Lake Tahoe Historical Resources

Special Collections

• Visual Resources for Tahoe Science
• Images of Lake Tahoe - Digital Project
• Lake Tahoe Manuscripts Guides
• Oral histories relating to Lake Tahoe

Library Resources

• Tahoe Research, Scholarship & Outreach
• Books and other materials in the library catalog

First Person Accounts Online: Early Exploration and Tourism

• First Sighting of Lake Tahoe by the John C. Fremont Expedition. John C. Fremont, 1844.
  Excerpts from Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and Northern California in the years 1943-'44 by Brevet Captain J.C. Fremont of the Topographical Engineers. Washington DC: Gales and Seaton, Printers. Includes an illustration and two maps.
• Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe. George Wharton James, 1915. New York: J. F. Tapley Co.
  A 385-page digital book. A history of the earlier years of the Tahoe area. Includes photographs; Tahoe-related appendices on Mark Twain, Thomas Starr King, John Le Conte, and John Vance Cheney (with excerpts of their writings) and resorts.
• Lake Tahoe and the High Sierras: A History of the Comstock Lode & Mines. Dan de Quille, 1889.
  Excerpts from A History of the Comstock Silver Lode and MinesVirginia, NV: F. Boegle. Dan De Quille was the editor of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City and chronicled much of the Comstock area history.
• Letters no. 1, 2, and 3 in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Isabella Bird, 1879.
  Letters written to her sister during her six-month journey by train and on horseback in the autumn and winter of 1873 from San Francisco to the Rockies. The first three pertain to the time she spent near Lake Tahoe. Originally published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York.
• Roughing It. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), 1872. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia.
  Semi-autobiographical account of Twain's real-life adventures in the 19th-century American West, as a frontier newspaper reporter, prospector, and writer. He went west by stagecoach to serve as personal secretary to his Orion, Secretary of the Nevada Territory.