BY VIC BEDOIAN
Tulare Lake has been many things to many people over a very long time. It’s not a lake anymore except when in certain wet years it becomes the ghost of a lake, bringing back memories of what was once the dominant natural habitat in the southern reaches of the Central Valley. Two years ago, atmospheric rivers of rain lashed the state submerging a vast tract of farmland bounded by straight-line levees. It was not the first time the ghost lake reappeared and it will not be the last to prove that mother nature cannot be confined.
It was a temporary emergence of the lake, and by midsummer the water gave way to saturated soil. But in that short life span, the lake’s rebirth generated a cascade of articles and wide-eyed media reports.
Much has been written about this historic and enigmatic place over the years, but one account that stands out is Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin by William L. Preston. He grew up in Tulare County and the work is a product of his personal appreciation and love of the region’s natural history and people. It led to his life work as a professor of geography at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. Preston succinctly observes the Tulare Lake of our time in his introduction:
“In the southern San Joaquin Valley of California, midway between San Francisco Bay and the Los Angeles Basin, lies the dwindling remnant of a broad Pleistocene lake. Eastward lie the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; westward the Coast Range. A century ago, Tulare Lake was known as the center of a distinct natural and cultural realm; the Tulare Valley, but the regional identity of the lake basin has steadily diminished with the demise of the lake itself, and the rise of human-dominated landscapes. Once upon a time, Tulare Lake and its associated environments were the region’s dominant landmarks; now these are subordinate to cultural creations.”
Comprehensive in its scope, Vanishing Landscapes documents the broad range of human and natural history, from prehistoric to the near-present along with the relationship of people to the land from historic, geographic and ecological perspectives. Preston takes us through the kaleidoscope of time from the region’s changing terrains through geological epochs all the way to the familiar surroundings of our present-day manufactured and manicured landscapes. It is mainly a story about people and the land and how it was utilized over the ages from the Yokuts, through the Spanish empire and Mexican occupation, and finally waves of immigration from the United States.
The resurrection of Tulare Lake in 2023 sparked not only media attention but also a thirst for a deeper look at the larger meaning of its history and changes over time. What does Tulare Lake mean for us today? That topic was recently explored in a series of lectures at the College of Sequoias (COS) collaborating with the Alta Peak chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS).
Tulare Lake was explored from a myriad of viewpoints. Barbara Brydolf is president of the CNPS chapter and main organizer of the events. She suggests the 2023 flood events did focus renewed attention on the regional environment.
“I do think that the 2023 flooding has raised the awareness of Tulare Lake in the minds of the public. As I and others in the lecture series said, we didn’t even know that the lake existed, even though we grew up in California. The Central Valley was just something you drove through to get to somewhere else.
“I think that the floods were a reality check for us and caused us to realize that this isn’t natural or desirable. Also, because of the State Groundwater Management Act we now have to look at changing how we manage the landscape. That opens up opportunities.”
Yokuts called it Pa’ashi, and that name is making a comeback too. The contrast over the lost lake’s ecosystem and today’s industrial agriculture helped inspire the concerns of local nature lovers.
“The Tulare Lake region used to be so rich and is now so impoverished,” says Brydolf. “When I see how abundant birds are in the wetlands in the northern Central Valley and think that they were once here in Tulare County as well, it seems like a tragedy. I think it’s wrong that the development of the Tulare Lake basin was so one-sided, resulting in almost all the natural landscape being destroyed for the sake of farming.
“Because of this, there is almost no native vegetation left in the valley floor, and animals that used to be abundant, like roadrunners, blunt-nosed leopard lizards, kangaroo rats, tricolored blackbirds, marsh wrens and western pond turtles, are now scarce and in danger of extinction.”
Renowned naturalist Rob Hansen learned about the Tulare Lake area as a teenage birder. His interest and expertise grew from there. He spent time managing at a wildlife refuge that was an offshoot of the J.G. Boswell ranch that now covers much of the old lakebed. Now a retired COS professor is continuing to appreciate what is special about this place.
“Tulare Lake was a patchwork of habitats running that ecological gambit from alkaline desert to lush riparian forest. The western portions lay in the rain shadow of coastal mountains, and moving further east, flatlands gave way to short grasslands, and these grasslands in turn transition to salt marshes that thrive along the lake’s tall grasslands.”
Hansen is especially in wonderment of the creatures living in that severe habitat. “Many of the critters live underground to escape the extremes of desert. You see blunt-nosed leopard lizards and burrowing owls and birds that live underground too.”
Tulare Lake and its environs provided a diverse range of plant communities. Fanning out from the water’s edge to the mountains was marshland, lowland heath, spiny saltbush, desert saltbush, prairie, tree savannah, riparian forest, chaparral and evergreen forest. All that habitat provided homes and resources for the numerous Yokuts villages in the basin. The basin was fed by four rivers: the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and the seasonal White. Experts say it was one of the most densely populated regions in pre-European America.
Then came Spain’s string of missions along the coast. Vivian Underhill, who specializes in environmental and water justice at UC Santa Cruz said the Yokuts environment was their protector.
“The lakes and wetlands really served as a front line of defense against Spanish and Mexican colonization and the villages among them became a place of refuge for both and runaways from the Spanish missions along the coasts.”
For a brief period in the early 1800s, newly liberated Mexico governed California and divided much of the landscape into large land-grant ranchos. They too mostly avoided Tulare Lake. And they respected Yokuts’ land rights. Hispanic peoples, Preston writes, “did little to change regional patterns of land and life, but their diseases, their livestock, and their plants, their politics and their values soon began to wield tremendous influence.”
But they were followed by increased immigration from the United States followed by the Mexican-American War that ceded the Southwest. Statehood in 1850 changed everything forever as settlers came into the valley to establish ranches and farms. Underhill explains how it happened.
“They said any lands that were not successfully claimed within two years would just revert to being public lands of the United States. This process was long, often intentionally drawn out and lawyers charged exorbitant fees specifically for non-white claimants. It ultimately bankrupted many Mexican land-grant holders.
“Meanwhile indigenous nations weren’t notified of the commission. If they had decided to go and represent their claims they would have had to travel to San Francisco during a time when U.S. law restricted their travel. There was a significant urgency felt by the state of California to begin assigning private ownership to white settlers.”
Growing up on the 40-acre Tachi Yokuts rancheria near the shores of old Tulare Lake, Robert Jeff told of his fears growing up and trying to comprehend history. “I never understood why people that were running away to find a better way of life would come over here and make our life bad. Never understood it.
“You know they came here looking for opportunities, running from whatever they were running from, and they had a clean slate. We could start this new way of life any way we want to, and this is how they wanted it.”
Jeff emphasized his people were peaceful and at first trusted settlers. “We were going to teach them our way of life, they’re going to learn how to live like us. But we didn’t know they had other plans. We didn’t know they didn’t respect the land, respect the water. We didn’t know they wanted to extract everything they can just to make money for themselves and their families down the line.”
Preston observes that “the years from 1844 to 1856 were most important as a transition between two very different ways of life in the Tulare Lake Basin: the termination of a balanced relationship between land and people, and the introduction of a new relationship based on forceful control of the land by people.”
It was the beginning of the end for indigenous Pa’ashi, as Vivian Underhill describes. “The lake did begin to shrink as settlers diverted river water to irrigate their crops, and settlers began to plant crops in the lake bed when it was dry, then slowly crops all year round. Vista Lake, Kern Lake and Goose Lake dried first, but then in 1898 Pa’ashi went dry for the first time. But it returned 19 times. So really, Tulare Lake wasn’t drained so much as it was starved.”
Jeff is now Tachi Yokuts tribal vice-president. They now have a casino resort operation on 4,000 acres. But he ponders why his people were left out and remembers it as a painful time. “As a little kid I felt like nobody cared about us. You know we were stuck on a small rancheria and there was nobody coming out to plant trees and paint the fences, there were no Toys for Tots, there was none of that coming to our community.”
Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, most of the settler lands in the basin were dedicated to cattle grazing and some grain growing. With the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad, wheat demand grew dramatically. By the end of the century that market played out and land-use patterns transformed again. This time, smaller farms of orchards and vines flourished attracting a permanent, land-based population.
As Preston documents, the early 1900s saw the basin’s farmers develop an increasingly intimate relationship with the land, using new technologies and specialization of crops. However, he states that between 1926 and 1945 economic and social upheaval caused small farms to give way to large operations. This prompted another change with the influx of farmworkers from Mexico, Asia and the American South to work the increasingly large farms and dairies.
Agribusiness in the Tulare Lake basin today follows that land-use pattern of domination. Since 1925, the J.G. Boswell company has been engaged there in the production, processing and marketing of cotton, tomatoes, oil seeds, orchards and cattle on roughly 135,000 acres. Mark Arax in his classic work The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California paints an indelible picture of the current reality when he observed the lake’s comeback a few years ago:
“The lake, maybe one-twentieth of its native size, had come back. Bordered on all sides by the hard lines of levees, it had come back square. The lake bottom, once fished by four tribes of Yokuts, now belongs to the J.G. Boswell, the biggest farmer in the world at the time and last of California’s land and water barons. The Boswells had been chased out of the Georgia cotton fields by the boll weevil in the early 1900’s. They’d landed in Kings County along with a handful of southern transplants and proceeded to drain the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. They straightjacketed the four rivers that fed into Tulare Lake and installed a series of pumps that made the Kings River run backward.”
As Brydolf sees it, “A fair amount of the ‘flooding’ that we experienced can be attributed to our attempts to manage the water—diverting, channelizing, separating it from its floodplains to deliver more water to farmers. As a result, we have increased flood danger.
“Large amounts of water flowing in channelized rivers tears out the banks, and if houses are too close, it tears them out too. When you allow extra water to spread out on floodplains, it dissipates the force and danger of the water. So perhaps the word ‘flooding’ is really a misnomer.”
American occupation, Preston emphasizes, served to homogenize the basin. “The cultural and physical diversity and distinctiveness that gave the Tulare Basin an identity of its own have been lost. Landscapes created by centuries of close interrelationships between land and life have been cleared away, and new patterns have taken over.”
However, he also points out to those who take the time to look around that “the influences of history and distinctive local ecologies may still be detected in the landscapes of the Tulare Lake Basin.”
Learning from the past is essential to creating a better future, reckons Brydolf, “We live in unsettled times: fire, drought, floods, groundwater overdraft, wells going dry, undrinkable water, land subsidence, and the conflict and anxiety that surrounds SGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, and its implementation.”
Groundwater overdraft is the most acute problem in the Tulare Lake basin as Arax documents. “Farmers are poking so many holes in the ground, sucking out so much water from prehistoric depths that the earth is pulling away, first by inches and now by feet. The earth doesn’t sink alone, of course. It takes with it roads, bridges, dams, and canals.
“No farmer dares to go deeper than J.G. Boswell, who had drilled fifty-two wells in the bottom of old Tulare Lake, seven of the wells to a depth of 2,500 feet. That’s a hole the length of one Empire State Building on top of another. And so on and on it goes, in a rush to the nethermost.”
Brydolf believes the Tulare Lake basin could be transformed again. “Now is the time to review our past actions and current approach to see if there is a better way forward. It is essential that we know the past.
“We need to know what was here before we reengineered the land and took away the lake, we need to understand how that happened and we need to know about the injustices perpetrated on the native peoples before we can make informed decisions about what we do going forward.”
Jeff has a dream of making water and the spirit of Pa’ashi a part of Yokuts life again. “We’re Lake people, we’re water people, we need to recreate the environment that our ancestors once lived in. One of our big focuses right now is to revitalize that slough and bring it back to life, and by putting water in there and letting water circulate throughout our community and see it moving.”
That’s where Julie Rentner of River Partners comes in. Her organization works mostly in the Central Valley and was founded in 1998 with a mission to create wildlife habitat for the benefit of people and the environment. They have restored 20,000 acres of riparian landscapes.
“We’ve learned from various cross-sector partnerships in the valley about exactly how we can recover lost ecosystems and exactly what benefit those recovered ecosystems play for people as well as for wildlife. The first big lessons we learned were how to use farming practices in large-scale restoration.”
Rentner cautioned that such a restoration would be expensive and require a lot of technical expertise. “Restored Tulare Lake obviously could be an incredible cultural asset but even the act of restoring it can be healing and revitalizing.
“Tulare Lake doesn’t have to just be a spot of wet on the landscape. It can be a place of lasting wildlife recovery for terrestrial species like the monarch butterfly that’s on the brink of extinction, and for aquatic critters that live in rivers, streams and wetlands fringing the lake.”
There is a way to initiate a restoration project, according to Rentner, through the State Department of Conservation. “With multi-benefit floodplain restoration, we can actually find those places where it makes sense for the water to spread across the landscape and sink in. We can work with willing sellers and willing water managers to put this water to positive use, to flip this damage into something that’s a tremendous community asset.
“Bringing life back to Pa’ashi is finding places with willing partners and finding ways to speak to all sectors about how it can benefit them, in turn benefiting all of us.”
Maybe restoring a semblance of the aquatic ecosystem that was Pa’ashi is a long shot. But the concept has many supporters and it is worth a try. Toward that end, legislation sponsored by State Senator Melissa Hurtado (D–Bakersfield) would bring floodplain restoration investment to the Tulare Basin. SB 556 passed the subcommittee with a unanimous vote. It is a beginning.
