Lake Tahoe Was Officially Lake Bigler Until 1945

For 75 years, California’s official name for Lake Tahoe was Lake Bigler, after a governor, while nearly everyone called it by its Washoe name. The Washoe Tribe says “Tahoe” is a mispronunciation of Da ow, its word for “lake,” and a mapmaker in 1862 is the one who got it onto a map.

Da ow, the lake at the center

The Washoe were there long before anybody drew a map. In its own booklet for visitors, Wa She Shu, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California calls itself “the original inhabitants of Da ow aga (Lake Tahoe) and all the lands surrounding it,” and puts it plainly: “Tahoe is a mispronunciation of Da ow, meaning ‘lake’.” Its list of Washoe place names glosses Da ow aga as “edge of lake.” George Wharton James noted in 1915 that the Washoe “pronounce it as if it were one syllable.”

You’ll find other meanings in older books, and they don’t agree with each other. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list of place names says Tahoe is “an Indian word meaning ‘big water.’” James, in his book The Lake of the Sky, says the Washoe first called it Tahoe, meaning “High or Clear Water.” The federal place-names database goes with “much water.”

The sharpest doubt came from A. L. Kroeber, writing for the University of California in 1916. He passed along the “big water” story but pointed out that the ordinary Washo word for “water” is time and for “large” is tiyeli. “Five minutes’ unprejudiced inquiry of an intelligent elderly Washo would settle the point positively,” he wrote. The tribe’s booklet is about as close to that inquiry as you’re going to get.

Frémont’s “mountain lake”

In February 1844, John C. Frémont’s men were beating a road through the snow to get his expedition over the Sierra. On February 14, he and his topographer, Charles Preuss, climbed a peak and saw “a mountain lake at our feet, about fifteen miles in length, and so entirely surrounded by mountains that we could not discover an outlet.”

On his map it became Mountain Lake, or Lake Bonpland, after the French botanist who’d traveled with Alexander von Humboldt. James says Frémont “evidently did not ask or seek to know its Indian name,” and neither of his names stuck.

Governor Bigler gets a lake

In 1853 the state’s official mapmaker put the lake down as Lake Bigler, after John Bigler, California’s third governor. The name took hold. A Nevada law approved December 19, 1862, even chartered the “Lake Bigler and Virginia Railroad Co.,” meant to run along the shore and over to Virginia City.

Not everybody liked it. In 1861 somebody tried to swap Bigler for “Tula Tulia.” James calls that name “fanciful” and says “fortunately it failed.”

Knight, DeGroot and a list in a pocket

The name Tahoe came in through a map. William Henry Knight, who’d first seen the lake from a cliff in 1859, was finishing a general map of the Pacific States for Bancroft’s publishing house in early 1862. He told his draftsman to leave off Lake Bigler, which he said honored a governor who “had not distinguished himself by any signal achievement.”

Then Knight invited two newspapermen, John S. Hittell and Dr. Henry DeGroot, to look at the map. Washington, Lincoln and Frémont were all floated as new names. Knight asked what the Indians called it, and DeGroot pulled a list from his pocket: “Here it is; they call it ‘Tahoe,’ meaning ‘big water,’ or ‘high water,’ or ‘water in a high place.’”

Knight wasn’t sold at first, but he put Tahoe on the map, the papers backed it, and he says the federal Land Office swapped it in too. A Nevada legislator complained that California hadn’t asked Nevada first. He couldn’t get the votes.

Mark Twain, by the way, couldn’t stand the name Tahoe. James reprints what Twain wrote about it, and it’s so ugly about Native people that we’re not going to repeat it.

California digs in for Bigler

You’d think that settled it. It didn’t. Under Governor Haight, W. A. King of Nevada County brought a bill into the Assembly declaring Lake Bigler “the official name of the said lake and the only name to be regarded as legal in official documents.” It became law on February 10, 1870, as chapter 58 of that session’s statutes, and it applied to the lake “in the Counties of El Dorado and Placer,” the California side.

“Historian Hittell,” as James calls him, said the law would stand as a monument “if not to Bigler, at least to the legislature that passed it,” while “the name of the Lake will doubtless continue to be Tahoe.” He was right. An 1876 map hedged with “Lake Bigler or Lake Tahoe,” and when James’s book came out in 1915, the lake was still officially Bigler. The legislature finally gave in with a law approved July 18, 1945. It said the lake “shall be known as Lake Tahoe,” repealed the 1870 act, and declared that any reference to Lake Tahoe, past or future, was “a legally sufficient reference to said lake for all purposes.”

That’s the odd part. The water that leaves Tahoe flows out down the Truckee, the same river where Reno started as a toll bridge, and for most of a century California’s law used a name for the lake that hardly anybody else did.

The Washoe never needed a vote on it. To them it was always Da ow, the lake.

Historical Sources & References

• Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, Wa She Shu: “The Washoe People” Past and Present (2009, 2021). The tribe’s own account: “the original inhabitants of Da ow aga (Lake Tahoe)” and “Tahoe is a mispronunciation of Da ow, meaning ‘lake’” (p. 5); Da ow aga, “edge of lake” (p. 42).
• John Charles Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains… and to Oregon and North California (1845). The February 14, 1844, entry with Preuss: “a mountain lake at our feet, about fifteen miles in length” (p. 234).
• George Wharton James, The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe (1915). “High or Clear Water” (p. viii); still officially Bigler in 1915 (p. ix); the Washoe pronunciation (p. xi); chapter V, “The Various Names of Lake Tahoe” (pp. 56–62): Mountain Lake and Lake Bonpland (p. 57), the 1853 state map, the Nevada railroad act of 1862 and Tula Tulia (p. 58), William Henry Knight’s account of the 1862 map and DeGroot’s list (pp. 58–61), the Land Office and the Nevada protest (p. 61), the King bill, Hittell’s comment and the 1876 map (p. 62).
• A. L. Kroeber, California Place Names of Indian Origin (1916). “Said to be named from Washo tah-hoo-he, ‘big water’,” and his doubts about that etymology (p. 60).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1905). “An Indian word meaning ‘big water’” (p. 295).
• The Statutes of California, 1869-70, chapter 58 (1870). “An Act to legalize the name of Lake Bigler,” approved February 10, 1870: Lake Bigler is “the official name of the said lake” in El Dorado and Placer counties (p. 64).
• Statutes of California, 1945, chapter 1499. Approved July 18, 1945: the lake “shall be known as Lake Tahoe,” chapter 58 of 1869-70 is repealed, and any reference to Lake Tahoe is “a legally sufficient reference to said lake for all purposes” (p. 2777). From the online archive of the California State Assembly’s Chief Clerk.
• Dawn Collings, “The American River and a Lake with Many Names,” UC Davis Library (2016). Old maps showing Mountain Lake, Lake Bonpland and Bigler L.; the lake officially named Lake Bigler in 1870; the legislature changing it to Lake Tahoe in 1945.
• Hauge Brueck Associates, Boulder Bay Project EIS, section 4.7 (Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 2009). Frémont and Preuss’s 1844 sighting, Knight’s 1862 map, and the legislature that “legalized ‘Bigler’ in 1870,” an act “not repealed until 1945,” citing Historic Spots in California (p. 4.7-2).
• GNIS feature 1654975, Lake Tahoe (U.S. Geological Survey). Official name Lake Tahoe; description “a Washoe Indian word for ‘much water’”; variant names including Lake Bigler, Lake Bonpland, Mountain Lake, Tula Tulia and Daow aga.