Passenger stages
Yuhaviat is a Serrano Indian word that means “Pine Place,” and it is the name Big Bear had for more than a thousand years.
Big Bear is no longer called Yuhaviat, because back in 1845, Benjamin Davis Wilson rode into Yuhaviat Valley with a posse of 20 men. They were chasing Indians who had been raiding their ranches in Riverside. As they entered the valley, they found it swarming with bear. Wilson divided his men into two-man teams. Each team went out, roped a bear and brought it back to camp. They had eleven bear at the camp all at the same time. This prompted Wilson to come up with the name Big Bear Lake.
However, Big Bear Lake is a man-made lake that did not exist in 1845. The lake Wilson named Big Bear was actually the natural lake at the east end of the valley, now known as Baldwin Lake.
The Bear Valley Hotel
The creation of the lake
It was a Redlands farmer, Frank Elwood Brown, who in 1885 constructed a thin rock dam across the narrow gorge at the west end of Big Bear Valley. The construction of the rock dam was both unique and controversial. It was designed as a thin arch dam, 52 feet high, 20 wide at the bottom and tapering to only 3 feet wide at the top. It was made entirely out of three-foot rock blocks cut from the surrounding hillside, with little cement used to hold the blocks together. The strength of the dam would come from the shape of the arch.
Without the use of explosives or power tools, the workers cut granite blocks from the hillside, each block weighing 3-5 tons. In just two years, at a cost of $75,000, Frank Brown had created the largest manmade lake in the world. What Frank did not realize was that he had also created a tourist attraction.
The discovery of gold around 1860 brought the first significant numbers of people to Big Bear. In the early 1900s, Fawnskin was rapidly becoming the center of tourist activity in Big Bear Valley.
In 1915, the new Rim of the World highway to Big Bear was completed. Major resorts began popping up all over in and around Fawnskin. In just a few years, over 17 resorts were operating along the north shore.
Cecil B. DeMille behind the camera
while filming in Big Bear Lake in 1914
Making movies
The beautiful scenery around Big Bear Lake attracted the budding movie industry and in 1911, the first recorded movie was made here by The Bison Company. During the ’20s and ’30s–the golden age for film companies–dozens of movies were made in the area.
Some of the recognizable names who came here on location include :
Cecil B DeMille, D.W.Griffith, Lillian Gish, Jesse L. Lasky, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford, Wallace Berry (The Last of The Mohicans 1920), Randolph Scott, Shirley Temple, Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, George Brent, Ward Bond and Gary Cooper.
Elvis Presley at the old mill at Cedar Lake during filming "Kissin' Cousins" in 1963
Others included: Ann Harding, Buster Crabbe, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Sylvia Sidney, Ralph Bellamy, Gilbert Roland, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, John Wayne, Vivien Leigh (Gone With The Wind), Elvis Presley, Dennis Quaid, Eddie Murphy.
More recently, scenes from “The Insider” with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe were shot in Fawnskin on the north shore of the lake.
In 2003, scenes from CSI: Las Vegas were also shot in Holcomb Valley and Fawnskin.