Tulare Lake - History

History

For centuries, the Tachi tribe or Tache, a Yokut people, built reed boats and fished in this lake in their homeland, until after the arrival of Spanish and American colonists. The Yokut had once numbered about 70,000. They had one of the highest regional population densities in precontact North America, which was possible because of the rich habitat.

The Yokuts also hunted deer, elk and antelope, which were numerous along the lake's shoreline. During wet years, the rivers feeding into the lake were the terminus of the Western Hemisphere's southernmost chinook salmon run.

Even well after California became a state, Tulare Lake and its extensive marshes supported 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, western pond turtles, which were relished as terrapin soup in San Francisco and elsewhere. The lake and surrounding wetlands were a significant stop for hundreds of thousands of birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway. Tulare Lake was written about by Mark Twain.

Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes, in 1849, the lake measured 1,476 km2 (570 sq mi), and in 1879, 1,780 km2 (690 sq mi), as its size fluctuated due to varying levels of rainfall and snowfall. Following the floods of 1861-62 and 1867-68, the highest water on record reached between 216 and 220 ft above sea level. At that elevation, the lake overtopped the natural "spillway" (located five miles west of the current community of Halls Corner on state route 41) and flowed northward into the sea via the Boggs and Fresno sloughs and the San Joaquin River.

The expression "out in the tules", referring to the 3–10 ft-tall sedges lining the lakeshore, is still common in the dialect of old Californian families and means "beyond far away".