User:Wound theology/Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake
A group of unidentified men and a dog camping at the shores of Tulare Lake
Tulare Lake
Location	San Joaquin Valley Kings County, California
Coordinates	36°3′0″N 119°47′17″W
Type	Flat
Primary inflows	Kaweah River Kern River Kings River Tule River White River
Primary outflows	Evaporation, historically underground seepage to San Joaquin River, occasional flow to Suisun Bay
Basin countries	United States
Max. length	dry bed 130 km (81 mi)
Surface area	dry bed 1,780 km2 (690 sq mi)
Average depth	dry
Surface elevation	56 m (184 ft)
Settlements	Hanford, CA Corcoran, CA Alpaugh, CA
References	U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Wound theology/Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake (/tʊˈlɛəri/ ^ⓘ) (Yokuts: Pah-áh-su, Pah-áh-sē) is a freshwater dry lake with residual wetlands and marshes in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California, United States. Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States based upon surface area. For thousands of years, from the Paleolithic onwards, Tulare Lake was a uniquely rich area which supported perhaps the largest population of Native Americans north of Mexico. Tulare Lake dried up after its tributary rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses.

Name

A map from 1853 showing seperate Chintache and Tontache basins.

The Spanish word tulare refers to a field of tule rush. Spanish captain Pedro Fages led the first excursions to the southern San Joaquin Valley in 1773.

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 tōllin, "sedge" or "reeds". The name is thus cognate with various Mesoamerican sites, such as Tula and Tultepec.

Geologic history

Main article: Lake Corcoran

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, rapidly carving an outlet through Carquinez Strait, probably catastrophically, and drained the lake, leaving the Buena Vista, Kern Lake and Tulare Lakes as remnants. The lake was part of a 13,670-square-mile (35,400 km²) partially endorheic basin, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley, 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 and alluvial fans extending out from Los Gatos Creek in the Coast Ranges and the Kings River in the Sierra Nevada. Above a threshold elevation of 207 to 210 feet, it overflowed into 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, and by 1899, the lake was dry except for residual wetlands and occasional floods.

Geography

Tulare Lake was the largest of several similar 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. 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 in the southern portion 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 Hog-Root Island or Root Island. It was owned by Allen J. Atwell of Visalia, California who introduced hogs onto the island. In early historical times, 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 attested in a 1876 map at the tip of Atwell Island's 'teardrop' shape which shows a small, oblate island.

An 1876 map of Tulare County depicting an archipelago named the Pelican Islands, a small island known as Bird Island, and "Root Island" which would become Atwell's Island.

A Wowol village on Atwell's Island was named Chawlowin, occupied later than 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 seagulls which nested at the site.

An 1877 irrigation map depicting the western shore of Tulare Lake, including two islands in the southern portion.

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. Brandt's cormorant also was 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 [sic] of the early Spanish settlers. Yoimut (Josie Alonzo) described a village, Witi'tsolo wın, probably on or near the site, to Anna Hardwick Gayton, which she visited between 1860 and 1870. Throughout the 19th century it was common for settlers in the Central Valley to raid 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. However, it is far more likely that the mass grave on Skull Island was due to an epidemic, probably smallpox.

For many years the tradition was that these unburied skeletons were the results of a great Indian battle. We can well believe upon good authority that [the battle] was really not the case, but that during the pestilence of 1833 this tribe was probably killed by the same plague which almost entirely depopulated the entire San Joaquin Valley.

— Frank F. Latta, Tulare Daily Times Tuesday, 9 June 1931

Ecology

Flora

Schoenoplectus acutus at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Tule reeds between 1 and 3 meters in height covered the Tulare Lake archipelago.

Native ecosystems of the region ranged from saltbrush scrub and alkali sink to valley grassland and wetland. Today alfalfa is grown on some parts of the southern basin and invasive saltcedar is recorded in natural habitats. 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 (Ixobrychus exilis), California red-legged frog (Rana aurora draytonii) and giant garter snake (Thamnophis gigas). Other species native or present in the area are sandhill cranes and tricolored blackbird. Historically attested species (sometimes present in nearby placenames) like the tule elk 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.

Painting by C. E. Grunsky of willow stumps at Tulare Lake

History

Pre-Hispanic

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), ground sloth (Paramylodon), and mammoth (Mammuthus) or mastodon (Mammut).

The Sand Ridge area has similarly been occupied since at least the late Pleistocene. According to the Bureau of Land Management, 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.

The southern San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada during contact (1772), showing Tulare Lake at 1880 levels

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 Juan Cabot, who was present on the expedition.

Map of the Laguna de Tache land grant as filed by Limantour

Pestilence of 1833

According to Frank F. Latta, a pandemic 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 throught [sic] 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. Fremont led a United States military expedition across California, including Tulare Lake, immediately before the Mexican-American War.

Anglo-American

Anglo-Americans began entering the Tulare Basin in 1826. The first American to enter the San Joaquin Valley was Jedediah Smith, who visited the lake in 1827.

The schooner Water Witch on Tulare Lake

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 ethnically cleansed Tulare Lake, forcibly moving hundreds of Yokuts to the Fresno River Reservation to the north. Severe floods in 1861 and 1867, killing thousands of cattle, resulted in settlers calling for 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.

Cowboys on the north side of the Tulare Lake

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.

Polymath Gustav Eisen undertook excavations on the Sand Ridge, probably in 1878.

Desiccation

This map from 1886 depicts a drying Tulare Lake, with the location of "Root I." outlined beyond the shore of the lake.

Dr. Mountford shown after a duck hunt on Tulare Lake.

In the wake of the United States Civil War, late 19th-century settlers drained the surrounding marshes for early agriculture. In 1884, Scottish travel writer Constance Gordon-Cumming would warn that "[e]ven 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...[t]he 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 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 into a system of reservoirs. In the San Joaquin Valley, the state and counties built canals to deliver that water and divert the remaining flows for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses. Tulare Lake was nearly dry by the early 20th century.

Drawing of a photograph of Tulare Lake from 1875

The dry lakebed of Tulare as it appeared in 1898

Swedish naturalist Gustav Eisen, who crossed the lake by steamboat in 1878, 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 so the Alameda Naval Air Station used Tulare Lake as an outlying seaplane base during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Flying boats could land on Tulare Lake when landing conditions were unsafe on San Francisco Bay. 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. The lake bed is now a shallow basin of fertile soil, within the Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. 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 habitats resulted in substantial losses of terrestrial animals, plants, aquatic animals, water plants, and resident and migrating birds. Although now dry, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt, as it did in 1983 and 1997. For this reason, it has been called a "phantom lake," or "the lake that will not die."

Resurgence

Tulare Lake as it would appear in California today.

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 now dry, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt, as it did in 1969, 1983, 1997 and 2023.

Huell Howser visited Tulare Lake in an episode of his show, California's Gold, in 1999.

Yoimut, who spent a significant portion of her life on the lake, warned ethnographer Frank F. Latta that the lake would return.

In 2023, the communities of Alpaugh and Allensworth were evacuated due to concerns that they might become flooded. Alpaugh was formerly on the site of Chawlowin, a Wowol Yokuts village, which sat on an island in Tulare Lake.

See also

• List of lakes in California
• Rancho Laguna de Tache (Limantour)
• San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
• Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge
• Great Valley Grasslands State Park
• Turlock Basin
• Mussel Slough Tragedy
• List of drying lakes
• Lake Poopó

References

• Dale, Harrison Clifford (1918). The Ashley-Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822–1829. Arthur H. Clark Company. pp. 210–211.
• Fleeman y Garcia, Trace (2022). "An Archae/pelago in the Valley: On Cultural Landscapes of the Southern Tulare Basin" (PDF). Proceedings of the Society for California Archaeology. Vol. 35. Society for California Archaeology. pp. 180–186.
• Latta, Frank F. (1999). Handbook of Yokuts Indians (2nd ed.). Coyote Press. ISBN 1-892622-09-2.
• Menefee, Eugene L.; Dodge, Fred A. (1883). History of Tulare County California, with Illustrations, Descriptive of its scenery, farms, residences, public buildings, factories, hotels, business houses, schools, churches, and mines, from original drawings, with biographical sketches. Wallace W. Elliott & Co, Publishers.
• Preston, William L. (1981). Vanishing Landscapes. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 1–243.

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