Truckee River is one of the most beautiful of the streams of Nevada. It
takes its rise in California and its head is an outlet from Lake Tahoe.
This outlet is on the northwest side of the lake and is about fifty feet
in width. It has an average depth of five feet and a velocity of six
feet a second, which gives a flow of about 123,120,000 cubic feet in
twenty-four hours. The head of the river is in Placer County,
California, it runs nearly north into Nevada County, in the same State,
to the town of Truckee, when it turns and flows northeast till it enters
the State of Nevada at Verdi, in Washoe County. Its course from Verdi to
Reno, the county seat of Washoe County, is nearly east, thence it is
northeast to the town of Wadsworth, on the Central Pacific, when it
suddenly turns to the north, and, after a course of about twenty-five
miles, enters Pyramid Lake. From the outlet of Lake Tahoe to Pyramid
Lake the distance is about 100 miles.
After leaving Tahoe the Truckee receives the waters of many mountain
streams. Below Verdi it passes through many beautiful and fertile
valleys and meadows. Pyramid Lake has an elevation of 4,000 feet above
the level of the sea; Lake Tahoe is 6,247 feet above sea-level,
therefore between the two points the river has a fall of 2,247 feet, an
average of a little over twenty-two feet to the mile. Along the river
from end to end there is almost unlimited water power, there being a
great volume of water, during several months, and an abundance of fall.
This water-power is utilized at Reno to some extent, but what has been
done there is merely a commencement toward what should be done. Large
areas of land are irrigated by ditches leading out of the Truckee at
several points. The stream is filled with beautiful trout of two or
three species, and also contains other smaller fishes of several kinds.
A kind sometimes seen in its waters at the spawning seasons is a large
fish of the sucker tribe, which runs up from Pyramid Lake, and is called
“koo-ee-wa” by the Piutes. It is half head, and in every respect is a
very ugly fish. It is said that the “koo-ee-wa” is found nowhere else in
the world. It is a palatable and wholesome fish, but its appearance is
against it. The Piutes spear and cure (by drying in the sun) great
quantities of this fish. Several kinds of Eastern fish have been planted
in the waters of the Truckee and have been found to flourish. Fish
ladders have been placed at all the dams in the rivers to permit of the
trout and other fish ascending toward the head-waters to spawn in the
various tributary creeks.
The Truckee River is named after “Captain Truckee,” a Piute chief who in
the early days guided a party of emigrants from the Humboldt to the
beautiful stream and thence through Henness Pass across the Sierras to
California. Captain Truckee also acted as a guide for Colonel Fremont
when he passed through the country in 1846. He died in the Como
Mountains in 1860, from the bite of some poisonous insect, and was there
buried by members of his tribe, and whites, with much sorrow. A
description of Pyramid Lake will be given further along, as it deserves
a separate notice, being the largest lake wholly owned by Nevada, and
almost as large as the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, which is seventy miles
in length by about thirty in width.