Robert C.
Yelp
A covered wagon stands outside this building, a stark contrast to the cars whizzing by on busy South Lake Tahoe Blvd.
The museum depicts the first encounters of the white settlers with the Indians, the scouts and wilderness explorers who discovered the lake for the later settlers, the covered wagons of the settlers.
One exhibit has a steel covered wooden wheel of the covered wagons. Another exhibit has the saws used to cut down lumber, needed in building the water stream carriers for finding and extracting the silver in nearby Virginia City in the 1850s.
Another exhibit has the steamboats that crossed the Lake, pulling cut down lumber to the lumber mills on the edge of the lake. Still another exhibit has the outfits worn by the ladies of the day.
To tie all this together is a 45 minute film on the history of Lake Tahoe in the 19th century, including the toll roads and toll operators who maintained the roads, regulating the unending flow of prospectors going to Virginia City from California.
People were charged, as was livestock, including cattle, hogs, etc. Veterans and people going to church were exempt.
Fascinating stuff including the wagon coach drives speeding recklessly around blind curves, carrying passengers to their destination, until they met a coach going the other way. In the crash, both people and horses were killed or maimed.
Similar stories of teams of oxen pulling wagons laden with scores of timber, until they lost control going downhill around the inevitable curves in the dirt roads.
Those were exciting and dangerous times for man and beast.
