# The River of Logs

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/story/the-river-of-logs

The Story

For nearly thirty years — 1867 to 1895 — the quiet river in front of the cabins was an industrial highway. Every spring it ran brown with Alpine County cordwood bound for the mills and mines of the Comstock.

The Comstock Lode ran on wood — timber to shore the mines, cordwood to fire
the mills — and Alpine County had wood to sell. The route to market was the
East Fork Carson River: the resort's river, the one outside your window.

The record comes from period newspapers, compiled by NDOW's Bob McQuivey.
In 1867, operators at Empire City, Nevada, prepared to "drive down the
Carson river... a large number of logs"; from Empire the wood moved by
rail and mule road up to Virginia City. In September 1868 a single drive
of about 18,000 cords came down from the neighborhood of Silver Mountain
— the largest ever brought down the Carson to that date. In 1871 the
Alpine drive ran 15,000 cords valued at $60,000, and the main drive took
about thirty-five days to reach Empire. In 1872 separate drives came out
of Markleeville Creek and Silver Creek; a town paper noted, "This week
Cleveland's drive passed through town."

Then came 1874, the peak: a single drive of roughly 100,000 cords filling
the river for ten miles, and a season total of 180,000 to 200,000 cords —
the largest ever. One account of the era's biggest drive describes the
river running up to six feet deep in wood for four and a half miles. Every
stick of it passed this bend, and passed under the toll bridge a mile
downstream — the one the county would come to call Hangman's Bridge, after
a hanging there that April.

Crews trailed the drives in piroques — flatboats — steering strays with
picaroons, the spiked poles of the trade, and at Empire in 1875 they pulled
700 cords a day out of the water. The work produced its own famous hands.
Sam Longabaugh of Empire ran the Markleeville drive almost annually from
1881 into the 1890s, and in July 1892 brought it from Markleeville to the
boom in five days, "the fastest time ever made." The last mentions of the
drives come in 1895; the market that needed them was gone.

The engraved plates on this page show orderly long timber, the way an
illustrator imagines a log drive. The real East Fork drives ran loose
four-foot cordwood — a churning brown raft of firewood, not sawlogs — and
the plate captions say so as well.

The same watershed carries a harder record. The Leviathan Mine, off the
Monitor Pass road, mined copperas in the 1860s for the Comstock's silver
process. A century later, Anaconda dug a 50-acre, 400-foot-deep open sulfur
pit there (1951–1962), and the acid drainage killed aquatic life in
Leviathan and Bryant creeks and caused fish kills as far as ten miles down
the East Fork.

The Washoe Tribe petitioned the EPA in 1997, the site was Superfund-listed
in 2000, and three treatment systems now run. The watershed the Comstock
poisoned is the same one where the native trout are being brought back
today.

When the mines and the drives ended, the trout stayed. The stretch that
carried the cordwood is the resort's stocked family water now.

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Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
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