On March 3, 1853, the United States Congress passed the first Act for surveys of a transcontinental railroad route. During the next two years, government survey parties explored the West looking for feasible routes. Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith was in charge of one of those expeditions. Beckwith surveyed Northern California and Western Nevada in search of a pass over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. On July 3, 1854, Beckwith’s party discovered Eagle Lake. Beckwith wrote: “. . . soon after leaving our morning camp, the road led over a low rocky butte, from which we had a fine view of the lake, a few miles to the northeast. It is several miles in extent and is set beautifully blue in the mountains, which rise from 500 to 1,000 feet above it, covered with majestic pines. It has no outlet. We gave it the name of Eagle Lake.”
Local folklore is that the lake was misnamed for the ospreys, that are abundant at the lake, and that the ospreys were mistaken for eagles. That is doubtful, since the bald eagle population of the 1850s was much greater than it is today. It must also be taken into account that the early day explorers and settlers, too, were keenly aware of the variety of species of birds and animals. To substantiate the fact that the lake’s name was not a misnomer for the osprey, there are accounts in the 1920s by field scientists who asked the same question of the “old timers”, who replied that it was named for the bald eagles.

There have been several comments posted last year, that a short sentence would not suffice, so I will slowly start responding. One reader wanted to know the status of Eagle Lake’s Gallatin House. Malvena Gallatin spent the Christmas of 1944 there and it would be her last visit. When she passed away in 1956, she left the two-acre parcel to her only great-grandchild, Wyn Wachhorst. When Wyn visited the place once in the 1960s the “Gallatin furniture was piled high inside,” but no one ever used it. In 1975, it was sold to the Lassen National Forest.

In the mid-1980s, Lassen National Forest Supervisor Dick Henry wanted to demolish the structure. Needless to say the battle line was drawn. The late Valerie Campbell and myself began a campaign to save Gallatin House. I will spare everyone the details, but in the end we along with so many others who fought to preserve prevailed. In 1988, the forest service issued a use permit to thirty-five acres, which includes Gallatin House for Camp Ronald McDonald at Eagle Lake. The Gallatin House has been maintained and used for administration purposes and two front rooms are intact just as it was back in the day when Gallatin’s owned it.

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Bly Tunnel Inlet

While I have been busy with the end of the year chores, like filing, not one of my favorite tasks. Anyhow, I came across this particular photograph of the construction of the Bly Tunnel inlet at Eagle Lake that my grandmother Lola Murrer Tanner. Hopefully, in 2018 I will be able to get out and about more, and even visit this site, which has been sealed and covered with the tailings from the construction.

Awhile back a friend sent me an article about Chico State’s Eagle Lake Biological Field Station, that I have wrote about. What caught my attention was the last sentence: “Eagle Lake is rich in biological resources and is the only lakeside fresh water biological research project on the west coast.”

The fate of the university’s field station is not known, its doors have been shuttered for sometime.

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Some may find this of interest. The lake has only dropped 1.59 feet this year and is 4.21 feet above this time last year. Several of my colleagues, including myself, thought this was rather remarkable. When one considers that the summer was abnormally hot this year, one would assume that due to evaporation the level of the lake would have dropped more. One explanation is that it might be possible that the springs underneath lake have recharged from the previous winter, thus offsetting the evaporation. I want to thank Don Willis, Lassen County Surveyor who on the first of every month monitors the lake level and provided this information.

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What would Eagle Lake be like if it were not for Norma? It is something that crossed my mind as I scan the Gallatin photograph collection. Norma Virginia Harvey was born in 1910 at San Francisco, the only grandchild of Malvena Gallatin. It was because of Norma, that Malvena built the first summer home at Eagle Lake in 1913, which she dubbed the Cedar Lodge, but is better known as Gallatin House. For the remainder of that decade the extended Gallatin clan were frequent visitors at Eagle Lake. At that the time the house was constructed Eagle Lake kept rising to historic high levels and this troubled Malvena. After all, a portion of her timberland along the lakeshore was flooded. In 1914, she invited a civil engineer by the name of Leon Bly to Eagle Lake to see about reviving the failed attempts to tap Eagle Lake for irrigation, that at the same time would regulate the level of the lake. Bly’s tunnel and a twenty year drought would greatly reduce the water level of the lake. By the 1920s, the Gallatin’s visits were few and far between. In the 1930s, Malvena attempted to sale her Eagle Lake property to a developer, but it failed due to the low water level of the lake. In 1944, Norma passed away, and that Christmas Malvena returned to Cedar Lodge for the last time. In 1946, Malvena sold all of her Eagle Lake holdings except for her summer home that eventually would be given to Norma’s son. Thus, Norma’s birth led to an interesting chain of events at Eagle Lake.

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Originally known as Papoose Valley and some time in the 1920s it was changed to Papoose Meadows.