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.
