Everything about Tulare Lake totally explained
Tulare Lake is an extinct fresh-water
lake that was formerly the largest in the
Western United States. Except during heavy precipitation it was part of a large
endorheic basin, at the south end of the
San Joaquin Valley but not connected to the
San Joaquin River. During wet years it was the terminus of the western hemisphere's southernmost (
Chinook)
salmon run. It was written about by
Mark Twain. It is approximately 10 miles south of the site of the
Mussel Slough Tragedy. The lake was named for
tule, a giant species of
bulrush that, once plentiful, lined the marshes and sloughs of its shores.
The lake and its surviving wetlands lie in the southern portion of California's San Joaquin Valley, about forty miles south of
Fresno, that existed over one hundred years ago since prehistoric times.
Yokuts tribesmen built
sedge-boats and fished in this lake before the arrival of American settlers. The lake and its large marshes were once an important fishery: in 1888, in one three-month period, 73,500 pounds of fish were shipped through
Hanford to
San Francisco. It was also the source of a regional favorite,
Pacific pond turtles, which were relished as Terrapin Soup in San Francisco and elsewhere. It was also a significant stop for hundreds of thousands of birds migrating along the
Pacific Flyway. In the wake of the
Civil War, the bordering marshes were drained, and in the twentieth century the lake was drained; it's now a shallow basin of fertile earth within the most productive agricultural region of the United States.
The lake was "reclaimed" (emptied and dried up) over the course of a few decades as the
Kaweah,
Kern,
Kings and
Tule rivers were diverted upstream and
canals were built to drain the lake. In fact, aggressive
groundwater pumping since the draining of the lake has resulted in a significant lowering of the
water table, causing subsidence of the land.
In 1849, the lake measured 1,476 sq km (570 sq mi). Its size fluctuated from year to year due to varying levels of rainfall and snowfall, but it ranked as the largest freshwater lake west of the
Great Lakes. By the end of the nineteenth century the lake had almost completely disappeared. Because the lake's basin remains, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of precipitation, as it did in 1997.
The expression "out in the tules," referring to the
sedge that lined the lakeshore, is still common in the dialect of old Californian families and means "beyond far away."
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