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14 In another case of ecodestruction in the era, Lake Tahoe’s large native trout, the Lahontan cutthroat, met a fate similar to that of the forests. That Americans drove them to extinction was only partly owing to the era’s value system. Conflicting jurisdictional decisions and, when regulations were passed, lack of funding for enforcement were more critical elements in causing the native’s demise. Mackinaw trout killed the last of the cutthroat, the culminating insult to a species threatened from the time of the Americans’ arrival. At the end of the nineteenth century, mackinaws—monstrous, razor-toothed predators that in Tahoe grow to nearly four feet long and well over thirty pounds—were imported from the Great Lakes. They are rapacious, eating anything that fits in their mouths. Whether the mackinaw feasted on the Lahontan or, as has also been speculated, a mackinaw-carried epizootic caused their destruction, it was a mere matter of years from the mackinaw’s introduction to the native trout’s disappearance. The Lahontan cutthroat, named for red slashes beneath the jaw, can be traced back seventy thousand years to the time when the Great Basin desert was filled by two giant lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. Natural selection favored the cutthroat, which was larger and longer lived than its competitors, and it prospered. As the climate changed and the landscape became desert, the Lahontan cutthroat survived only in Pyramid Lake—the thirty-mile-long, nine-mile-wide sink northeast of Reno—and its tributary, the Truckee River. From there it made its way into Lake Tahoe.1 The habitats contained in the two lakes, and the river between, were mature ecosystems, largely unchanged from year to year, allowing the cutthroat to continue to thrive. The human abuses to the lake that severely affected the fish involved overfishing and the clear-cutting of the forests that allowed large quantities of sediment and silt to flow into the lake. Meanwhile, the lake’s tributaries and its t w o n trades t r a d e s 15 one outlet, the Truckee River, were dammed, diverted, and polluted, ruining spawning beds. In the early 1870s, ten years after Americans came in numbers to Tahoe, they undertook attempts to sustain the fish population. They introduced artificial breeding in an attempt to preserve the Lahontan cutthroat and imported other fish to further counter losses. In 1895 the US Fish Commission reported on attempts to introduce mackinaw into the Sierra. From a commercial standpoint , the commission pointed out that the species was the “most valuable of the so-called trouts.” In 1893 mackinaw fishermen in the Great Lakes had earned more than six hundred thousand dollars.2 In November 1894, the US Fish Commission sent one hundred thousand mackinaw eggs to California, and sixty-five thousand were placed in the Lake Tahoe hatchery. But local resort owners blocked the experiment to plant the voracious predator at Tahoe. Harry O. Comstock, whose Tahoe career would span some seventy years, led the effort to foil the introduction, just as years later, as a director in the Lake Tahoe Protective Association, he led a fight to prevent power companies from taking Tahoe water.3 The opposition caused the fish managers to change plans. They distributed the mackinaw fry southwest of Tahoe in the Tallant Lakes, a string known as “paternoster lakes,” because they are strung out in the mountains like rosary beads. These, like other lakes in the 136,335 acres of wilderness, much of which is now known as Desolation Valley, previously had no fish.4 The planted fish were not heard of for several years. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, Tahoe fishermen caught trout with scars on their sides and bites taken from their tails. An occasional eight- or nine-pound mackinaw was taken, although it was not generally recognized as one of the Great Lakes’ plants. In May 1902, using seines to gather trout from which to take spawn, hatchery workers captured a number of similar-size mackinaw. These first specimens were believed to have gained the lake by following Meeks Creek, the West Shore stream that cuts through granitic bedrock down the gorge to Tahoe. It was tougher to explain a catch a year later: a two-and-a-half-foot mackinaw caught in the lake and presented to President Theodore Roosevelt as he passed through Truckee. In 1905 a fisherman trolling with heavy tackle [3.139.233.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06...

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