Frederick Lander was part of several expeditions of the 1850s to locate a route for a Pacific Railroad. There would be many turn of events during this time period, among them the nation’s civil war. When Lander arrived in the Smoke Creek/Honey Lake area, it just happened with the outbreak of the Pyramid Lake War of 1860, and there were several contributing events in the Honey Lake Valley that had a bearing. Lander was caught in the middle. He did keep an excellent account of those activities, which were published by the Desert Research Institute in 1993 with Joy Cleland as editor.

On a side note, even though he died in 1862, one hundred and thirty three years his estate funded a re-photographic survey of Eagle Lake; where in using photographs of the early 1900s, Desert Research Institute went back to those sites to photograph and examine the changes.

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