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 (
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." 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. 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 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.
American United States settlers began entering the Tulare Basin in 1826. The first settler to enter the San Joaquin Valley was
Jedediah Smith. 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 began
ethnically cleansing Tulare Lake, by killing or forcibly relocating the majority of the
Yokuts population. Severe floods in 1861 and 1867 killed thousands of cattle and caused settlers to request 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. 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.
Desiccation In the wake of the
United States Civil War, late 19th-century settlers drained the surrounding marshes for agriculture. In
1884, Scottish travel writer
Constance Gordon-Cumming warned 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. Citing health benefits of the day, Swedish naturalist
Gustav Eisen, who crossed the lake by steamboat in 1878 and undertook an excavation of Sand Ridge probably that same year, 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 that the
Alameda Naval Air Station used Tulare Lake as an outlying base for
flying boats during
World War II and the early years of the
Cold War. Aircraft needing a place to land could put down on Tulare Lake when landing conditions were unsafe on
San Francisco Bay. The lake bed became a shallow basin of fertile
soil, within the
Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Farms in the basin produce much of the country's cotton, tomatoes, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, alfalfa, wheat, barley and milk. 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.
Resurgence Yoimut, who spent a significant part of her life on the lake, warned ethnographer
Frank F. Latta that the lake would return. 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 usually dry, the lake reappears during floods following unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt; Estimates have found that Tulare Lake could hold twice the water of the proposed
Temperance Flat Dam at one-fifth the cost. The Tachi Yokuts and many other people and organizations are trying to restore the lake permanently for various reasons including environmental purposes, water storage and Native American land reclaiming. The lake reappeared in 1942, 1969, 1983, In 1983, the lake took two years to dry out. In June 1998, an above-normal winter snowfall led to the lake reappearing, reaching a size of , which resulted in about $100 million worth of crop damage and losses. The
groundwater in recent years has been overpumped by the large land owners that dominate the politics and economy of the Tulare Lake region. The overpumping has contributed to the
sinking of the ground under
Corcoran, as well as exacerbated the dangers of flooding and necessitated the construction of multimillion-dollar
levees.
2023 resurgence The numerous storms that struck California during the
first few months of 2023 resulted in the reappearance of over of the lake, forcing the evacuation of several communities and causing the flooding of hundreds of farm buildings and homes amidst the land farmed by agricultural operations on the former lakebed. Parts of the communities of
Alpaugh and
Allensworth were under evacuation orders due to concerns that they might become flooded. As of February 1, 2024, the water only covered 4,532 acres of farmland. == In mass media ==