CHAPTER XVII
HISTORIC TAHOE TOWNS
There have been only three towns on the immediate banks of Lake Tahoe, viz., Tahoe City, Glenbrook and Incline, though Knoxville was located on the Truckee River only six miles away.
Tahoe City. Tahoe City was founded in 1864 at the collapse of the Squaw Valley mining excitement, the story of which is fully related in another chapter. Practically all its first inhabitants were from the deserted town of Knoxville. They saw that the lumbering industry was active and its permanence fully assured so long as Virginia City, Gold Hill and other Nevada mining-camps remained profitable. The forests around the Lake seemed inexhaustible, and there was no need for them to go back to an uncertainty in the placer mines of El Dorado County, when they were pretty sure to be able to make a good living here. They, also, probably exercised a little imagination and saw the possibilities of Lake Tahoe as a health and pleasure resort. Its great beauty must have impressed them somewhat, and the exploitation of these features may have occurred to them.
Anyhow, in 1864, the Bailey Hotel was erected, and, later, a man named Hill erected the Grand Central. The Squaw Valley excitement had attracted a number from the Nevada camps, and when these men returned they took with them glowing accounts of the beauty of Lake Tahoe, and of the fishing and hunting to be enjoyed there. Thus the Lake received some of its earliest resort patronage. During lumbering days it was an active, bustling place, being the nearest town to which the loggers, drivers, tree-fellers, millmen and others could flee for their weekly recreation and periodic carouses. Yet it must not be thought that the town was wholly given over to roughness. Helen Hunt Jackson, a widely traveled and observant woman of finest susceptibilities, says of the Lake Tahoe House, which she visited in stage-coach days, that it was "one of the very best in all California." It was the stopping-place of the élite who came to see and enjoy Tahoe, and until later and more fashionable hotels were built around the Lake enjoyed great popularity.
As soon as the logging industry declined Tahoe City began to go down, and only the fishing and tourist interests kept it alive.
When the railway was moved over from Glenbrook and the shops and yard of the Transportation Company were established here it regained some of its former activity and life, and is now the chief business center on the Lake. It is the headquarters of the campers who come for pleasure each year, and its store does a very large and thriving business. New cottages are being erected and it is destined ere long to be a stirring pleasure resort town, for, as the delights of Tahoe become more widely known, every available piece of land will increase in value and where there is now one summer home there will be a hundred.
Glenbrook. On the Nevada side of the Lake, Glenbrook used to be one of the most active, busy, bustling towns in the west. It scarcely seems credible to one who visits the quiet, placid resort of to-day that when I first saw it, some thirty years ago, it had three or four large sawmills in constant operation, day and night. It was then regarded, and so designated in the History of Nevada, published in 1881, as "the great lumber manufacturing town of the state."
The town was begun in 1860, the land being squatted upon by G.W. Warren, N.E. Murdock, and R. Walton. In 1861 Captain A.W. Pray erected a saw-mill, run by water-power, but as water sometimes failed, when the demand for lumber increased, he changed to steam-power. He also secured a thousand acres, much of it the finest timber land, from the government, using in its purchase Sioux Scrip.