e home to the Tavern.

The reader should observe that in this, as in the chapter on "Trail
Trips," only a sample is given of a score or more of similar trips.
His host at any of the hotels can suggest others equally interesting.

CHAPTER XVII

HISTORIC TAHOE TOWNS

There have been only three towns on the immediate banks of Lake Tahoe,
viz., Tahoe City, Glenbrook and Incline, though Knoxville was located
on the Truckee River only six miles away.

_Tahoe City_. Tahoe City was founded in 1864 at the collapse
of the Squaw Valley mining excitement, the story of which is fully
related in another chapter. Practically all its first inhabitants
were from the deserted town of Knoxville. They saw that the lumbering
industry was active and its permanence fully assured so long as
Virginia City, Gold Hill and other Nevada mining-camps remained
profitable. The forests around the Lake seemed inexhaustible, and
there was no need for them to go back to an uncertainty in the placer
mines of El Dorado County, when they were pretty sure to be able
to make a good living here. They, also, probably exercised a little
imagination and saw the possibilities of Lake Tahoe as a health and
pleasure resort. Its great beauty must have impressed them somewhat,
and the exploitation of these features may have occurred to them.

Anyhow, in 1864, the Bailey Hotel was erected, and, later, a man
named Hill erected the Grand Central. The Squaw Valley excitement had
attracted a number from the Nevada camps, and when these men returned
they took with them glowing accounts of the beauty of Lake Tahoe, and
of the fishing and hunting to be enjoyed there. Thus the Lake received
some of its earliest resort patronage. During lumbering days it was an
active, bustling place, being the nearest town to which the loggers,
drivers, tree-fellers, millmen and others could flee for their weekly
recreation and periodic carouses. Yet it must not be thought that the
town was wholly given over to roughness. Helen Hunt Jackson, a widely
traveled and observant woman of finest susceptibilities, says of the
Lake Tahoe House, which she visited in stage-coach days, that it was
"one of the very best in all California." It was the stopping-place of
the _elite_ who came to see and enjoy Tahoe, and until later
and more fashionable hotels were built around the Lake enjoyed great
popularity.

As soon as the logging industry declined Tahoe City began to go down,
and only the