Lake Tahoe Trout, New York Forest, Fish and Game Commission, Seventh Report of the Forest, Fish and Game Commission of the State of New York, 1901, Albany, N.Y, J.B. Lyon Company.
The Lahontan cutthroat trout is the state fish of Nevada, and it’s what we’ll fish for in Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. You’d think that the name Lahontan was Native American: The Lahontan Sioux, the Lahontan Paiute, the Lahontan Comanche. Where the Lahontan cutthroat are located, west northwest Nevada, there was once, roughly 15,000 years ago, a Pleistocene lake covering much of the Great Basin: northwestern Nevada, southern Oregon, and northeastern California, and there are remnants of that lake, Pyramid Lake, Walker Lake, Lake Tahoe. Pyramid Lake was the deepest part of Lake Lahontan, with the lowest point 900 feet below the surface. Lake Lahontan was the historic range of the Lahontan cutthroat.
But back to the name Lahontan. The trout (and the ancient lake) were named after Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan, who was neither Sioux nor Paiute nor Comanche. Lahontan was a 17th century French explorer in Canada, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He never made it to Nevada. The name was chosen in the 1860s by a U.S. Geological Survey geologist, Clarence King, who admired Lahontan, or at least liked the name.
The Lahontan cutthroat was originally named the salmon trout because of its size, but unlike Lahontan that was a lousy name and didn’t stick. The Truckee River was originally named by John C. Frémont as the Salmon Trout River, but that didn’t stick either. Like I said, salmon trout as a name is lousy.
In the United States, Nevada seems always to be a one-trick pony, though that trick has changed over time. The current trick is tourism. The previous trick was mining precious metals, silver and gold, mostly silver. The original inhabitants, the four principal tribes, the Shoshone, Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Southern Paiute, plus the far west settlements of the Anasazi (or Puebloan as they now prefer to be called), got on well enough. They supplemented subsistence agriculture, beans, squash, and corn, with hunting and gathering. Ok, they ate desert lizards, but they also ate Lahontan cutthroats. They didn’t rely on silver or gambling. And they didn’t need Elton John, though maybe they would have liked him better than I do.
The Lahontan cutthroat was almost extinct by the 1940s, and the tie between mining and its extinction seems obvious. In 1860, the population of Nevada was 6,857. By 1870, after ten years of boom driven by silver and gold, the population was 42,941. It was during this period that Mark Twain went to Nevada with its new territorial secretary, Orion Clemens.
Over the next 40 years the market for precious metals went up and down, mines played out and new booms played out, mining towns like Belmont, Nelson, Unionville, Silver City, and Gold Point came and went. A United States mint was built in Carson City and then went away. Monetary policy favored silver as a base for U.S. currency, and then didn’t. Nevada was crucified on that cross of gold. In 1900, the population of Nevada was still 42,335. There had been some growth and some decline during the interim, but it didn’t stick.
Nevada had snuck into statehood during the Civil War–“Battle Born” appears on the state flag. It was a sure Republican vote for the 13th Amendment ending slavery. But Nevada’s mining population wasn’t very stable and the state didn’t exactly lend itself to other kinds of economic development, desert lizards not being an exportable dietary commodity. I’m sure they’re fine, and I’m sure they’ll be appearing on the menu of some New American restaurant in Brooklyn soon, but meantime by 1900 Nevada residents were stuck in a 20-year economic depression. At one point the population was so small that removal of statehood was seriously considered. How can a state with 20,000 eligible voters have two senators and a congressman?
Between 1904 and 1913 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation constructed Lake Tahoe Dam and Derby Dam as part of a series of dams to divert waters from Lake Tahoe to agriculture land as part of it’s Newlands Project. The Lake Tahoe Dam controls flow from Lake Tahoe, the Derby Dam diverts water from the Truckee River drainage into Lake Lahontan and the Carson River watershed. That water irrigates something over 50,000 acres, which is a lot to an Easterner, but really not so much. It was the first project of the newly created U.S, Reclamation Service. New lands for old!
One can just see the engineer’s and politician’s minds a-spinning: silver is pretty much done, the senators from Nevada won’t leave me alone, and the state otherwise can’t support much settlement. We’ll transform the region into the Garden of Eden! With farming! Not that farming ever appeared to be all that much fun to me, though I’m thankful somebody does it.
The result was that Lake Winnemucca Lake, a sister-lake to Lake Pyramid, lost all inflow and dried up. Lake Pyramid lost 80 feet of lake elevation. Lahontan cutthroat trout, already decimated by a commercial fishery supplying California and the mining boom with salmon trout, no longer had sufficient flows or water quality in the Truckee for the native fish to move upriver to spawn–they are their own kind of mildly anadromous migratory fish. By 1943, the Pyramid Lake population was extinct. On the other side of the Lake Tahoe Dam, in Lake Tahoe, predation by introduced lake trout and hybridization with rainbows wiped out the Lahontan cutthroat by the 1930s.
There is an amazing story of the discovery of pure-strain Lahontan cutthroats in the 1970s high in the Sierras (of course it would be a better Nevada story if they were living with a striper in Vegas). They were recovered, hatchery-raised, and reintroduced to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee. By 2013, Pyramid Lake anglers standing on ladders were once again catching 20-pound Lahontans. These can be big fish, and the record fish, 41 pounds, was caught in Pyramid Lake in 1901. Reading about the Pyramid Lake fishery by those who care about it, there is an almost religious conviction that soon a 30-pounder will be caught.
The Cui-ui, a lake sucker important to the diet of the Northern Paiute, was also decimated in the 20th Century and has also recovered (also supported by hatcheries), but it’s not much of a fishing target, so it’s not news unless you’re the Northern Paiute. Pyramid Lake, by the way, is managed by the Pyramid Lake Paiute, and the return of both the Cui ui and the Lahontan cutthroat is thanks in big part to tribal management. One doubts that if they’d had anything to say about it they would have allowed the irrigation diversion in the first place. One suspects what makes the Garden of Eden is always relative.
