South Lake Tahoe

The discovery was accidental: Fremont was searching for the mythical "Buenaventura River" described to the area by some early geographers, and shown variously on regional maps as flowing into the Gulf of Mexico or San Francisco Bay.

Winter was not an auspicious time of year to travel the Sierra and Fremont's party had suffered severe hardships. Washoe Indian guides warned that no man had ever crossed the barrier in winter, and described the range simply but eloquently as consisting of "Rock on rock…snow on snow".

The discovery was a great morale-booster for the exploration party of 36 men, now in extremely bad physical shape and without a single sound pack animal. Just the night before, Fremont had written in his journal, "We had tonight an extraordinary meal…pea soup, mule and dog". From his first vantage point at the 10,000-foot level of what was probably either Steven's or Red Lake Peak, Fremont turned his eyes to the west, and there saw the sought-after pass. In his excitement at locating a way across the forbidding heights, Fremont neglected to name the magnificent lake he had discovered, but struck on with his exhausted party through the pass and down the south fork canyon of the American River to Sutter's Fort. The rigors of the journey can be better understood by considering the loss of all but 33 of his 67 pack animals, and though he did not lose a single man, two lapsed into insanity, unable to accept the monumental deprivation.

After his arrival at Stutter's Fort on March 8, Fremont wrote (as follows) of the 16-day journey from Carson Pass. "A more forlorn and pitiable (sight) than they presented cannot well be imagined. They were all on foot, each man weak and emaciated, leading a horse or mule as weak and emaciated as themselves. They had experienced great difficulty in descending the mountains, made slippery by rains and snows, and many horses fell over precipices and were killed…out of 67 animals with which we commenced crossing the Sierra, only 33 reached the valley out of the Sacramento, and they only in a condition to be led along."

Fremont left it to Mark Twain to wax lyrical on the subject of the lake's startling beauty, but he did rectify his earlier omission and designated it "Lake Bonpland" on his post-exploration maps of the region. (The name was bestowed in honor of the famed French explorer and botanist, Alme' J. Alexander Bonpland, who accompanied Baron Alex von Homboldt on his North American expedition.) Bonpland never came into general usage, however, nor did the other name, "Mountain Lake", also attributed to Fremont and shown on a few of his regional charts. By 1853 the lake's location was well enough established to enable the new State of California's official mapmaker to locate it with certain accuracy and name it…for some unknown reason…"Lake Bigler" in honor of the third governor of California, John Bigler. Both California and Nevada adopted the name, at least officially, but it rested uneasily on the crown jewel of the Sierra and in 1861 an attempt was made to change the name again, this time to the somewhat fanciful title "Tula Tulia". For better or worse, the effort failed and "Lake Bigler" remained in general use until late in 1862 when William Henry Knight, an early and wholehearted admirer of the basin, left the name Bigler off geological survey maps of the region he was preparing, and began a crusade to adopt the name Tahoe, the Indian name then most commonly accepted. As Knight explained, "I remarked (to many) that people had expressed dissatisfaction with the name "Bigler", bestowed in honor of a man who had not distinguished himself by any single achievement, and I thought now would be a good time to select an appropriate name and fix it forever on that beautiful sheet of water". And so it was that "Tahoe" appeared for the first time, at Knight's request, on federal maps issued from the Land Office in Washington, D.C. in 1862.