San Bernardino National Forest: Lake Arrowhead and the Serrano Homeland Under a Resort

Lake Arrowhead is a private lake. Not private in the sense of restricted waterfront access, which is common enough in the West, but private in a more fundamental way: the lake itself is privately owned by the Lake Arrowhead Community Services District, and non-residents cannot legally access the water. You can see the lake from the road. You cannot get in.

The lake was created in nineteen twenty-two by damming Little Bear Creek, nine miles west of Big Bear Lake, to create a resort community at fifty-one hundred feet in the San Bernardino Mountains. The planned development was conceived and built as a private enclave for wealthy Angelenos seeking summer relief, an arrangement that remains largely intact a century later. The village at the north end of the lake has a shopping arcade, a resort hotel, and a weekend visitor economy, but the lake belongs to the property owners.

Before the dam, this was Serrano territory. The Serrano people occupied the high desert and mountain slopes of the San Bernardino range for thousands of years before Spanish contact, following a seasonal pattern of mountain summers and desert winters that the resort developers found useful only as backdrop. The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which includes Serrano descendants and is based in Highland at the base of these mountains, is today among the most financially powerful tribal governments in California, operating a casino resort that generated revenues substantial enough to permit significant philanthropic and political activity.

The lake they were displaced from is still private. The tribal government at the base of the mountains has found its own form of power. Both facts coexist without resolution in the same mountain range.