Cartago: Steamships on a shallow but useful vanishing lake

The cluster of old bungalows lakeside is Cartago, founded in 1872 by a Sardinian merchant named John Baptiste Daneri.

In the 1870s the silver-lead mines at Cerro Gordo, at the top of the Inyo Mountains across the valley, were booming. The bullion was chosen to be secured in Los Angeles banks instead of San Francisco institutions, a decision which drove the growth of the small city to the south. It had to be hauled by wagon around the southern Owens lakeshore through deep sand and the going was three days slow.

Now in 1872 James Brady, superintendent of the Owens Lake Silver-Lead Company, builds a steamboat and names it the Bessie Brady after his daughter. She is 85 feet long and able to carry about a hundred tons, and it churned the silver ingots straight across the 30 foot deep and three mile wide lake to a landing near here on the west side of the lake, Cartago. This cut three days off the transit time of going around the lake by wagon. From Cartago, Remi Nadeau's famous fourteen-mule teams hauled the bullion south the rest of the way to Los Angeles banks for deposit.

With the help of a second and smaller steamer in 1877, the boats actually worked too well, piling up bullion faster than the teamsters could move it south across the desert. For a few months, stevedores slept in small cabins made of silver ingots stacked like a fort around them. But Remi was good and he caught up within a few months and the houses were deconstructed and ended up 200 miles south a month later.

As Cerro Gordo's ore played out, the steamers fell idle. In 1882, while the Bessie Brady was being refitted tar and oil aboard caught fire and she burned to the waterline, ending the steamboat era. As the Los Angeles aqueduct is completed, the 30 foot deep lake is quickly exhausted. This is a great source of strife between valley residents and Department of Water and Power officials for decades in the past. It is now a cooperative effort between the two sides at restoration of the river for recreation and dust pollution minimization on the lakebed which is quite a challenge at the end of a sometimes wind tunnel of a valley floor.