![]() ![]() Though he famously hosted luminaries like baseball legend Ty Cobb and fellow millionaire recluse Howard Hughes for debaucherous all-night card games, more often than not he preferred to be alone with his exotic pets. Aside from Mingo, he favorited an African lion named Bill who used to accompany him everywhere, including rides around the lake in his convertible. Whittell loved animals and collected various exotic breeds that lived at Thunderbird Lodge. Perhaps most unusual of all is the large stone elephant barn built for Mingo, Whittell’s pet Sumatran elephant. The grounds also feature a decadent card house, caretaker’s cottage, butler’s house, and a boathouse for Whittell’s prized speedboat, the Thunderbird, which is connected to the main house by an underground tunnel replete with a dungeon and opium den. Whittell, who was also known as “the Captain,” had a Tudor Revival-style stone mansion built as his residence, designed by the prominent Nevada architect Frederic DeLongchamps. There, he built the Thunderbird Lodge, a storybook estate on the waterfront with sweeping views of the lake and mountains, where he spent the rest of his summers indulging in Great Gatsby-style high-society. He was worth the equivalent of billions today by the time he purchased 40,000 acres and nearly all of Lake Tahoe’s eastern shoreline. The millionaire in question is George Whittell Jr., who was born into one of the wealthiest families in San Francisco at the time and inherited a gilded-age fortune. Few visitors realize this is thanks to a peculiar and reclusive millionaire who built his summer residence on the lake in 1936, and in doing so, unwittingly conserved much of the beautiful land along the east shore. If you’ve spent any time at Lake Tahoe, you may have noticed the California side is far more developed than the unspoiled eastern shoreline in Nevada.
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