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The Mountain Sea article
Story by Suzanne Stone,
apparently from the fall 1998 issue of something
called the Tahoe Artifacts.
Rescued from Google's cache Dr. Lyndall Landauer. Ah, for the good old days at Lake Tahoe when tourism was in its infancy. The most elegant hotel, Glen Brook House, cost only $4 a day in gold or $5 in currency. That was in 1863 when the first travelers came to the lake for recreation. However, traffic jams were already a well-established tradition in summer. The road over Spooner Summit to Carson City, then called Eagle Valley, was congested from sunup to sundown with gold and silver seekers headed for the Comstock Lode in Virginia City. Adventurers waited for hours to join the long line of wagon trains. Similarly, the road over Echo Summit was crowded with cows, chickens and sheep as well as wagon trains. It took seven days to travel between Placerville and Lake Valley. During that same era, sight-seeing excursionists circumnavigated the entire lake for the first time on the "Governor Blasdel," a side-wheel steamer. Cattle roamed Lake Valley's meadows in large numbers and Lake Tahoe was becoming well-known for its butter. Soon after the first settlers established themselves, gambling also became a well established tradition at wayside stations, hotels and casinos. These and many more facts about Lake Tahoe can be found in The Mountain Sea: A History of Lake Tahoe by Lyndall Baker Landauer. A resident of Lake Tahoe for many years, Landauer became intrigued with the jumble of fact and fiction about Lake Tahoe's past. As editor of the Lake Tahoe Historical Society's monthly newsletter, Landauer began writing short historical articles about the lake each month. In pursuit of facts for these articles, she found herself traveling all over California and Nevada, visiting libraries and museums of all sizes and descriptions. From the huge Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to the substantial libraries in Reno, to the cozy little libraries around Lake Tahoe at Zephyr Cove, Kings Beach, Incline Village, Tahoe City, South Lake Tahoe and Placerville -- she visited them all. It became obvious that someone needed to step in and make historical order out of the confusion. Although many books had been written about Lake Tahoe, none created a complete record of the area's past. "For a historian trying to find trends, it was impossible," said Landauer. Academically trained, Landauer has a Phd. degree in history from the University of California. In 1989, she decided that she would be the one to write that badly needed history. Thus, she began The Mountain Sea, the first complete history of Lake Tahoe. "I have to know how things begin -- why we walk along this road," she said. "I want to know why something happens. I have an inner curiosity that leads me to write history." Well-versed in California history, Landauer had previously written a biography of Charles Melville Scammon, Beyond the Lagoon, for the Pacific Maritime History Series. The early California whaling captain, explorer and naturalist, Scammon gave his name to Scammon's Lagoon in Baja California. Landauer has a long history of personal associations with Lake Tahoe. Growing up in Oakland, Calif., she vacationed at Lake Tahoe with her family for many summers. As a youth, she rode horses in the meadow area which is now paved and called the "Y" Shopping Center. At that time, Lampson's was the only store, a homey meat market and grocery store. She recalls dancing in the evenings at Globin's A1 Tahoe, a chalet built out over the water on the lake shore. Fortuitously, just after Landauer began the task of compiling Lake Tahoe's history into one book, the Lake Tahoe School District passed a requirement that all teachers must take a one-unit course in Lake Tahoe history. This requirement was an added spur to complete the book. "I knew they wouldn't have my book for some years," she said. Since the book was not yet written, she offered a course for teachers in Lake Tahoe's history at the local community college. Thus the teachers' needs and her own motivation as a historian both contributed to her determination to write.
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