Tahoe
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Tahoe. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ta-ho', a lake on the border line between Nevada and California. It is twenty miles long and about half as wide. The Truckee River is its outlet. The water has been dammed and diverted to irrigate a large body of land. Lake Tahoe is a picturesque body of water much frequented by tourists. The air and scenery are thus described by Mark Twain : We plodded on and at last the lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe. I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man can not sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there is summer time.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
LAKE, a beautiful body of water at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, on the boundary line between Placer co., Cal., and Douglas and Ormsby cos., Nev. It is about 20 miles long and 12 miles wide, and about 6,250 feet above sea-level. The scenery about it is strikingly picturesque. Its outlet is the Truckee river.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The lake itself is much as Aiton's described it in 1910, though modern surveys put it at 22 miles long, 12 wide, 6,225 feet up and 1,645 feet deep — the second-deepest lake in the United States after Crater Lake. What has changed is everything around the shore: Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931 and the state-line towns of Stateline and Crystal Bay filled with resorts, the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley (renamed Palisades Tahoe in 2021) made the basin a ski destination, and the year-round population and traffic that followed brought fertilizer, sediment and algae into a lake once famous for transparency. Clarity measured since 1968 has fallen from roughly 100 feet to the 60s and 70s, and in 1969 California and Nevada created the Lake Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to control building in the watershed. Collier's 1921 address is also out of date twice over: Ormsby County was absorbed into consolidated Carson City in 1969, and the California shore takes in El Dorado County as well as Placer.
Written for this edition, 2026.