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Iron Duke in 1873, tied up at Tahoe Citys Custom House and Pier. Photo courtesy of California State Library |
CommentsTahoe's Nautical Lore
Published: May 7, 2008by Terray Sylvester
The small vessel Fleta in Emerald Bay, summer 1883. The booze must be belowdecks. Photo courtesy of California Historical Society
From 1953 to 1958 The Mapes Mile High Gold Cup races drew professional hydroplane competitors from around the country. Tahoe City buildings can be seen in the background.
photo by George Klass
Click on images for slideshow
The Iron Duke and the “Unsailable” Lake
These days the entrepreneurs of Squaw Valley make their money stringing ski lifts up the mountains and laying golf links in the meadow, but in the mid 1800s the valley was home to business people of a different stripe. Though their main interest lay with the land, the search for profits led them to build the largest wind-powered freighter Lake Tahoe has ever known.
Some of their last names were Fish, Ferguson, Coggins and Smith, and though the history books these days commonly refer to those four, there were probably others involved as well. The men had originally traveled to the Truckee River watershed in search of gold, but the easy riches never panned out. So the would-be prospectors partnered up and looked to the grasses of the Squaw Valley’s meadow for a more reliable source of livelihood. The group began harvesting feed for the hard-working mules, horses, oxen and other beasts of burden owned by the miners in the area. At some point, they must have decided their goods deserved a wider market, because in the spring of 1860 they began building a ship to take them there.
The men built the Iron Duke near present day Tahoe City. Once complete she stretched 60 feet from bow to stern and boasted two masts, each of which stood taller than 40 feet and measured three feet through at deck level. There was enough room onboard for 125 tons of hay, a bounty that would have fetched a small fortune at Lapham’s Landing or the Lakehouse Fishery Wharf on the southeast shore of the lake. With so many animals headed over Kingsbury Grade to the Comstock Lode, feed was selling for $250 per ton. According to Carol Van Etten, who works as a historian for the museum and has published a number of books on Tahoe’s history, $250 was more than most people of the period made in a month.
The Iron Duke carried hay, passengers, and other cargo around Tahoe until she was sold to Joseph A. Todman in 1867. For a little over a decade Todman put her to use as a lumber and general cargo ship, but eventually she was abandoned to rot on the South Point of Glenbrook Bay. She was picked over for scraps and burned in 1884.
By the time Iron Duke met her end, steamers had become established as the most effective means of transport on Lake Tahoe. This was partly because the lake had developed a reputation for being “unsailable.” The topography of the area made for squirrelly, unpredictable winds and a rash of capsized sailboats and drownings had thickened the atmosphere of danger. Though if Van Etten has it right, the hazard had a human component.
“There’s some (evidence that) a great many of the folks who lost their lives were actually under the influence,” Van Etten said. “So maybe it wasn’t that you couldn’t sail the lake, it was just that you couldn’t sail the lake drunk.”
It took 50 years for sailing to return to the lake. In the early 1940s a former Norwegian Navy sailor named Rusty Rustadt brought up a handful of heavy wooden Bear boats. But the Bears were hard to pull out of the water in the winter and it wasn’t until lighter craft began arriving in the second half of the 1940s that recreational sailing became popular.
Museum member and former trustee Bill Briner began bringing up plywood craft in 1947.
“Modern sailing took off in the early 1950s, late 1940s, and became very popular,” Briner said. “(Rustadt) and I established the basis to get people feeling like they wanted to go out on the water in a sailboat.”
After some debate, sailors were allowed to join the Tahoe Yacht Club, and eventually Briner organized the first Trans Tahoe Regatta around the lake. At one time the race drew 140 participants. The 45th running will be held this summer – minus roughly 100 boats.
“It’s a little more reasonable now,” Briner said.
1925 - 1984: Decades of Engines
An older trophy may eventually turn up in someone’s attic, but for now historians call a silver cup from 1914 evidence of the first organized power boat competition on Tahoe. The race took place during the Fourth of July celebrations at Hotel Tallac and the winning boat was pushed along by a 40-horsepower automobile engine. Over the next decade resorts around the lake hosted races, but these were unconnected events. As interest in the new sport began to grow, participants decided to get organized.
The creation of the Tahoe Power Boat Club – the antecedent to the Yacht Club – in 1925 marked the beginning of an era; for the next 60 years petrol-powered races would be contested each summer almost without exception. They became an integral element of the boating life in the basin, and though the first competitors strained to tip the 20 mph mark, their early matches paved the way for the world-class hydroplanes that howled over Lake Tahoe in the last years of the 20th century.
The Tahoe Power Boat Club was formed to “promote sociability, power boating, and other aquatic sports and good sportsmanship on Lake Tahoe.” It was renamed the Tahoe Yacht Club in 1939, and by that time the Depression had slightly dampened its members’ passion for racing. But before the stock market collapse of 1929, petrol fumes were a familiar scent on the summer air.
“At first, they were going gangbusters,” Van Etten said.
Before Black Tuesday the club staged as many as four regattas each year. After the crash the number dropped to two and stayed there. The festivities began by 9 a.m. and awards were generally handed out around noon. A variety of races were staged: there were competitions organized by engine power – after all a 100 horsepower Stephens runabout couldn’t match a 325 horsepower GarWood – as well as handicap events open to everybody, relays, and an “unlimited” championship race whose prize went to the fastest craft on the lake that day.
Randy Walker, a former yacht club commodore whose family had competed since the inception of the regattas, described the races as a mixture of good community amusement and hard competition. Folks had a chance to go waterskiing before the races and then take a spin in their boats afterwards as well.
“They were mainly for people who wanted to race their boats for fun although none of us thought it was for fun – we were serious about it,” Walker said. “These races were really designed for pleasure boats and that’s unique to Tahoe. Most races (elsewhere) were for very fast boats.”
According to the historian Van Etten, however, the family pleasure boats remained competitive in the championship races only until 1928, from that year on the open division was dominated by custom boats and the few people rich enough to possess them.
From the beginning, the Club’s races had been the territory of the upper crust. In 1921 a mahogany Chris-Craft cost $4,450 while, according to maritime museum staff, a new home went for $3,000. As a result, the challengers were men such as automaker Norman DeVaux and playboy Walter Scott Hobart Jr., who raced on the timber fortune amassed by his father.
In the 1930s and 1940s other familiar names appeared. R. Stanley Dollar Jr. raced successfully on Lake Tahoe – and around the world – from 1929 to 1954. He was the grandson of shipping magnate Robert Dollar, and when it was purchased in 1927 his family estate stretched from present-day Carnelian Bay to Lake Forest. Dollar frequently challenged Henry J. Kaiser who, between 1931 and 1935, managed to maintain a presence in the Tahoe race scene while his cement company contributed to the construction of the Hoover Dam. The concrete was still cooling in the Colorado River when Kaiser drained 16 acres of wetlands on Tahoe’s west shore and built his mansion, Fleur du Lac. Later, he went on to build ships for the war effort and create Health Care giant, Kaiser Permanente.
As Van Etten describes it, the line between Tahoe’s power boat races and the world of high finance was for many years a thin one.
“They were very competitive people. They were the upper class and they didn’t get that way by accident,” Van Etten said. “The enthusiasm these champions of industry showed for the Power Boat Club races was equal to the kind they displayed in their work. The following morning in the boardroom in San Francisco it was very important who won the regatta last weekend up at Tahoe.”
After the Second World War a wider portion of the population was able to participate in the power boat races, even as the fastest craft became more specialized. Wartime advances in mass production made speedboats more affordable, while at the same time surplus airplane engines began finding their way into boats that looked less like the woodies of the 1930s and more like something that would have been a threat in the Pacific Theater.
During the war, the Air Force had stored aircraft engines in a warehouse it leased from the Dollars. However, after hostilities concluded Washington flaked out on the rent and the Dollars found themselves in possession of the motors. One such engine, the 1,500 horsepower Allison V-1710, was designed to power P-82 Mustang warplanes, but now began appearing in Tahoe regattas.
In 1949, Dollar’s Allison-powered Skipalong of California – which had been making waves on the professional circuit – put in an appearance at the August 14 regatta and promptly sank in 500 feet of water near Sunnyside. She stayed down there for 30 years. In 1951, Kaiser’s own 1,500 horsepower craft, Fleur Du Lac, won a Tahoe regatta while zipping along at average speeds near 80 miles per hour in the water off Chamber’s Landing.
Dollar, Kaiser and other Tahoe Yacht Club racers had also been competing in the Gold Cup races staged by the American Power Boat Club. The Gold Cup was a national circuit that touched down in the Detroit River, Puget Sound and other water bodies. From 1953 to 1958 it came to Tahoe. According to Van Etten the matches drew crowds of several thousand people and were staged on courses just off Camp Richardson, Chambers Landing, and Commons Beach in Tahoe City.
But the Mapes Mile-High Gold Cup races, as they were called, proved unpopular with the locals. After the 1958 competition, folks at Tahoe decided they’d had enough.
“(The Gold Cup) always drew a big crowd but there was not much support for it in the community, which is kind of essential if you’re going to bring a national event to your town and your town is 2,000 people,” Van Etten said. “A lot of people thought it was too loud and the crowd wasn’t the kind of crowd they wanted.”
The Gold Cup races moved to Pyramid Lake for a few years and then left the area, and though Bill Harrah and others tried to resuscitate unlimited hydroplane racing on Tahoe their efforts fell flat. The most recent high-speed competition, called the High Sierra Shootout, took place in 1995 and 1996. However, they weren’t spectator-friendly events because modern Coast Guard restrictions required the races to be held far from shore. Locals also protested the noise and pollution. As Van Etten sees it those were the last unlimited races likely to be waged on the waters of Lake Tahoe.
But what of the Yacht Club Regattas?
“The inboard races never really changed until 1984,” Walker said.
Though the fastest boats – the ones souped-up by the biggest pocket books – had begun competing around the world, local events continued until liability concerns, proliferating buoy fields, and the regulations on near-shore high-speed boating made the races unfeasible.
“It was getting harder to see,” Walker said. “We used to race right up to the edge of the pier. I can remember practically clipping both the (Tahoe) Tavern and the Chamber’s (Landing) piers back when I was racing in the late 1940s.”
To Walker, the races were a singular piece of Tahoe history.
“I don’t think you would find anything like these (races) anywhere else. I really think it was unique,” he said. “It continued for almost 60 years. It was a piece of Tahoe that a lot of people have forgotten about.”
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