Tulare Lake
Tulare Lake or Tache Lake is an ephemeral 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 in surface area. For thousands of years, from the Paleolithic 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 tributaries for irrigation and municipal water uses. In modern times, it is usually a dry lake with residual wetlands and marshes. The lake reappears during unusually high levels of rainfall or snowmelt as it did in 1942, 1969, 1983, 1997, 1998, and 2023.
Name
The Spanish word tular 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 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 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, 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, 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, it overflowed northward into the then-extant Summit Lake, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Ecology
Flora
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.File:Schoenoplectus acutus FWS-1.jpg|thumb|right| Schoenoplectus acutus at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Tule reeds between in height covered the Tulare Lake archipelago.
Fauna
Indigenous fauna of the Sand Ridge area include Buena Vista Lake shrew, southwestern pond turtle, fulvous whistling duck, least bittern, California red-legged frog, giant garter snake, and the extinct thicktail chub.Other species native or present in the area are sandhill cranes and tricolored blackbird. Historically attested species 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.
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, bison, ground sloth, and mammoth or mastodon.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.
File:S0KKjTYU.png|thumb|The southern San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada during contact, 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 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 centenarians were Pahmit, San Joaquin River Dumna; Sáhn-ē-hat, Tule River Yaudanche, and Tō-tū-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.