Early Reactions

From the beginning, everybody who saw Mono Lake had an opinion about it. Some marveled, some recoiled.

Alexis Waldemar Von Schmidt, who came to the basin in 1855 to do the first land

survey, called the scene "the most beautiful I ever saw." Mark Twain was here in 1861–62 and said it was "little graced with the picturesque." Judging by his descriptions in Roughing It , Twain found the region fascinating nonetheless. Like others, he noticed that the water was a good detergent, but he had a sharper eye than some for the life it supported: "millions of wild ducks and sea-gulls," and in the lake itself "a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these." He noticed the alkali flies, too, and the way they could walk under water, holding bubbles of air beneath their wings. He ate his fill of gull eggs and went out to Paoha Island to look for a hot spring that people said would cook an egg in four minutes. On the way back, a sudden afternoon windstorm swamped his boat. The same thing has happened to many on this lake, and not a few have drowned.

William Brewer, whose journal Up and Down California is a priceless source on the primitive state of the state, came over Mono Pass in 1863. "It is a bold man who first took a horse up there," he wrote of the steep eastern path. "The horses were so cut by sharp rocks that they named it 'Bloody Canyon,' and it has held the name—and it is appropriate—part of the way the rocks in the trail are literally sprinkled with the blood from the animals." As for Mono Lake itself, Brewer was of Twains persuasion: he found it not quite pleasant but entirely intriguing.

In 1865, journalist J. Ross Browne came for Harper's . He admired most of what he saw: the mountain shapes reflected on the water; the tufa towers, especially when they resembled classical architecture; the clear air; the flocks of ducks. But he thought the rim of kutsavi rather disgusting.

John Muir tramped over the old Indian trail not long after. He loved the country in general for its mix of glacial and volcanic landscapes, "frost and fire." In his account of the trek he says much about this setting, rather little of the lake itself. Perhaps, like many first-time visitors, he didn't know what to make of this uncommon piece of water. On a second visit, he went to Paoha Island in "an old waterlogged boat," got into windstorm trouble, and seems to have warmed to the place.

Then came Israel Russell. The young geologist arrived in the region in 1881, when the Bodie railroad was under construction, and he stayed for several years. He seems to have been the first to set aside alpine standards of scenery to admire Mono Lake as the desert phenomenon it is. He clearly saw it as strange—"a sea whose flowerless shores seem scarcely to belong to the habitable earth"—but he was captured by the beauty in the strangeness. His 1884 monograph, Quaternary History of Mono Valley, California , is well worth reading today.

Russell described journeys throughout the basin and up and down the ranges, made shrewd guesses about the geology, and puzzled out much of the natural history of tufa. He gave their modern names to the Mono Craters and Negit and Paoha islands, using

Paiute words though not the original Kuzedika names (now lost). Paoha refers to water spirits—dangerous ones, though Russell seems not to have known that. Russell thought Negit meant "blue-winged goose." This is uncertain, but, logical though it might seem, Negit does not mean "gull."

In 1890, when Congress was debating the bill to establish Yosemite National Park in the mountains to the west, Robert Underwood Johnson of Century magazine called for a preserve extending "to the Nevada line." (Johnson was a friend of John Muir's, and the plan may really have been Muir's as well.) The indicated boundary would have taken in about the southern third of Mono Lake. As first enacted, the park did at least include the upper reaches of all the important Mono Lake feeder streams. The presence of parkland in the Mono watershed might, perhaps, have drawn earlier attention to the fate of the lake below. But in 1905 the park was shrunk back to the Sierra crest. Yosemite and Mono, two of California's most debatable landscapes, would henceforth be fought over quite separately.