Hawthorne's Forgotten Frontier Fake News Purveyor: Alfred McCarthy

   Several years ago, I wrote a book about Nevada’s 19th and early 20th century journalists who indulged in the art of writing hoaxes (“Frontier Fake News: Nevada’s Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters”). While the best-known of these writers were Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille of Virginia City’s legendary Territorial Enterprise, the central Nevada community of Hawthorne once boasted its own hoaxster: Alfred J. McCarthy.

   McCarthy, in fact, had close connections to Virginia City—his brother was Denis E. McCarthy, co-owned the Territorial Enterprise for a time and, later, owned the Virginia Evening Chronicle.

   Alfred McCarthy began his newspaper career at the Territorial Enterprise and the Gold Hill News and later worked at the Sacramento Bee, Sacramento Union, San Francisco Chronicle, Sierra City Tribune, Virginia Evening Chronicle, and the Reno Evening Gazette. While working at the latter, he fell into ill health and, in 1888, moved to Hawthorne because he thought it would help him better recover.

   That year, he became editor of the local newspaper, the Walker Lake Bulletin, and in 1890, bought the paper. He would continue to edit and own the paper (except for a few years when his son, John, ran it) until it closed in 1926 due to a fire destroying its building.

   McCarthy’s primary hoax, published during his time with the Bulletin, involved promoting Walker Lake as the home to a massive sea serpent (which has been celebrated by the community over the years).

   While the idea that the lake was home to a large snake-like monster first appeared prior to McCarthy’s arrival in Hawthorne, he did his part to foster the legend during his tenure.

   The original story about the creature appeared in the August 1, 1883 edition of the Bulletin, under the headline, “The Sea Serpent In Walker Lake.”

   According to the article, “One day, about a year ago, two Indians, while fishing at the north end of the lake, were startled at seeing an immense sea serpent, with the regulation saucer-shaped eyes and barrel-shaped head, rise out of the water and, after lashing its tail in sport until the water for miles around turned into a sea of seething foam, suddenly, with a loud hissing sound, disappear.”

   The story went on to talk about the creature reappearing the next day and the local Native people seeing there were actually two of these monsters, who were fighting with each other. One was seriously wounded in the battle and ended up beached on the lake’s shore. The Indians decided to kill it to put it out of its misery.

   It concluded by noting the Indians presented the skeletal remains to a local man, Charley Kimball, who apparently measured the bones as being “exactly seventy-nine feet, seven inches and a quarter in length.”

   McCarthy’s contribution to keeping the legend alive was perhaps best acknowledged in the Bulletin with a short item on May 9, 1911: “The Bulletin is in receipt of a package of seeds from Congressman (Edwin E.) Roberts. The following note accompanied the seeds: ‘Through the courtesy of the Government, and for the feeding of that Walker Lake Sea Serpent, I am sending you a consignment of various kinds of bird seed. By the way, if you can catch a few of those young Sea Serpents, send them back to put among the Sea Reptiles in the National Museum. I am yours, E.E. Roberts.’”

   Additionally, an article in the March 8, 1914 Nevada State Journal, quoted one of McCarthy’s reporters, Frank Kinghorn, as noting that while his boss was a great newspaperman, he was also “the greatest bunch of contradictions ever assembled in one human frame.”

   To illustrate that point, Kinghorn claimed, “As a publisher of facts and reputed facts, he is absolutely truthful and fearless. As the originator of the Walker Lake sea serpent story, he is the most colossal faker that ever crossed the pike.”

   McCarthy, like many frontier editors, also carried on a long-standing “fake” feud with a rival newspaper editor, W.W. Booth of the Chloride Belt (McCarthy often mocked the paper with funny titles).

   For example, in a short item in the September 18, 1890 issue of the Bulletin, McCarthy wrote: “The Chloride Belly Band made an unusually silly spectacle of itself last week. It is bad enough ordinarily, but its last issue was a marvelous mixture of bad English and untruths. We always believed that ‘editor’ of that sheet to be an ass, but we did not know before that he was a malicious liar.”

   After the Bulletin shut down, McCarthy moved on to Yerington, where he joined his son in publishing the Yerington Times. In 1931, he sold that interest and relocated to Reno, where he lived until his death on November 5, 1938 at the age of 84.

   In his obituary in the Nevada State Journal, he was said to have been “well acquainted with Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille, both famous newspapermen of the Comstock Lode.” It was high praise indeed.

 

The Story of the Felling of Prometheus

  In the summer of 1964 a geography graduate student named Donald L. Currey, with permission from the U.S. Forest Service, cut down a bristlecone pine tree nicknamed Prometheus that was growing on the slopes of Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada. The tree turned out to be more than 4,900 years old, making it the oldest known tree (at the time) in the world.

  There are various stories explaining why Currey cut down the ancient tree. According to the National Park Service’s webpage, Currey was conducting research on ice age glaciology in the region and had originally been granted permission to take tree core samples from several bristlecones to determine the age of glacial features of the area where the trees were growing.

  “Currey was studying the different widths of the rings inside these bristlecone pines, which were believed to be over 4,000 years old, to determine patterns of good and bad growing seasons in the past. Because of their old age, these trees act as climatic vaults, storing thousands of years of weather data within their rings. This method of research is valuable to the study of climate change,” the site noted.

  Apparently, he took a sample from Prometheus and, according to one version of the story, his borer broke off in the tree. Another version claimed he didn’t know how to core such a large tree or that his borer was too short. And yet another version is that he decided he needed a full cross section of the tree to better examine the tree rings.

  Whatever the truth, which we may never know since Currey died in 2004 at the age of 70, Currey gained permission to cut down the tree.

  The result was that for many years, many believed, ironically, that Currey had chopped down the oldest living tree in the world to see how old it was.

  While Currey gave few interviews about the event during his lifetime, in 1998 he told reporter Carl T. Hall of the San Francisco Chronicle that he “knew it was a pretty old tree.” He said he didn’t know how old–or that it might be the oldest in the world—and assumed there were older trees living in the same grove.

  Currey, who later expressed deep regret for the felling of Prometheus, went on to have a successful academic career at the University of Utah, spending several decades researching and exploring ancient Lake Bonneville among other things. He also testified in the mid-1980s on behalf of the effort to create Great Basin National Park, which provided permanent protection for the bristlecone pines in the Snake Range.

  A few years after the felling of Prometheus, scientists discovered older bristlecone pine trees living in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border. One, nicknamed Methuselah, is estimated to be some 5,065 years old and its believed there may be older ones that have not yet been dated.

  Visitors to Great Basin National Park hiking up the trail leading to the glacial cirque at the base of Wheeler Peak can pass through several small groves of bristlecone pines, many of which have been dated to being more than 3,500 years old. And tucked away, amidst the other majestic, twisted, unique bristlecone trees is a flat, decaying stump—all that remains of Prometheus.

  For more information about Prometheus, go to: https://www.nps.gov/grba/learn/historyculture/the-prometheus-story.htm. Additionally, author Jim Sloan’s 1993 excellent book, “Nevada: True Tales from the Neon Wilderness,” contains a chapter on the cutting down of Prometheus.

The Story of Mary Jo Estep: The Last Survivor of the Battle of Kelley Creek in Northern Nevada

 

Posse that hunted Shoshone Mike and his band in 1911

For most of her life, Mary Jo Estep had kept a secret. Born in either Idaho or Nevada in 1909 or 1910, she had been adopted at a very young age and raised by her step-parents, Evan and Rita Estep. The family lived in Montana and New Mexico before settling in Toppenish, Washington, in 1924.

   In 1934, Estep graduated from the Washington State Normal School (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg with a degree in music education. While a student, she had excelled at her studies. On several occasions, the student newspaper noted when she was performing piano recitals on campus.

   Following graduation, Estep began teaching music in Yakima schools, which she did for the next 40 years, until her retirement in 1974. Over the years, she and her longtime partner, Ruth Sweeney, lived a quiet life that, in addition to work, included tending a large garden.

   Estep’s secret, however, came out in 1975, when Oregon writer Dayton O. Hyde, who had written a book, “The Last Free Man,” sent her a letter and asked to visit. His book told the story of a small band of Native Americans, led by a man called Shoshone Mike Daggett, who had fled Idaho’s Fort Hall Indian Reservation in order to return to living off the land in their homeland in Northern Nevada.

   Tragically, most were later massacred in an incident that became known as the Battle of Kelley Creek.

   After his book had been published, Hyde received a letter from a woman who said she had attended the Washington State Normal School in the 1930s with a young Native American woman named Mary Jo Estep, who had confided that her birth family had been killed by white men in northern Nevada. The woman said Estep was then adopted by the superintendent at Fort Hall. She had lost track of Estep over the years but thought Hyde might be interested in finding her.

   Hyde later recounted in his autobiography that he began searching for Estep, calling long-distance operators in the state of Washington, asking for any information on a woman by that name (this was in the pre-Internet days).

   “Finally, the Yakima, Washington, operator said that she had a Mary Jo Estep in Yakima,” he said. “I sent Mary Jo a copy of my book, then waited in agony for her to agree to see me. Her adopted parents had kept most of the information about Shoshone Mike from her, and I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be.

    “She had been born to wild, free-living Indians, survived the murder of her band, and been raised by white parents as a white girl. I was to learn that during her lifetime, Mary Jo had toured as a concert pianist and taught music in the Washington public school system.”

   Hyde said he was as fearful of meeting Estep as she was of meeting him. But after Estep agreed to a visit, Hyde traveled to her home in Yakima.

    “It was the beginning of a long friendship that lasted until Mary Jo moved into a rest home,” he wrote.

   At one point, Estep visited Hyde in Oregon and showed him the child’s undershirt she was given when she was captured; her own clothing was taken from her and burned.

   “In the collar, written in indelible ink, was the name she had been given [at birth], Mary Josephine Mike,” he recalled. “She remembered only a little of her capture.”

   According to Hyde, after Estep learned her story, she became a popular inspirational speaker for Native American student groups.

   In the book, “Shoshone Mike,” author Frank Bergon recounted the story of Shoshone Mike (Estep’s grandfather) and his band of about a dozen members of the Bannock tribe (despite his nickname, Mike was a member of the Bannock tribe, not the Shoshone tribe). The tribe had their traditional hunting and gathering land taken from them by the U.S. government.

   After initially attempting to live on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho, where they were given moldy food and little shelter, the band wandered away from the reservation and, starting in 1890, began to live off the land in the mountains between southern Idaho and northern Nevada.

   For the next two decades, the band struggled to survive, which was particularly difficult during the lean winter months. In May 1910, the group had managed to round up wild mustangs to replace several that had died during the previous winter.

   One of Mike’s sons, Jack, was shot and killed while driving the horses to camp. In response, Mike’s other sons rode out and, in Bergon’s words, “paid death with death.” They encountered a party of four white men and a woman camped in a draw, who had Jack’s horses. The parties exchanged shots and one of the white men, Frankie Dopp, was killed.

   The episode exacerbated the already tense relations between white settlers and Native Americans in northern Nevada. Believing that he and his band would not receive a fair hearing on the matter, Mike led the party deep into the mountain ranges between Nevada and Idaho, away from settlers. For the next several months, the group traveled hundreds of miles through the Nevada-Idaho borderlands and into northern California.

   Then, in January 1911, four stockmen were found murdered in a remote canyon about 135 miles north of Reno. Humboldt County (Nevada) Sheriff Graham Lamb formed a posse and set out to find and capture the responsible party. The newspapers of the time reported breathlessly on the posse’s hunt to quell what was described as an “Indian uprising.”

   On February 26, they caught up with Mike’s band, which numbered 12, including women and children, in a dry wash north of Golconda, known as Kelley Creek. Gunfire was exchanged and when it was all over, one member of the posse was dead, along with four Indian men (including Mike and his three sons), two women (including Estep’s birth mother, Wenegah), and two children.

   The only survivors were Estep and three older children. All, except for 18-month-old Estep, would die of tuberculosis during the following year. Shortly after being removed from a cradleboard on her dead mother’s back and taken to Fort Hall, the former Mary Josephine Mike was adopted by Fort Superintendent Estep and his wife, and became Mary Joe Estep.

   Historians now believe what happened was that Mike’s band—desperate, cold, and starving—had captured and killed cattle in the High Rock Canyon area, north of Gerlach, to survive. The four stockmen had gone to investigate the missing cattle and were most likely killed during an encounter with the band.

   Sadly, Estep would again find herself in the headlines at the end of her life. In 1992, at the age of 82, she was receiving care for a broken hip in a Yakima nursing home and was accidently given three doses of prescription medicine intended for another patient.

   While the error was discovered within a half-hour, and was easily reversible, the home took no corrective action because Estep had signed an advance directive barring heroic measures from keeping her alive. She died a few hours later. Her death triggered a series of investigations and, eventually, a change in Washington state law to require health professionals to rectify any life-threatening situation that was caused by health providers.

   In an Associated Press article published at the time of Estep’s death, one of her friends, Louis Jarnecke, noted, “You look at what happened to her, and you could say that she [like her family] died at the hands of the white man, too.”

The Real Story Behind Bowers Mansion in Washoe Valley

  Tamera J. Buzick has long been passionate about the story of Ellison (“Eilley”) and Lemuel Sanford (“Sandy”) Bowers.

  As she writes in the fun introduction to her new book, “Bowers Mansion: The Legacy of a Comstock Family,” she first wrote about them in her first U.S. history class as a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and returned to their story for several other papers over the years.

  Later, after embarking on her career as a high school math teacher, she found herself returning to their story, spending the next two decades researching them. She began working on a biography, but then put it away for another two decades, while still continuing her research.

  In the early 2020s, Buzick, who by then had retired and become a curator at the Bowers Mansion, decided to finally complete her biography. With the aid of former Nevada State Preservation Officer and prolific author Ronald M. James, she was able to complete and expand her manuscript, including incorporating an architectural history by Michael “Bert” Bedeau.

  The result in a comprehensive look into the lives of Eilley and Sandy Bowers, who built Bowers Mansion, with a particular emphasis on the former. Their story also coincides and is interconnected with many of the major events in early Nevada.

  The focus on Eilley Bowers is warranted because she was a fascinating and often-misunderstood figure in Nevada history. 

  Eilley Bowers was born Alison Oram in Scotland on September 6, 1826. According to Buzick, little is known about her childhood, but in April 1842, she married Stephen Hunter, who was four years older than her.

  In 1848, Hunter embraced the then-new religion of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the pair decided to relocate to Salt Lake City, Utah, to help with the establishment of that community. The transition apparently put a strain on their marriage and, in 1850, they divorced.

  Three years later, Eilley, who had remained in Salt Lake City, married Alexander Cowan, another Scottish emigrant who had joined the Mormon Church and journeyed to Salt Lake City. In 1855, the two relocated to the settlement of Genoa in the far western Utah Territory.

  Buzick continues Eilley’s story through her time in Washoe Valley, the end of her marriage to Cowan, her move to the booming Comstock region, and her meeting and, eventually, marrying, Sandy Bowers.

  From this point, the Bowers story becomes more familiar, with Sandy Bowers success in the silver mines in the early 1860s, which resulted in them being considered among the first millionaires on the Comstock.

  In 1863, they completed work on the magnificent sixteen-room home in Washoe Valley that became known as the Bowers Mansion. They filled the house with furnishings acquired during a lengthy trip through Europe and, with adopted daughter Persia, lived in splendor for a handful of years.

  In 1868, however, Sandy Bowers died at the age of 35, leaving his family with the mansion, mining properties, but also serious debt. Eilley managed to resolve part of the debt, but was left nearly destitute. She turned to leasing out the mansion as a boarding house and resort, and to her growing fame as a “prophetess,” who could allegedly see the future.

  Over the next decade, Eilley faced the sudden and unexpected death of Persia in July 1874, a financially-disastrous effort to expand the mansion to make it more profitable as a resort in 1875, and, in 1876, the loss of the mansion.

  Buzick recounts the rest of Eilley’s story and the eventual saving of the mansion, which, today, is a county park. The final chapters include Bedeau’s excellent architectural history of the building and one by James that provides an historical context for the Bowers’ story.

  “Bowers Mansion: The Legacy of a Comstock Family,” by Tamera J. Busick is published by the University of Nevada Press and available from the press website (https://unpress.nevada.edu/9781647792237/bowers-mansion/) and from local bookstores and online retailers.

Frontier Journalist Fred Hart was a Man of Many Names

 

Austin in the late 1860s

   If former Reese River Reveille editor Fred Hart is known for anything today, it is for concocting the fictional Sazerac Lying Club for that Austin, Nevada newspaper in the early 1870s.

   For about four years, Hart regularly recounted the minutes of the local social club’s meetings in the pages of the Reveille—in spite of the fact that club did not actually exist. His tall tales of the club’s doings were so popular, in fact, that in 1878 he compiled them into a book that was successful enough to go into five printings.

   But the Sazerac Lying Club wasn’t Hart’s first literary invention. Several years earlier, in 1868, Hart began writing under a pen name—Van Jacquelin—when he contributed letters to the Reveille about promising mining activities in the White Pine Mining District.

   The use of a nom de plume was fairly common in Nevada newspapers during this period. A few years earlier, a young Virginia City newspaper reporter named Samuel Clemens had begun writing under the name, Mark Twain, while one of his co-workers, William Wright, wrote under the name Dan De Quille.

   By 1873, Hart had moved to Austin and become editor of the Reveille. In addition to his reporting for that paper, he also traveled to Carson City during the sessions of the Nevada State Legislature and reported on its activities for other publications. Here, he out-did Twain and De Quille by utilizing yet another pseudonym, Toby Green.

   In fact, during the 1873, 1875, and 1877 legislative sessions, Toby Green’s dispatches on state government activities appeared in the Gold Hill News, owned at the time by renowned newspaper editor Alfred Doten, as well as in several other Nevada newspapers.

   Perhaps feeling the freedom of writing under a pen name, Hart’s Green stories sometimes had a slightly sarcastic tone with an edge. He often poked fun at self-important legislators and mocked the tedious hearings.

   For example, in “Letter from the Capital,” which appeared in the News on January 14, 1873, Green wrote: “In the Senate today, Mr. Phelan [State Senator James Phelan of Storey County] gave notice of a bill providing for the appointment of an inspector of alcoholic liquors. If ever there was need of the creation of an office there is need in this instance.

   “Let a man take two drinks of ordinary Carson whisky and in five minutes afterward he’ll fancy that he owns the Capitol, the Warm Springs and the Mint. I think there ought to be a man—with a cast-iron, copper-bottomed stomach—whose duty shall be to examine this rotgut, and throw it ‘righd avay oud.’”

   Strangely, it appears that having two nom de plumes may not have been enough for Hart. In the February 26, 1875 edition of the Eureka Sentinel, a letter to the editor purportedly from a reader in Virginia City named “Quien Sabe,” which is Spanish for “who knows,” wrote of encountering Toby Green and Van Jacquelin.

   “I also saw Toby Green, the lively correspondent of the Gold Hill News. He was very agreeable and gentlemanly, and informed me that his full name was Tobias, but he signed Toby for shortness, and with the view of saving ink for the State. Good, economical soul, I shall never forget him.

   “On the second day I met Van Jacquelin, the racy correspondent of the Reese River Reveille, and was astonished at the resemblance he bears to Toby Green. He told me the likeness had been remarked by others, and modestly said that he thought that Toby was better looking than he was.

   “He informed me that he was a brother of Bret Harte, who is widely known as the author of a religious work called the ‘Heathen Chinee.’ He said his true name was Fred Hart, and that the final e was assumed by Bret as an aristrocratical appellation. Fred was not at all stuck up, but on the contrary was very affable and attentive to me.”

   From the tone and style of the letter, it’s pretty obvious that Quien Sabe most likely was another pen name for Fred Hart.

   But, as Quien Sabe might say—who knows?

Silver City's Devil's Gate Has Fascinating History

 

Devil's Gate in the 1860s

"As I passed through the Devil's Gate it struck me that there was something ominous in the name." —J. Ross Browne, A Peep At Washoe, published in 1860

  Twin walls of craggy, dark rock jut from the surrounding canyon, almost meeting in the center. A two-lane road barely squeezes through the center of the stone barricades. Welcome to the rock formation known as Devil’s Gate near Silver City.

  Almost since men discovered silver and gold in nearby Gold Canyon, Devil’s Gate has had a reputation for being a mysterious place.

  Formed from lava rock, the passage through Devil’s Gate was widened in the middle of the 19th century when part of the jagged rock wall was blasted away for a wagon road. It is located about 3 1/2 miles south of Virginia City on State Route 341, at the entrance to Silver City.

  In addition to having a somewhat scary name, Devil’s Gate gained its early notoriety in the late 1850s and early 1860s when the narrow passage was known as a hideout for highwaymen and robbers.

  J. Ross Browne, a noted 19th century journalist, wrote that the trip through the gate’s narrows was unsafe for travelers because of the “unhallowed character of the place.”

  Dozens of newspaper reports from the day mention people being relieved of their watches, wallets and other possessions as a “toll” extracted by unsavory types lying in wait at the gate.

  In addition to any involuntary toll, there was also, for many years, an official toll station at the gate. Since the passage was the easiest way to reach Virginia City, the gate saw thousands of newcomers trudging through its narrow opening on their way to the Queen of the Comstock.

  Still, despite the area’s notoriety, by 1860, a significant mining boomtown cropped up adjacent to Devil’s Gate, which was known as Silver City. Browne vividly describes the hustle and bustle of the area, with its bawdy saloons, frail wooden shacks and miners of every ethnicity crawling over the hillsides in search of a big strike.

  Nevada historian Stanley Paher notes in his “Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Nevada,” that Silver City had a population of 1,200 in 1861. Additionally, it could claim boarding houses, saloons, four hotels and extensive stables.

  The town ultimately became an important link between the Comstock Lode mines of Virginia City and the processing mills located near Dayton and along the Carson River.

  While the town thrived for a few years, its own mills and mines proved to be less productive than Virginia City and Gold Hill. A serious decline began after 1869 with completion of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, which reduced the town’s value as a freight center.

  Perhaps because Silver City has never gained the acclaim and attention of Virginia City, today there are significant remnants including a handful of historic structures still in use that serve as direct links to the town’s rich past.

  While the community does not have a large commercial district like Virginia City, it does have a post office, a substantial cemetery and such historic buildings as the Hardwick House, a former icehouse (and former bed and breakfast) built in 1862, and the restored Donovan Mill Museum (which is definitely worth a visit).

  For more information, go to: https://westernmininghistory.com/towns/nevada/silver-city/.

Cable Cars are a Special San Francisco Treat

  When you think about the city of San Francisco, one of the first things that comes to mind are its iconic cable cars. It’s impossible to imagine the city, one of America’s most scenic, without its unique clanging, grinding public transportation system.

  The cable car system was the brainchild of Andrew S. Hallidie, a transplanted Englishman and engineer. One day in 1869, Hallidie was watching a horse-drawn streetcar attempt to climb one of San Francisco's steep streets.

  The animals struggled, partially making it up the hill before slipping on the wet cobblestone road surface and being dragged by the heavy car back down to the bottom of the hill.

  Hallidie thought there had to be a better way. He began developing a plan for an underground system of thick metal wires, which would continually circulate. Streetcars would be designed to clamp onto these cables, and thereby be able to be pulled forward, including up San Francisco’s steep hills.

  Over the next four years, he worked on his designs for the project, and then lobbied for funds to built it. Despite considerable skepticism, Hallidie succeeded in gaining support and, on August 2, 1873, the first cable car made a run from the top of Clay Street, down Nob Hill's steep east side.

  The test was so successful that within seven years, the city had installed eight lines with more than 112 miles of cable.

  Fortunately, "Hallidie's Folly," as it was originally called, not only weathered the early criticism but also later attempts to remove the system in the name of modernization (the fate of nearly every other cable car system later built in America).

  Today, three cable car lines operate in San Francisco—and will in perpetuity, under the provisions of a city charter amendment adopted by the residents in 1971. Additionally, the system was designated a national historic landmark in 1964 by the National Park Service.

  The most popular routes are the two Powell Street lines, both of which can be picked up at the turntable at Powell and Market streets, in the heart of the shopping district.

  The Powell-Mason branch takes riders through Union Plaza, over the top of Nob Hill, then down to a turntable on Mason Street, about two blocks from the center of Fisherman's Wharf.

  The Powell-Hyde line is a tad more dramatic a ride, taking you from the same starting point, up to Nob Hill, then veering west through some steep terrain, over Russian Hill, before coasting to Victorian Park, at the northern end of Fisherman's Wharf.

  The latter route is probably the busiest in the system, so be prepared to wait in line at both ends of the ride.

  The third cable car line is the Van Ness-California route, which runs from the foot of California Street, near Market Street, in the financial district, then travels northwest, through Chinatown, to Van Ness Avenue at Nob Hill.

  Riding on a cable car is not only a reasonably cheap thrill— it only costs $5 to ride each way, which is a bargain in a pricey city like San Francisco—but an essential part of playing tourist in the city.

  Plus there is something magical about standing on the running boards of a cable car (for the full effect, the best place to stand is in the front, hanging onto an exterior pole), feeling the brisk ocean breeze against your face.

  The steep, somewhat frightening inclines, sharp turns, diverse sights, broad buffet of sounds and exotic odors, including the metallic smell of the cable car brakes, are all part of the experience.

  Additionally, San Francisco's brakemen, who are the guys manipulating the levers and brakes that control the cable car, are often showmen. Most have their own styles in the way they ring the car's bells and bark out the various stops along the way.

  Of course, for those not quite ready to hang on the outside, dodging the occasional automobile, there are plenty of seats within the cable car.

  A few other facts about the cable cars:

  • Despite evidence seemingly to the contrary, cable cars do not travel any faster than nine-and-a-half miles per hour.

  • Cable cars have three brakes, so they are difficult to dislodge from the underground cable.

  • Some 7 to 9.7 million passengers travel on the cable cars each year.

  • San Francisco’s cable cars operate from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

  For those wanting to learn more about the cable car system, there are excellent exhibits and tours available at the Cable Car Barn and Powerhouse, which is the nerve center for the system. The museum is located at Washington and Mason Streets and is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, Sunday (closed on Mondays). Admission is free.

  For more information about San Francisco's cable car system, go to: https://www.cablecarmuseum.org/.