Tulare Lake
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Tulare Lake () or Tache Lake ( Yokuts: ''Pah-áh-su'', ''Pah-áh-sē'') is a freshwater lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California, United States. Historically, Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the
Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...
in surface area. For thousands of years, from the
Paleolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic ( years ago) ( ), also called the Old Stone Age (), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehist ...
onward, Tulare Lake was a uniquely rich area, which supported perhaps the largest population of Native Americans north of present-day Mexico. In the second half of the 19th century, Tulare Lake was dried up by diverting its tributary rivers for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses. In modern times, it is usually a
dry lake A dry lake bed, also known as a playa (), is a basin or depression that formerly contained a standing surface water body, which disappears when evaporation processes exceed recharge. If the floor of a dry lake is covered by deposits of alkalin ...
with residual
wetland A wetland is a distinct semi-aquatic ecosystem whose groundcovers are flooded or saturated in water, either permanently, for years or decades, or only seasonally. Flooding results in oxygen-poor ( anoxic) processes taking place, especially ...
s and
marsh In ecology, a marsh is a wetland that is dominated by herbaceous plants rather than by woody plants.Keddy, P.A. 2010. Wetland Ecology: Principles and Conservation (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 497 p More in genera ...
es. The lake reappears during unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt as it did in 1942, 1969, 1983, 1997, 1998, and 2023.


Name

The Spanish word '' tular'' (plural: '' tulares'') refers to a field of tule rush. Spanish captain Pedro Fages led the first excursions to the southern San Joaquin Valley in
1773 Events January–March * January 1 – The hymn that becomes known as '' Amazing Grace'', at this time titled "1 Chronicles 17:16–17", is first used to accompany a sermon led by curate John Newton in the town of Olney, Buck ...
.
This plain will exceed one hundred and twenty leagues in length and in parts is twenty, fifteen and even less in width. It is all a labyrinth of lakes and ''tulares'', and the river San Francisco, divided into several branches, winding in the middle of the plain, now enters and now flows out of the lakes, until very near to the place where it enters into the estuary of the river.
''Tulare'' ultimately derives from
Classical Nahuatl Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican Codices through the medium of Aztec Hieroglyphs) and Colonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in the Lat ...
'' tōlin'', "rush" or "reeds". The name is thus cognate with various Mesoamerican sites, such as Tula and Tultepec. A Tachi name of the lake is ''Pa'ashi'' which translates to "big water". Other variants include Chentache (or Chintache) and Chataqui.


Geologic history

Before 600,000 years ago, Lake Corcoran covered the Central Valley of California. 600,000 years ago a new outlet formed in the present day
San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay (Chochenyo language, Chochenyo: 'ommu) is a large tidal estuary in the United States, U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the cities of San Francisco, California, San ...
, rapidly carving an outlet through Carquinez Strait, probably catastrophically, and drained the lake, leaving the Buena Vista, Kern and Tulare Lakes as remnants. The lake was part of a partially
endorheic basin An endorheic basin ( ; also endoreic basin and endorreic basin) is a drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water (e.g. rivers and oceans); instead, the water drainage flows into permanent ...
, at the south end of the
San Joaquin Valley The San Joaquin Valley ( ; Spanish language in California, Spanish: ''Valle de San Joaquín'') is the southern half of California's Central Valley (California), Central Valley. Famed as a major breadbasket, the San Joaquin Valley is an importa ...
, where it received water from the Kern, Tule, and Kaweah Rivers, as well as from southern distributaries of the Kings. It was separated from the rest of the San Joaquin Valley by
tectonic subsidence Tectonic subsidence is the Subsidence, sinking of the Earth's Crust (geology), crust on a large scale, relative to crustal-scale features or the geoid. The movement of Plate tectonics, crustal plates and accommodation spaces produced by Fault (geol ...
and
alluvial fan An alluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to Semi-arid climate, semiar ...
s extending out from Los Gatos Creek in the Coast Ranges and the Kings River in the
Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada ( ) is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primari ...
. Above a threshold elevation of , it overflowed northward into the then-extant Summit Lake (southwest of Riverdale), thence via Fresno Slough to the San Joaquin River. This happened in 19 of 29 years from 1850 to 1878. No overflows occurred after 1878 due to increasing diversions of tributary waters for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses. By 1899, the lake was dry except for residual wetlands and occasional floods.


Geography

Tulare Lake was the largest of several lakes in its lower basin. Most of the Kern River's flow first went into Kern Lake and Buena Vista Lake via the Kern River and Kern River Slough southwest and south of the site of
Bakersfield Bakersfield is a city in and the county seat of Kern County, California, United States. The city covers about near the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, which is located in the Central Valley region. Bakersfield's population as of the ...
. If they overflowed, it was through the Kern River channel northwest through tule marshland and Goose Lake, into Tulare Lake.


Islands

During times of high water, the ridge of high ground separating the upper Chintache basin from the lower Tontache basin became an
archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Example archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the o ...
in the southern part of the lake. During times of low water, this ridge created two separate lakes. Today, these former islands make up the Sand Ridge in Kings County. The largest of these islands, Atwell's Island, was originally known as Hog-Root Island or Root Island. It was owned by Allen J. Atwell of Visalia, California, who introduced hogs onto the island. In early history, it was the site of the Wowol village, Chawlowin. Today the city of Alpaugh, California, sits on the remnants of Atwell's Island. Atwell Island was the largest of the Tulare Lake archipelago and has the latest recorded habitation by indigenous peoples. A Bird Island is shown in an 1876 map at the tip of Atwell Island's 'teardrop' shape which shows a small, oblate island. A Wowol village on Atwell's Island was named Chawlowin. It was occupied after 1852 by refugee Yokuts natives. Yoimut described semi-traditional life at Chawlowin:
My mother found almost all of her relations there at Chawlowin. Her brother had his family there and two or three of her uncles were there, too. They had all come back to that camp from Tule River Reservation, where the soldiers had taken them from Téjon Ranch. They wanted to stay at their old home. These people did not go back to the old village at the mouth of Deer Creek and White River because they would come back and get them. They were hid in the tules in tumlus (''toom-loos'') houses at the north side of the Island.
Gull Island was a small islet at the mouth of the Tule River, extending westward from the south bank of the Tule River. It was a narrow bar which was low, muddy, and had no vegetation. It was named for the large number of
gulls Gulls, or colloquially seagulls, are seabirds of the subfamily Larinae. They are most closely related to terns and Skimmer (bird), skimmers, distantly related to auks, and even more distantly related to waders. Until the 21st century, most gul ...
which nested at the site. Pelican Island was formed from deposits of the Kings River as an extension of its east channel, about a mile long and ten to sixty feet wide in 1883. It was named, as with Gull Island, for the vast number of white pelicans that nested on there. Cormorants also were present. Skull Island extended between five and six miles and was just over half a mile wide, the highest part being about twenty feet above the lakebed. Skull Island is one of the more locally famous landmarks. Frank F. Latta identifies it with the Calaveres of the early Spanish settlers. Yoimut (Josie Alonzo) described a village, ''Witi'tsolo wın'', probably on or near the site, to Anna Hadwick Gayton, which she visited between 1860 and 1870. Throughout the 19th century it was common for settlers in the Central Valley to
raid RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...
Skull Island. Dr. William Ferguson Cartmill, who numerous streets are named after in Tulare County, took several skulls from the site and kept them in his house. Local legend holds of a great "Indian battle" that took place at Skull Island. It is far more likely that the mass grave on Skull Island was due to an epidemic, probably
smallpox Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by Variola virus (often called Smallpox virus), which belongs to the genus '' Orthopoxvirus''. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (W ...
.


Ecology


Flora

Native ecosystems of the region ranged from saltbrush scrub and alkali sink to valley grassland and wetland. Today,
alfalfa Alfalfa () (''Medicago sativa''), also called lucerne, is a perennial plant, perennial flowering plant in the legume family Fabaceae. It is cultivated as an important forage crop in many countries around the world. It is used for grazing, hay, ...
is grown on some parts of the southern basin and invasive saltcedar is recorded in natural habitats.


Fauna

Indigenous fauna of the Sand Ridge area include Buena Vista Lake shrew (''Sorex ornatus relictus''), southwestern pond turtle (''Actinemys pallida''), fulvous whistling duck (''Dendrocygna bicolor''),
least bittern The least bittern (''Botaurus exilis'') is a small heron, the smallest member of the family Ardeidae found in the Americas. This species was formerly placed in the genus ''Ixobrychus''. Taxonomy The least bittern was Species description, forma ...
(''Ixobrychus exilis''), California red-legged frog (''Rana aurora draytonii''), giant garter snake (''Thamnophis gigas''). and the extinct Thicktail chub fish. Other species native or present in the area are
sandhill crane The sandhill crane (''Antigone canadensis'') is a species of large Crane (bird), cranes of North America and extreme northeastern Siberia. The common name of this bird refers to its habitat, such as the Platte River, on the edge of Nebraska's S ...
s and tricolored blackbird. Historically attested species (sometimes present in nearby placenames) like the
tule elk The tule elk (''Cervus canadensis nannodes'') is a subspecies of elk found only in California, ranging from the grasslands and marshlands of the Central Valley to the grassy hills on the coast. The subspecies name derives from the tule (), ...
and pronghorn antelope were of economic importance to Native American peoples living in the area. Grizzly Adams hunted tule elk on Pelican Island in the 1850s. The re-emergence of the lake can lead to explosions of the mosquito population in the area, which raises the concern of mosquito borne illness for people living in the area.


History


Pre colonial

The Tulare Lake region has been continually inhabited for more than 10,000 years. The Witt Site, on the shores of Tulare Lake, has yielded fluted and stemmed points from Paleoindian cultures, flaked stone crescents, Pinto points, drills, and limaces or "humpies." Fragmented mineralized bone have been identified as horse ('' Equus''), bison (''
Bison A bison (: bison) is a large bovine in the genus ''Bison'' (from Greek, meaning 'wild ox') within the tribe Bovini. Two extant taxon, extant and numerous extinction, extinct species are recognised. Of the two surviving species, the American ...
''), ground sloth ('' Paramylodon''), and mammoth ('' Mammuthus'') or mastodon (''
Mammut A mastodon, from Ancient Greek μαστός (''mastós''), meaning "breast", and ὀδούς (''odoús'') "tooth", is a member of the genus ''Mammut'' (German for 'mammoth'), which was endemic to North America and lived from the late Miocene to ...
''). The Sand Ridge area has similarly been occupied since at least the late
Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( ; referred to colloquially as the ''ice age, Ice Age'') is the geological epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fin ...
. According to the
Bureau of Land Management The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior responsible for administering federal lands, U.S. federal lands. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the BLM oversees more than of land, or one ...
, Sand Ridge "has yielded artifacts spanning the entire cultural horizon in California." Historical research by William Preston suggests that European-introduced epidemics may have devastated Lake Indians as early as 1500. At the point of European contact, three Yokuts nations inhabited the Tulare Lake area. The Wowol, to the southern margin, the Chunut to the east, and the Tachi to the north and west.


Early Spanish expeditions

European exploration into the Tulare Basin area began in 1805 with Fr. Juan Martin, who was the first European to see the lake. He arrived in Wowol territory following a three-day trip from the coast. In 1816, Luís Antonio Martinez destroyed the rancheria of Bubal, burning the village, scattering their grain, and smashing their grinding stones. He was heavily criticized for his cruelty by Father Juan Cabot, who was present on the expedition.


Pestilence of 1833

According to California historian and ethnographer of the Yokuts people Frank F. Latta, there was an epidemic around 1833 that wiped out nearly the entire western San Joaquin Valley:
At least three centenarians among my Yokuts informants were children here at that time. They were able to verify the existence of such an occurrence and to give me some account of it: burial of dead bodies until there were not enough survivors to make burials; abandonment of village sites, fleeing to the mountains, and later, studying the general condition of the valley floor and foothills until the Mewalk them safe for reoccupation. These centarians were Pahmit, San Joaquin River Dumna; Sahn-e-hat, Tule River Yaudanche, and To-tu-yah, Yosemite Valley Mewalk. Totuyah and Pahmit actually knew of the Mewalk moving down into the vacant Yokuts territory.
Skull Island was probably a result of this epidemic, as Latta's informants specifically note that bodies were too high in quantity for the living to bury them. Two Mexican land grants were claimed in 1843, one between Kings River and Cross Creek, and another, Manuel Castro's Rancho Laguna de Tache on the north bank of the Kings River. John C. Frémont led a United States military expedition across California, including Tulare Lake, immediately before the
Mexican-American War Mexican Americans are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. In 2022, Mexican Americans comprised 11.2% of the US population and 58.9% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans. In 2019, 71% of Mexican Americans were born in the United State ...
.


American

United States settlers began entering the Tulare Basin in 1826. The first settler to enter the San Joaquin Valley was Jedediah Smith. In 1854, Grizzly Adams hunted on Pelican Island, "where there was said to be elk in abundance." Children from a village on the mouth of the Kings River guided him to the island on a canoe made of tules. In 1858 or 1859, settlers began ethnically cleansing Tulare Lake, by killing or forcibly relocating the majority of the Yokuts population. Severe floods in 1861 and 1867 killed thousands of cattle and caused settlers to request further dams on the inflows to Tulare Lake. From 1875 to 1877, large numbers of hogs and cattle were carried to Skull Island from the mainland on the ''Mose Andross''. Presumably the last autonomous Indigenous people lived at the Tulare Lake archipelago in the 1870s. Yoimut detailed white settlers introducing cattle to the island and subsequently forcing the indigenous people out:
While we were at Chawlowin some white men put cattle on the island. The water was low and they drove them across from the east. There were hogs there already, but they were wild. As soon as the white people found out we were there we began to have trouble. The tules were getting dry and we were afraid the white people would burn us out. So we all left. My mother and stepfather took us to Téjon Ranch. We went in his brother's little wagon.


Desiccation

In the wake of the
United States Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded ...
, late 19th-century settlers drained the surrounding marshes for agriculture. In 1884, Scottish travel writer Constance Gordon-Cumming warned that " en the great Tulare lake itself is in danger of being gradually absorbed by the numerous canals and ditches with which the whole country is now being intersected... e poor lakes have simply been left to starve—the rivers, whose surplus waters hitherto fed them, having now been bridled and led away in ditches and canals to feed the great wheat-fields." That same year, ''
Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...
'' predicted the "utter absorption" of Tulare Lake. The Kaweah, Kern, Kings, and Tule Rivers were dammed upstream in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which turned their
headwaters The headwater of a river or stream is the geographical point of its beginning, specifically where surface runoff water begins to accumulate into a flowing channel of water. A river or stream into which one or many tributary rivers or streams flo ...
into a system of
reservoir A reservoir (; ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam, usually built to water storage, store fresh water, often doubling for hydroelectric power generation. Reservoirs are created by controlling a watercourse that drains an existing body of wa ...
s. In the San Joaquin Valley, the state and counties built
canal Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface ...
s to deliver that water and divert the remaining flows for agricultural
irrigation Irrigation (also referred to as watering of plants) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow crops, landscape plants, and lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has bee ...
and municipal water uses. Tulare Lake was nearly dry by the early 20th century. Citing health benefits of the day, Swedish naturalist Gustav Eisen, who crossed the lake by steamboat in 1878 and undertook an excavation of Sand Ridge probably that same year, celebrated the desiccation. He wrote,
In my opinion the drying up of Tulare Lake is a good thing. The land will be good for crops and there will be less sickness in the vicinity. The sloughs and marsh land in the old days used to be full of malaria that will now be a thing of the past.
Skull Island, surrounded by wheat fields, was eventually raided by grave robbers.


Post-1930

Enough water remained that the Alameda Naval Air Station used Tulare Lake as an outlying base for
flying boat A flying boat is a type of seaplane with a hull, allowing it to land on water. It differs from a floatplane in having a fuselage that is purpose-designed for flotation, while floatplanes rely on fuselage-mounted floats for buoyancy. Though ...
s during
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
and the early years of the
Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
. Aircraft needing a place to land could put down on Tulare Lake when landing conditions were unsafe on
San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay (Chochenyo language, Chochenyo: 'ommu) is a large tidal estuary in the United States, U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the cities of San Francisco, California, San ...
. The lake bed became a shallow basin of fertile
soil Soil, also commonly referred to as earth, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, water, and organisms that together support the life of plants and soil organisms. Some scientific definitions distinguish dirt from ''soil'' by re ...
, within the Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Farms in the basin produce much of the country's cotton, tomatoes, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, alfalfa, wheat, barley and milk. Farmers have irrigated the area for a century, so soil salination is becoming a concern. The destruction of the terrestrial wetlands and the lake ecosystem
habitat In ecology, habitat refers to the array of resources, biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species' habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ...
s resulted in substantial losses of
terrestrial animal Terrestrial animals are animals that live predominantly or entirely on land (e.g. cats, chickens, ants, most spiders), as compared with aquatic animals, which live predominantly or entirely in the water (e.g. fish, lobsters, octopuses), ...
s,
plants Plants are the eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars f ...
,
aquatic animal An aquatic animal is any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, that lives in a body of water for all or most of its lifetime. Aquatic animals generally conduct gas exchange in water by extracting dissolved oxygen via specialised respirato ...
s, water plants, and resident and migrating
bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class (biology), class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the Oviparity, laying of Eggshell, hard-shelled eggs, a high Metabolism, metabolic rate, a fou ...
s.


Resurgence

Yoimut, who spent a significant part of her life on the lake, warned ethnographer Frank F. Latta that the lake would return. In 1938 and 1955, the lake flooded, which prompted the construction of the Terminus and Success Dams on the Kaweah and Tule Rivers in Tulare County and Pine Flat Dam on the Kings River in Fresno County. Although usually dry, the lake reappears during floods following unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt; for this reason, it has been called a "phantom lake," "the lake that will not die," or California’s zombie lake. Estimates have found that Tulare Lake could hold twice the water of the proposed Temperance Flat Dam at one-fifth the cost. The Tachi Yokuts and many other people and organizations are trying to restore the lake permanently for various reasons including environmental purposes, water storage and Native American land reclaiming. The lake reappeared in 1942, 1969, 1983, 1997, 1998, and 2023. In 1983, the lake took two years to dry out. In June 1998, an above-normal winter snowfall led to the lake reappearing, reaching a size of , which resulted in about $100 million worth of crop damage and losses. The
groundwater Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and Pore space in soil, soil pore spaces and in the fractures of stratum, rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available fresh water in the world is groundwater. A unit ...
in recent years has been overpumped by the large land owners that dominate the politics and economy of the Tulare Lake region. The overpumping has contributed to the sinking of the ground under Corcoran, as well as exacerbated the dangers of flooding and necessitated the construction of multimillion-dollar
levee A levee ( or ), dike (American English), dyke (British English; see American and British English spelling differences#Miscellaneous spelling differences, spelling differences), embankment, floodbank, or stop bank is an elevated ridge, natural ...
s.


2023 resurgence

The numerous storms that struck California during the first few months of 2023 resulted in the reappearance of over of the lake, forcing the evacuation of several communities and causing the flooding of hundreds of farm buildings and homes amidst the land farmed by agricultural operations on the former lakebed. Parts of the communities of Alpaugh and Allensworth were under evacuation orders due to concerns that they might become flooded. Some floodwaters were diverted to alleviate flooding on farms. The Kern National Wildlife Refuge received its full water allocation in 2023. Located about south, the wetlands provide habitat for birds as part of the Pacific Flyway. As of February 1, 2024, the water only covered 4,532 acres of farmland.


In mass media

In 1967, a documentary film about the J.G. Boswell Company’s achievements and variety of California's agricultural industry titled ''The Big Land'' directed by David H. Vowell was released. TV personality Huell Howser visited Tulare Lake in an episode of his show, '' California's Gold'', in 1999. In 2003, author Mark Arax published a book titled ''The King of California'' which is about how J.G. Boswell turned the lakebed into farms and revolutionized the farming industry. In 2015, a documentary titled ''Tulare, the Phantom Lake: Drought'' was released and in 2022, a second part to the same documentary was released. Both were directed and produced by Christopher Beaver.


See also

* List of lakes of California * Rancho Laguna de Tache (Limantour) * San Luis National Wildlife Refuge *
Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge The Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge was an artificial wetland environment, created using agricultural Surface runoff, runoff from farmland in California's Central Valley (California), Central Valley. The irrigation water is transported to t ...
* Great Valley Grasslands State Park * Turlock Basin * Mussel Slough Tragedy * List of drying lakes * Lake Poopó


Notes


Sources

* * * * *


External links

* Lakes of California Endorheic lakes of California Landforms of Kings County, California Wetlands of California Natural history of the Central Valley (California) Former lakes of the United States San Joaquin Valley History of the San Joaquin Valley Geography of the San Joaquin Valley Kern River Yokuts