Convict Lake: A Name That Earns an Explanation

Most place names in the Eastern Sierra that sound dramatic have a story behind them that the sign on the highway does not tell. Convict Lake is one of the shorter ones.

In September of eighteen seventy-one, a group of prisoners who had escaped from a Nevada state penitentiary were making their way south through the Sierra Nevada. They had been on the run for several weeks when a posse from the town of Benton caught up with them in the mountains above this lake. During the confrontation, a posse member named Robert Morrison was killed, as was one of the escapees. The surviving prisoners were recaptured over the following weeks.

The incident was widely reported in California and Nevada newspapers, which is why the name stuck. The lake and the creek that drains it were named Convict Lake and Convict Creek in reference to the confrontation. The name has been on the maps since the eighteen seventies.

The lake itself is one of the more beautiful fishing and recreation destinations in the eastern Sierra, set below a steep volcanic cirque with a rim that rises more than two thousand feet above the water. Inyo National Forest manages it now. The scenery is not ironic. The name is not meant as a warning.

It is simply what the historical record does: names a place for the most dramatic thing that happened near it, and then the water stays beautiful and the name stays strange, and a century and a half later you drive past and wonder.