It all started long ago when the early people of the area, named Qua, took upon themselves the task of proactively building on their good fortune and sharing it with others.

As generations of Quas spread from the high country around Tahoe down toward sea level and across the oceans, they encountered and influenced creative people in and from many lands. Here are a few representative briefs on contributions by Tahoe-spirited people.

West Coast
The first recoreded sea voyage of discovery by Qua people was with Sir Francis Drake. The Quas joined him in on the coast of Northern California in 1577-78. Possibly due to their presence and information, Drake planted a flag and claimed all the land for Engalnd. Subsequently, he sailed on around the world, the second mariner to do so. (Magellan was the first in 1520.)

In addition, again possibly due to Qua information, a large body of water across Northern California, called the Sea of the West, eventually appeared on European maps of North America. (See top red arrow below.) In the 1700s, the idea of this sea, and possibly a navigable channel from the Pacific across to the Atlantic or at least to the Mississippi River, was a magnet for West Coast exploration by ships from England, Spain, Russia, and even the U.S., then composed of only the 13 original states.


California
Hernan Cortes is the famous conquistador who led the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521. Subsequently, Spanish forces explored lower and upper "California,"--a mythical name credited to a Spanish adventure writer of the times.

Over the next two hundred fifty years the Spanish gradually pushed northward and Catholic monks established a chain of missions starting in San Diego. Qua people were on hand when missions were built in Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco in the late 1700s.

The Qua people remained fiercely independent even as the monks sought to colonize other native people in California. Diaries and partial records imply, furthermore, that the Spanish became more and more interested in the mountain "paradise" described to them by the Quas. This is the second known instance where information from Qua descendents about Tahoe was a catalyst for big changes.

The Spanish/Mexican interest festered and, among other issues, was possibly one of the causes of the war between Mexico and the U.S. that occurred in 1846-47 at the same time as the Donner Party saga near Lake Tahoe. Much of the war took place in the Bay Area, including Monterey and Sonora where the short-lived Bear Flag Republic was founded in 1846.

A U.S. victory in the war with Mexico resulted in California becoming a state in 1850. Also, as the result of the victory, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and much of Texas became part of the United States. (Note: The star in the California flag is a tribute to the independent , Lone Star Republic formed in Texas in 1836.)


Truckee
Qua descendants (now with many non-Qua names) were reputedly very influential during the formation of Nevada County in 1851. Originally the county was to be bounded by the gold country in the west and the Sierra Crest (Donner Summit) in the east. But the founders to ensure that the county included access to the transcontinental railroad, which ran through Truckee, exerted pressure. After much debate, a rectangular block running to the Nevada state line was added to the new county's boundary, and today Truckee is in Nevada County.


The clincher in the negotiations with Placer County (North Tahoe) over the boundary was when a local pointed out that the resulting shape of Nevada County would closely resemble a Derringer pocket pistol, which was popular at the time in the gold rush area. "The pistol points straight at the Nevada Territory!" was the exclamation that sealed the deal. Some locals were angry at Nevada for stealing the county's name.


Tahoe
The Comstock Lode was the first major deposit of silver ore in the U.S. The discovery under what is now Virginia City, NV was made public in 1859, 10 years after the gold rush (the "49ers") in the California foothills west of Lake Tahoe. Whereas Tahoe was not directly involved with the gold rush, the Tahoe Basin and Tahoe-spirited people were central players in the extraction of $500 billion in silver and gold from the earth between 1859 and 1878.

The Tahoe Basin provided the lumber for the mines that were dug to depths of more than 3,200 feet. In fact, the Tahoe Basin was stripped of its trees, some 750,000,000 board feet of lumber and 500,000 cords of wood, over the twenty-some years of the mining activity.


The hub of the lumbering (and partying) was Glenbrook on the east side of Lake Tahoe just below Spooner Summit that is the gateway to Nevada through the short Carson Range. It was there in the posh, Glenbrook Inn that descendants of both the California Quas and the Nevada Noes--the earliest Tahoe peoples of LOST LEGEND #1--met and formed the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company (C. & T. L. & F. Co.). This company "siezed the moment."

It cut and moved Tahoe's trees, built mills, roads, railroads, and lake steamers, e.g., Tahoe, the "Queen of the Lake," and it made Lake Tahoe a tony place to visit and be for the rich and famous, including San Francisco bank presidents and writer, Mark Twain. Duane L. Bliss was the president of the dynamic C. & T. L. & F. Today there is a Duane Bliss Peak (8,658') behind Glenbrook and the beautiful D.L. Bliss State Park on the California side of the lake. The park includes 3,500' of lakeshore on Emerald Bay and 14,840' of lakeshore on the lake itself.



The examples above have to do mostly with local geography, but as Qua descendents traveled the world sharing their good fortune, they also made some singular contributions here and there to math, music, and political matters, as the opportunities presented themselves. This legend would be incomplete without the inclusion of just a few examples of the pervasive influence of those under the spell of Lake Tahoe.

Mathematics
Pi Qua traveled to and around the Mediterranean at a young age and was active in defining the exact value of the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. That the ratio was slightly over 3 had been known to ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, and Greek wise men. But the exact number was difficult to determine. Archimedes (287-212 BC) worked hard on the problem. But there have always been whispers that it was Pi Qua, while assisting a German mathematician (Ludolph van Ceulen) around 1600, who was finally able to determine the value of the number to 32 decimal places. In his honor, the number was named pi. Having a precise number for pi in 1869 was a huge help in the building of the transcontinental railroad, which even today runs through Truckee.


The significance of pi is hard to overstate. At 3.14159….. it is a fundamental mathematical constant. For example, the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. Pi is what is known as an irrational number in that its decimal expansion never ends or repeats. While the value of pi has been calculated to more than a trillion digits, a value truncated to 39 decimal places is adequate to compute the circumference of any circle in the visible universe to the precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.

Music
A descendant of the early Quas was traveling in Europe with his wife and seven children in the 18th century. He was deeply moved by the sound and practicality of the diatonic scale, which is the foundation of the European musical tradition. This scale consists of seven notes: five whole tones and two half-tone steps.

The seven notes plus one more equal an octave, which has eight notes. The father taught his children music using the scale, and he named the notes in an octave after the children: Do—Re—Me—Fa—So—La—Si—Do. Acoustically speaking, an octave occupies the interval between (and including) the two endnotes, the last one having twice the frequency of vibration of the other, i.e., the last Do is twice the frequency of the first Do. The last note is the most prefect consonance, so perfect that it gives the impression of duplicating the original (first) note. No convincing explanation for this phenomenon has been found. For example, there is no such relationship in color frequencies in the spectrum of light.


Both Re Qua and La Qua went on to significant musical careers in San Francisco when they were in their twenties.

World Affairs
It appears as though someone with Tahoe genes was a speechwriter for Sir Winston Churchill in London. The central thought in a speech the then Prime Minister gave to the House of Commons when WW II was raging included these words: "Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, though checkered by defeat, than to take rank with those poor souls who live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." In other words, carpe diem.

©Copyright 2009 by Steven C. Brandt