunting and gathering in high-desert and alpine environments. Tribal people understood that winter rain and snow were inconsistent from year to year and they adapted to that.
But as soon as Euro-American settlers moved in, the game was on to control the ebb and flow of Big Blue and the Truckee River watershed for economic gain: hydroelectric power, mills, ranching, agriculture and more. Whoever secured the rights to harness and distribute the liquid gold that water represents in the arid West would control the levers of industry, politics and development. 14
LEFT: Log drivers on the Truckee River.
| Courtesy North Lake Tahoe Historical Society BELOW: Von Schmidt’s plan to send Tahoe water to San Francisco. | Courtesy Donald F. Pisani, Tahoe Research Group
Topographical engineer John C. Frémont “discovered” Lake Tahoe in 1844 and within 15 years entrepreneurs were scheming to exploit its water. The most ambitious of these early diversion plans included transporting water to Carson City and Virginia City, Nev., or redirecting it to the gold diggings of Placer County or even San Francisco. These mammoth public-works projects rarely gained sufficient popular, political and economic support, but by the start of the 20th Century, Nevada had successfully tapped Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River as its primary sources for irrigation, industry and municipal water use. The first permanent settlement in the Tahoe Basin was an industrial logging hub at Glenbrook, Nev., on the eastern shoreline. In the spring of 1860, four squatters settled the lakeside valley and built a log cabin. The men named their bucolic parcel for its babbling brook and mountain meadow landscape. In 1861, squatter Capt. Augustus W. Pray along with two new partners consolidated ownership of the land, formed the Lake Bigler Lumber Company and erected the first sawmill at the lake. During the early 1860s, Glenbrook became an important transit point with gold seekers and other travelers paying for a time-saving ride on one of Pray’s two schooners from the west side of the lake across to Glenbrook. From there it was a relatively short journey to Carson City or on to the Virginia City silver mines. Steamer piers at Glenbrook were built deep into the water as investors already knew to compensate for the wide variability in the seasonal surface levels of Lake Tahoe.
As soon as Euro-American settlers moved in, the game was on to control the ebb and flow of Big Blue and the Truckee River watershed for economic gain: hydroelectric power, mills, ranching, agriculture and more. In 1865, a Prussian-born civil engineer named Col. Alexis von Schmidt formed the Lake Tahoe and San Francisco Water Works Company to supply water to the distant city via an aqueduct from Lake Tahoe. It was an audacious plan, but von Schmidt was confident that he could build it. Surveys were undertaken to construct a canal from the lake’s outlet at Tahoe City to Olympic Valley, where a 24,172-footlong tunnel would be excavated through the Sierra Nevada to the North Fork of the American River. From there a series of canals, flumes and pumping stations would transport the high-quality water to San Francisco. Lake Tahoe has one outlet and it is the headwaters of the Truckee River in Tahoe City. Von Schmidt built a 50-foot-wide dam near the outlet to create water storage for his proposed Grand Aqueduct. “The [dam’s] gates were suspended above the water, ready to drop at any moment,” wrote a Carson City reporter. Von Schmidt’s barrier did raise the level of the lake, but the overall project ran into resistance due to its cost, as well as fierce local resistance, particularly by western Nevadans. Even so, in 1871 the Board of San Francisco supervisors approved the project, but the city’s mayor, concerned about legal suits over Tahoe water, vetoed the increasingly contentious proposal. San Francisco still required reliable drinking water, however, and the source of choice became Hetch Hetchy Valley, 160 miles away in Yosemite National Park. It took years of political arm-bending and bureaucratic intrigue by politicians and businessmen, but in 1913 Congress
finally granted the city permission to build a dam in Yosemite. The controversial legislation infuriated environmental activist John Muir, who had led opposition to the project. In 1923, construction on the O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed and the valley that Muir described as “a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples” transformed into a massive reservoir. The Lake Tahoe and Truckee River system dodged a bullet, but a combative water war between California and Nevada was just heating up. Before a dam at Lake Tahoe converted it into a managed reservoir, water levels followed a natural rhythm. Each year, water volume was boosted by winter precipitation and then extended by snowmelt runoff. Subsequently, the amount of water rushing down the Truckee River in spring was based on the previous winter’s snowpack and its water content. By the end of the summer, however, the surplus water drained out, at which point the lake reached its natural rim at the outlet and flow into the Truckee River effectively stopped. But a reservoir with no storage is just a lake and the burgeoning development in the region demanded more. A dam to control water release from the Tahoe Basin was required.
Read more local history at TheTahoeWeekly.com In 1870 the California Legislature granted Donner Lumber and Boom Company a franchise to charge tolls for improving the Truckee River channel for floating timber downstream to Truckee sawmills. The outfit was a subsidiary of the omnipotent Central Pacific Railroad. The narrow, shallow mouth of Lake Tahoe’s outlet is favorable for regulating water drainage from Big Blue into the Truckee River and Donner Lumber and Boom Company constructed a substantial dam to control flow for the log drivers. The legislation restricted the floodgates to a maximum height of only 5 feet, but due to Lake Tahoe’s size, the dam had the capacity to restrain a large volume of water. Read Part II in the next edition and at TheTahoeWeekly.com. Tahoe historian Mark McLaughlin is a nationally published author and professional speaker. His award-winning books are available at local stores or at thestormking.com. You may reach him at mark@thestormking.com.
