Lily Mae backed into the corner of the saloon as the hulking villain lumbered toward her.  “Got you,” he snarled.  “Now hand over that deed to your father’s gold mine.”

            “Not on your life!”  Summoning her courage, she glared up at him.  “I’m going to see you hang for what you did!”

            He laughed, his belly shaking beneath his greasy vest.  “You and what army?   All I see between me and that gold is a purty little gal in a pink satin dress.  And by the time I finish with her she’s not gonna look so purty.  You’ve seen what I can do to a woman.  Now give me that deed, or you’ll be beggin’ me for mercy!”

            “All right.  You win.  I’ve got it right here in my stocking.”  Lily Mae raised her skirt a few inches.  “A gentleman would turn away.”

            “Well, I ain’t no gentleman, honey.  You got till the count of three.  One…two…”

            Lily Mae fumbled beneath her petticoats.  Tucked into her lace garter was a tiny derringer with a barrel no bigger than her thumb.  Drawing and cocking the pistol in one motion, she swung back to face her enemy.

            “Reach for the sky, you mangy varmint,” she snarled, “or I’ll plug you right between the eyes! 

            No, this  isn’t a scene from one of my books, although I did have fun writing it.  I just wanted a dramatic way to introduce one of the most notorious and popular weapons in the history of the west.

 In 1852 an American gunsmith named Henry Deringer invented a pistol so small that it could be easily concealed in a pocket, vest, boot, stocking or bodice.  The original Deringer Pistol was less than six inches long.  It used a cap lock mechanism to fire a single bullet from a barrel bored in calibers from .36 to .45, with .41 being the most common.  Easy to handle and accurate at close range, the tiny gun was an instant success.  Other gun manufacturers were swift to copy and improve on it (these copies were known generically as derringers, with an extra r)  but Deringer’s original design remained popular for decades.

            The gun was a favorite of women, who could hide it in their handbags or their clothes.  Gamblers and card dealers often kept one up their sleeves.  Even well known gunfighters, such as Wild Bill Hickock, used them as backup weapons.  One Arizona lawman was known to have carried upward of a half dozen petite pistols on his person.

            The scaled down size of these guns cost heavily in accuracy and range.  Mark Twain, who carried a pocket model Smith & Wesson .22 on his western travels wrote, “It was grand.  It only had one fault—you couldn’t hit anything with it.”

            Sadly, the little weapon became the preferred choice of hit men, who could hide it while they stole up behind their target.  The most famous hit carried out with a Deringer Pistol was the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.  Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head at point blank range while the President was watching a play.  This incident branded the Deringer as a “Hitman Special.”  Sales of the Deringer and its derringer clones went through the roof.  But Henry Deringer was troubled, knowing his weapon had been used to kill an American President.  Shortly afterwards, in 1868, he stopped production of the Deringer Pistol.  Other versions, however, continued to be made and are popular among shooters and gun collectors to this day.

This tough-looking gun moll is me, posing for a friend’s magazine article with an unloaded pistol I have no intention of firing.  Good for a laugh, at least.

            Do you know how to handle a gun?  Would you carry one for protection, or do you want nothing to do with them?  I’m looking forward to some interesting responses.

 Don’t forget to check out COWBOY CHRISTMAS, with stories by Pam Crooks, Carol Finch and myself. 

 And don’t forget to enter our new Christmas contest!

“I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” said Mark Twain upon his first sight of the “big water” on a summer day in 1863. Although he lived in Virginia City, Nevada and wrote for the Territorial Enterprise, he’d decided to try harvesting timber from the lake’s luxuriant wooded shores for the Comstock Lode mines.

“It was a vast oval,” he later wrote in Innocents Abroad,  “…80 or 100 miles in traveling around it.”  

Actually, the drive around the Tahoe shoreline  is 71 miles, 42 belonging to California, 29 to Nevada. and so spectacular it should be on everybody’s Bucket List. The breathtaking clarity of the lake water exceeds depth of 75 feet! Although this is down from 100 feet in the late 1960’s, it has held stable since 2001. In fact, Mark Twain blamed the clear water for his failures at fishing, saying if he could see fish 80 feet down, they surely could see him as well and refuse to be caught.

The lake holds enough water , 39 trillion gallons, to cover entire California fourteen inches deep. The amount of water evaporating every 24 hours could supply Los Angeles with its daily demand for water!

And some people get to live here! Today Lake Tahoe is a mix of residents and tourists, but the first humans here were the Washoe. For centuries, the tribe migrated here from Nevada’s Carson Valley every summer  to seek cooler temperatures and abundant fish and game, and hold religious ceremonies at the  lake sacred to them.  They named the lake, Da-ow-a-ga, meaning “edge of the lake.” The basketry of the Washoe women is especially famed today.  

In 1844,  John C. Fremont and Kit Carson recorded the first non-native “sightings.” Mispronouncing the Washoe name, they called the lake “Tahoe.” It was officially named Tahoe in 1945 after names such as Lake Bonpland and Bigler (after California’s third governor) failed to stick. Although Kit Carson went on in 1848 to carve the nearby Carson Pass known then as the Mormon-Emigrant Trail, the Tahoe area was virtually ignored until the discovery of silver in Virginia City in 1859.

Thus began the heartbreaking deforestation of this lush land from 1860-1880’s, as timber was relentlessly cut to build the mines of the Comstock and the boomtowns, trestles and snowsheds of the Central Pacific Railroad. A logging empire established on the east shore clear-cut the entire shoreline, and the natural resources are still recovering. I’m happy that Twain only spent a few half-hearted weeks working a timber claim.

In 1860, the lake had its first permanent resident. General William Phipps claimed 160 acres in today’s Sugar Pine Point and built a humble cabin.  During his twelve years at the lake, he built a second cabin, a pier and a boathouse while successfully protecting his homestead from loggers. His homestead is preserved today, and does it ever have a room with a view.

On this same plot at Sugar Pine in 1903, banker Isias Hellman built a vacation cabin, ahem—a spectacular three-story mansion with Phipps’s same view. Sadly, sugar pines are scarce in the basin today, still recovering from the deforestation of more than a century ago. Florence Ehrman inherited her father’s estate in 1920, her heirs selling it to the State of California in 1965, which offers daily tours.

Not far away at Emerald Bay sits Fannette Island, the lake’s only island, overlooked by Vikingsholm Castle. A castle?  Vikings?  Indeed. In 1928, the bay so reminded Mrs. Lora J. Knight of Norwegian fjords that she instructed a Scandinavian architect to build her a vacation home without chopping down or injuring any of her land’s natural trees.  The resulting structure was built with the same methods and details of a Norse fortress circa 800 A.D. and includes sod roofs,  like those in Scandinavia which fed livestock in the wintertime. For her guests, Mrs. Knight built a special “tea house” on Fannette Island.  Look to the top of the island in the photo to see it.

Now, I’ve seen such historic, iconic waters as Lake Champlain, Walden Pond, the Mississippi, the big Muddy, the Columbia, and others, but nothing, nowhere, does it for me the way Lake Tahoe does.  Since it’s one of my favorite places ever, and Twain is one of my favorite authors, I can’t help but quote him again because he said it best. “I have such a high admiration for it (Tahoe) and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.”

How lucky were Ben Cartwright and the boys to live around here. Sadly, the ranch at the Incline area was closed to tourists in 2004 after a 37-year ride.

How about you? Have you ever visited Lake Tahoe? What other bodies of water are special to you? Do you fish? Have a mountain home? Go river rafting?

(P.s. All the travel brochures warn that it can snow any time at Lake Tahoe. Believe it. Here’s me in late May. )