The Gatekeeper's Cabin and the Washoe Baskets
Near Tahoe City, California
Beside the dam stands a log cabin that looks like it belongs to another century, and in spirit it does. This is the Gatekeeper's Museum. For decades a person known as the gatekeeper actually lived here, tending the dam by hand, raising and lowering its gates to control the water leaving Lake Tahoe.
The original cabin dated to around nineteen ten. After it burned, the community decided the gatekeeper no longer needed to live on site, and rebuilt the cabin as a museum to hold Tahoe's history. Inside is one of its greatest treasures, the Marion Steinbach Indian Basket Museum, home to hundreds of intricately woven baskets from tribes across the country, including the Washoe.
Washoe basketry is considered some of the finest ever made. Its most celebrated artist was a woman named Louisa Keyser, known as Dat So La Lee, who worked near Carson City and perfected a rounded, sculptural basket form called the degikup. Her patrons documented well over a hundred baskets she wove between eighteen ninety-five and nineteen twenty-five, and her work is treasured in museums today.
Step inside, and the whole arc of this basin, native, pioneer, and modern, sits under one roof.
