After spending a couple of years in Virginia City writing for the Territorial Enterprise, Mark Twain allegedly said, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” This quotation hasn’t been verified as Twain’s, but it sounds like his folksy wit and sharp eye for the reality beneath the romance. Purple mountain majesty aside, no resource is more essential, and more contested, than water in the West.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that water rights for Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River have been fought over since Europeans first settled the region. In fact, the Truckee is among the most litigated waterways in the country.
By 1930, those tensions nearly erupted into violence. As Nevada interests began digging a diversion ditch at Tahoe City during a deep drought, armed locals confronted them, and only a community blockade and last-minute injunction prevented a Wild West–style shootout.
Whose water is it?
Lake Tahoe’s only outlet in Tahoe City is the source of the Truckee River, which terminates 120 miles later in Nevada at Pyramid Lake. It may seem strange that Nevada can claim water from across the state line. After all, Lake Tahoe Dam and three-fifths of the lake itself lie within the Golden State. Yet few people realize that Tahoe is regulated primarily for Nevada interests, including flood protection and water storage.
When Nevada Territory achieved statehood in 1864 it adopted the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation water policy. The idea is “first in time, first in right,” meaning that the first person or entity to take a quantity of surface or groundwater and put it to beneficial use has more rights than a subsequent user. Nevada has proven in federal courts that it preceded California in tapping the Truckee River for beneficial use, and the fact that the vast majority of the river flows through Nevada hasn’t hurt their case.
The first dam at the Lake Tahoe outlet was a rock-filled wooden barricade, built in 1870 by the Donner Lumber and Boom Company to store water for fluming logs down the Truckee River. The Truckee River General Electric Company later acquired the dam and enlarged it for downstream power generation. But the higher levels of impounded water encroached on private lakefront property, damaging piers, boathouses and beaches. It also eroded the shoreline, negatively affecting water quality and clarity. Not only that, but western Nevada vehemently protested at what they saw as choking off their main water source. One Reno editor wrote at the time that Tahoe water was a “God-given right to the Silver State” and that the dam builders “should certainly be the ones damned instead of damming the Truckee.”
In 1902 President Teddy Roosevelt signed into law the Newlands Reclamation Act, authorizing massive federally funded irrigation projects in the arid West. Its first goal was to transform western Nevada into farmland by diverting Truckee River water into the Lahontan Valley. Despite the high deserts to the east receiving only about four inches of annual precipitation, government engineers assured all users of the Truckee River, including the Paiute tribe on the shores of Pyramid Lake, that there would be plenty of water for everyone.
In 1909, the agency soon to be known as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation obtained control of the Tahoe City damsite and began building what still stands today — a robust concrete slab and buttress dam that boosted the volume as well as the maximum elevation of the lake’s water. Tahoe lakefront property owners were once again alarmed, but federal officials negotiated immunity from any problems caused by higher water levels. In exchange for purchasing landowners’ water rights, the feds required them to sign quitclaims releasing the government from any liability associated with the potential impact of managing the lake as a huge reservoir for Nevada farmers.
By the early 20th century, forecasting and managing the Truckee’s seasonal fluctuations had become easier, in theory at least, thanks to Dr. James E. Church. A winter backcountry enthusiast in his spare time, this University of Nevada, Reno art professor developed a snow survey system that measured the water content of Tahoe’s snowpack. The federal watermaster in Reno could then make a data-driven decision on how much water to release and make room for spring snowmelt. Church’s methodology is still used today.
But it is sheer hubris to think that in a western climate that fluctuates between desiccating dry spells and heavy wet winters, Lake Tahoe can be kept in perfect equilibrium to satisfy all user demands.
Water wars
During the historic drought of 1924 to 1935, Lake Tahoe’s water level fell below its rim eight separate years. The Truckee was often just a trickle, when it ran at all. Nevada farmers clamored for the water they were promised by the government. To get it, they threatened lawsuits seeking reimbursement for crop losses from lakefront property owners, whom they characterized as “millionaire pleasure seekers” standing in the way of “the people” who were converting deserts into productive croplands.
In 1924, a contingent of Nevada farmers openly threatened to dynamite the rock ledge that forms the natural rim of Big Blue to permanently increase flow into the Truckee River. Their monkeywrenching failed to materialize, but its threat intensified the ongoing and contentious hydra-headed negotiations between Tahoe property owners’ associations, power companies, commercial interests, both state governments, the feds, and downstream water users.
In July 1930, the lake’s water levels had fallen below the rim for the second year straight and farmers were pleading in vain for permission to pump 75,000 extra acre-feet of water from the lake. On Aug. 1, Nevada “water interests,” with a police escort, trucked a steam-powered excavator to Tahoe City and began digging a diversion ditch around the dam. Although the Army Corps of Engineers later decreed that this would have been legal, based on guaranteed flows stipulated in the original agreement, property owners and resort operators were not in favor of seeing the lake level drop any further. Rumors spread that Nevada instigators might be tempted to dynamite the dam itself.
Locals drummed up a posse, some armed, and confronted the unwelcome visitors, and a violent Wild West-style shootout was narrowly averted. The next night, 60 Tahoe locals waded into the chilly waters to block the ditch intake with sandbags. Others began filling in the ditch itself, and one sabotaged the excavator by removing its alternator.
A guard was posted at the dam, including Placer County Sheriff Elmer Gum, four of his deputies, and the county assistant district attorney. Within a few days Gum presented a temporary injunction to cease and desist obtained by irate Lake Tahoe property owners, and the workmen took themselves and their excavator back down the hill.
As the multi-year drought was parching Nevada’s farmlands, protracted legal wrangling continued among the usual suspects over lake levels, dam releases, and damages to crops and livestock. It was an endless and acrimonious series of meetings, conferences, negotiations, and outright legal confrontations. One participant, a World War I veteran, compared the discussions to trench warfare. “The second battle of the Marne and Château Thierry,” he said afterwards, “had nothing on some of these battles.” The result was that state and federal officials, rather than strictly local interests, began to take charge, mediating between farmers, utility companies, lakefront owners, and the Tahoe tourism industry.
Ultimately, pumps were installed and over several ensuing drought years, more than 117,000 acre-feet of water was sucked from the lake to satisfy downstream demand. Newspapers reported rumors that unnamed Tahoe inhabitants were intent on sabotaging the pumps or blowing them up completely. Placer County law enforcement warned everyone to keep their cool, and further confrontations were barely averted between the warring parties.
For Tahoe property owners, anger at too much water when the dam went in turned into fear of too little water as, every second they were activated, the pumps collectively injected 200 acre-feet of Tahoe into the Truckee River. There was talk of a tunnel and spillway that would send Tahoe water to the Washoe Valley. Locals fretted openly about a nefarious plot to “drain the lake.” To deal with the blowback from California, a consortium of Nevada water agencies, the cities of Reno and Sparks, and Washoe County hired an army of lawyers to argue their interest in pumping Tahoe whenever necessary, for as long as necessary.
Arbitration, negotiation, and litigation have continued into the 21st century, and it’s a fragile truce at times. The latest compromise, the Truckee River Operating Agreement, was not finalized until 2017. But, as Twain might put it, the fight ain’t over. Not by a long shot.
~ Award-winning historian Mark McLaughlin is Lake Tahoe’s most prolific author and public speaker. He has been writing from the mountains he calls home for nearly 50 years. David Fenimore moved to Kings Beach in 1974 and recently retired after 35 years teaching English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Get Your Butt Over to Fanny Bridge on May 17!
Tahoe’s 117-year-old dam is still doing the job, its pumps and outlet gates controlled by Federal Water Master Chad Blanchard in downtown Reno, and to date no more Nevada alfalfa or cantaloupe farmers nor lakefront landowners have threatened to blow it up or dig a diversion ditch. Built 20 years after the dam, however, historic Fanny Bridge was due for a seismic retrofit.
According to Jared Deck, Placer County Deputy Director of Public Works, “The bridge was about 100 years old, and at that point, concrete starts to degrade.” A few years ago, federal, county, and local agencies finally came up with the $10 million needed to build a wider single-span structure with expanded car, bike, and pedestrian lanes, and plenty of room for the iconic row of rearview looky-loos that long ago gave the bridge its now-indelible if still unofficial name. Opened to traffic last February, the brand-new Fanny Bridge will be fêted in an afternoon celebration and block party on Sunday May 17, from 12:30 to 5 p.m., featuring music by the Blues Monsters and fun activities for the whole family.
~ David Fenimore
