This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

As Lake Tahoe became a popular destination for vacationers and tourists in the early twentieth century, demand for souvenirs and other mass-produced items grew rapidly. Travel photographers and enterprising commercial firms began to cater to an ever-increasing demand for souvenir images. The rise of offset printing and lithography led to the proliferation of printed postcards.

Visitors came to Lake Tahoe and the surrounding Sierra to enjoy a variety of recreational activities—including hiking, fishing, horseback riding, swimming, and boating. Increased access via railroad and automobile gave rise to tourism and a vibrant resort culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Just like today, visitors to Lake Tahoe in the early twentieth century, might have purchased postcards to send friends or to keep as personal mementos of their travels.

All postcards from the collection of Erik Flippo.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Illustrations by BillyHawk Enos, Kevin Jones, Charles Munroe, and Mauricio Sandoval

The Washoe people have lived in the Lake Tahoe region for countless generations. They shared a common language, ancestral traditions, legends, and a great reverence for the lake.

Cultural preservation, and specifically language preservation, is important to the Washoe people and the Washoe Tribe today. In an effort to revitalize Washoe language and traditions for future generations, the Tribe’s language program—known as the Patalŋi Me?k’i Head Start Immersion Nest—recently published a series of children’s books with support from the Administration for Native Americans.

Four artists, BillyHawk Enos, Kevin Jones, Charles Munroe, and Mauricio Sandoval, illustrated the legends. The stories were retold and translated by Lisa Enos and Washoe Elder Melba Rakow. This exhibition features the original illustrations.

The books accompanying these original artworks are for sale in the Museum Store. Sales help to support Washoe youth language revitalization programs.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

The Washoe people have lived in the Lake Tahoe region for countless generations. They referred to Lake Tahoe as DaɁawɁaga, or “edge of the lake,” because they lived around its shore. The term was eventually shortened to DaɁaw, from which the word “Tahoe” is derived.

Different Washoe groups gathered annually at the lake during late spring and summer where they caught fish and gathered plant foods. The Welmelti were from a territory located roughly north of the lake, the Ṕawalu or “valley people” lived to its west, and the Huŋalelti were from the southern region. During the winter months, they returned to the lake’s adjacent valleys where elevations were lower and temperatures milder.

The annual trip to DaɁaw was eagerly anticipated. Its pure waters offered more than simple benefits—it was the life-sustaining element for the land, the plants, the fish, the birds, the animals, and all the people who lived around it. Once the Washoe people arrived at DaɁaw, they blessed themselves and the water in celebration of the harmony that existed among the people, the land, and the water. Every notable geographic feature and stream had a Washoe name.

Today, Washoe people carry on the traditions of their ancestors and encourage younger generations to do the same. Programs related to Washoe language preservation, basket weaving, fishing, and other traditional activities are offered and encouraged through the Washoe Cultural Advisory Committee. Special access is also granted in areas around the lake where Washoe people continue to gather native plants and other resources. Lake Tahoe continues to be a special and sacred place to all Washoe people.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Tahoe’s hydrological impact extends far beyond its shores. The 400-square-mile greater Lake Tahoe watershed contains 63 tributaries, or streams, that flow into it from adjacent Sierra peaks. Lake Tahoe’s waters flow out and down the Truckee River 122 miles to the north and east before feeding Pyramid Lake, a terminus desert lake whose surface area rivals that of Tahoe and whose resources sustain the indigenous Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

Nineteenth-century artists depicted the region’s water in abundance—as a plentiful resource that could seemingly never be depleted. Recreation and agriculture, however, began to impact the larger watershed system’s water levels, clarity, and ecological makeup. The politics of how the lake’s water is distributed outside the Tahoe basin continues to be a complicated matter.

Today scientists race to study human impacts on Lake Tahoe so that conservation measures can be implemented to help manage the diverse interests that depend on the lake’s output. Federal officials declared parts of the Tahoe Basin a natural disaster area in 2014 due to severe drought and lack of water from diminishing snowmelt. Many living artists have created works that reflect on how issues related to water quality, distribution, and conservation affect the lake’s future.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Lake Tahoe experienced rapid growth after World War II. Residential populations at the lake grew steadily, and with the rise of the ski industry and other recreation businesses, the number of visitors to the lake skyrocketed. Growth and development in the region reached a tipping point in the 1950s and 1960s, as plans for high-rise casinos, shoreline freeways, sprawling ski resorts, landfill marinas, and a four-lane concrete bridge across Emerald Bay gained forward momentum.

In 1957, a gathering of concerned conservationists formed what became known as The League to Save Lake Tahoe. They coined the iconic tagline, “Keep Tahoe Blue,” a conservationist slogan that remains popular to this day. The attitude that unchecked growth at the lake was a foregone conclusion precipitated local resistance, and ultimately led to a unique bi-state agreement governing planning and management of the lake and its resources.

Today millions of people visit the Tahoe/Donner region annually and nearly 50,000 people call it their permanent home. In the twenty-first century, one’s experience of Tahoe is sure to be mediated by commercial enterprise, advertising, and limited access to much of the lake’s privately-owned shore. Contemporary artists and architects invite us to look carefully at how this human presence impacts the fragile Lake Tahoe basin.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

While the Civil War raged in the eastern United States and Tahoe’s lumber industry rose to prominence to service Nevada’s booming Comstock mines, the Lake Tahoe region began its transformation into a landscape of tourism, leisure, and recreation. Easy railroad and automobile access to the region accelerated the growth of resorts around the lake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Lake Tahoe became a place of rest and repose for the social and economic elite.

During this time resorts began to flourish, including Tahoe Tavern and the Grand Central Hotel near Tahoe City, the Glenbrook Inn on the east shore, and the Tallac Hotel on the south shore. As the region became more settled and accessible, artists could easily fold a visit to Lake Tahoe into their Pacific Coast travels, which might have also included a stay at Yosemite.

Many artists produced nostalgic or romantic images of the region, which were readily purchased as souvenirs by visitors and tourists. At the same time, many ofthe San Francisco Bay area’s most prominent architects were commissioned to design private residences in the Lake Tahoe basin, forever changing the nature of its built environment.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

In 1878, John Muir derided “the outlandish noise of loggers and choppers and screaming mills” that he witnessed during his stay at Lake Tahoe. The towering pine, cedar, and juniper stands in the Tahoe basin were quickly falling in the name of progress. Lumber was needed to construct railroad trestles and snow sheds over Donner Pass, to buttress the burgeoning underground mines of the Comstock, and to power the steam locomotives used to transport and process the ore. As populations and tourism increased in the region, timber was also used for resort and lodge structures on the panoramic shores of the lake.

The first sawmill at Lake Tahoe was built in 1860. The invention of the V-shaped flume and the completion of a narrow-gauge railroad vastly accelerated the transport of timber out of the Tahoe Basin. Muir returned to Lake Tahoe in 1888 and was deeply distressed by what he saw. Hillsides once covered in trees were barren. With the support of the railroad lobby and local timber baron Duane Bliss (who had, ironically, turned his logging property at Glenbrook into a tourist resort), Muir worked hard to have Lake Tahoe declared a national park. He came within only a few of the necessary votes in Congress, but the measure failed in 1889.

By 1900, almost a billion board feet of lumber had been removed from the Tahoe Basin and 60 percent of its lands had been harvested. Nineteenth-century painters and photographers rarely depicted the transformed landscape, and the few examples showing such subject matter are rare. In the twenty-first century, however, it is common for contemporary artists to explore issues related to forest conservation, reclamation, fire management, and sustainability in the region. Their work is on view alongside that of their historical predecessors.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

In 1844, trapper and frontiersman Elisha Stevens safely guided the first American emigrant wagons across the Sierra Nevada to California over what came to be known as Donner Pass. Two years later, the Donner Party sought to repeat this trek, but snow stranded them near the lake that would later bear the Donner name. Because of this disaster, a region destined to develop into a world-class destination first entered American history through a dystopian scenario of starvation, death, murder, and cannibalism.

One might think that the tragedy of the Donner Party would have provided a warning for generations to come. In the American West, however, dystopia remained a recurrent possibility. The Sierra Nevada and Donner Pass stood as a barrier to America’s desire to expand westward. As the transcontinental railroad neared completion in 1869, over 20,000 men were employed by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies in some capacity. Around 12,000 of them were Chinese immigrants working in the treacherous Sierra canyons. Accidents, avalanches, and explosions, according to some reports, left as many as 1,200 Chinese laborers dead.

The nineteenth-century paintings and photographs of Donner Pass seen throughout this exhibition tend to offer romantic views of picturesque rail cars and pristine landscapes. Whether intentionally or not, artists typically marginalized or ignored the presence of Chinese workers. Many Chinese and Chinese-American artists working today seek to revisit this visual history, producing artworks in a variety of media to honor and memorialize the stories of those who perished during the construction of the railroad.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

The Sierra Nevada range was a physical and symbolic obstacle to America’s western expansion in the nineteenth century. The legendary struggles of the Donner Party in the winter of 1847, along with an enterprising drive to surmount the summit via railroad, fueled a young nation’s “Manifest Destiny” to stretch its boundary from coast to coast. Artists depicted Donner Lake, the closest body of water to Donner Summit, more frequently than any other in the Sierra range. Unlike the flat, picturesque expanse of Lake Tahoe’s surface, the view of Donner Lake from the summit offered a dramatic, sublime vista layered with historical and symbolic significance.

Visiting artists, photographers, and other tourists often lodged at the Summit Hotel near the top of Donner Pass. Built in 1870, the hotel was a way station for travelers on the Central Pacific Railroad (completed in 1869) and a destination from which travelers could explore the surrounding mountain terrain. For the most part, early photographers such as Alfred A. Hart, Andrew Russell, and Carleton E. Watkins, as well as painters including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill, were drawn to the region because of lucrative commissions provided by railroad executives who sought grand images to celebrate and promote their transcontinental accomplishments.

The American conquest of the now-legendary summit predicted not only the joining of east and west with rails of steel, but the development of the entire far western United States—to which the Tahoe region stood as both barrier and gateway.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

During the Golden Age of American landscape painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lake Tahoe and its nearby lakes inspired paintings by artists who were primarily associated with the burgeoning art world of San Francisco. Lake Tahoe itself did not become a subject for serious artists until the 1860s after the discovery of silver on the nearby Comstock. Early tourists to the lake included the influential Unitarian minister, Thomas Starr King, who visited in the summer of 1863 and delivered a rapturous sermon on the beauties of the lake to San Franciscans upon his return—surely enticing many artists to visit.

From the 1860s through the 1880s Lake Tahoe was depicted by artists with an enhanced sense of realism known as the Hudson River School style. Painters associated with that style sought out beautiful natural landscapes and executed their paintings with considerable realism. At the same time, they sought to convey a spiritual or transcendental presence in their paintings to underscore the widely held nineteenth-century belief in nature’s divine origins. Like the California geologists John Muir and Joseph LeConte, many artists believed that nature was God’s handiwork. Painters visiting the Sierra reproduced natural features in ways that inspired thoughts of divinity: mountains were sublime and still water serene.

Many of America’s most noted nineteenth-century artists including  Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, John Ross Key, and William Marple considered Lake Tahoe a worthy subject for their landscape paintings. For most city dwellers of the time, the Sierra was considered a remote wilderness destination. However, one might experience a taste of the wilderness through the vicarious agency of a landscape painting. Contemplating a spiritually charged view of the lake in one’s San Francisco or New York living room could provide much of the same magic as being there in person. When exposed to a beautiful painting, the clamor and stress of urban life might be forgotten.