The
margins of Tulare Lake and the sloughs in the river bottoms were
covered by a broad band of freshwater marsh. The tule, a bulrush that
often grew to more than 15 feet in height, dominated this plant
community. The Spanish word for this plant gave the name tulare,
"place of the tules", to the lake.
The marshland was abundant in many kinds of plants and animals and the Yokuts tribes who lived nearby made use of these resources for transport, shelter and food. They used the tules to build boats and mats for shelter. They caught fish, turtles, birds and small mammals in the marshes. They harvested cattail tubers for food and collected sedges for basket material.
Grebes,
bitterns, herons, ducks, coots, rails, wrens, three species of
blackbirds and sparrows all nested in the tules. Lake fish spawned in
the protected waters of the marsh with its plentiful food supply of
tiny aquatic invertebrates.
Pacific pond turtles
were so numerous along the marshy lake edges that they were caught
and shipped by train to San Francisco and other coastal
c
ities
where "terrapin" soup and stew were menu items in the 1870s and
1880s. Turtles and fish were caught in the lake with seines that
brought out up to 2000 pounds at a time. In 1888, in one three-month
period, 73,500 pounds of fish were shipped through Hanford to San
Francisco.
The marshlands were not attractive to settlers. They made travel difficult, they could not be farmed, they had no trees to cut and they produced swarms of mosquitoes.
Reclamation
of "swamp and overflowed lands", including the marshes of Tulare
Lake, was widely favored. The State of California owned this land but
sold it for $2.50 an acre to individuals who would reclaim it for
farming. The State passed laws providing for reclamation districts to
build levees, dams, and drains to help remove the water from the
marshes, sloughs and lake bottom.
Wheat was the first major crop planted on these reclaimed lands and the San Joaquin Valley was the number one shipper of wheat in the country in the 1880s. As more irrigation water became available, cotton and vegetables became the main crops.
By 1899, the lake was
dry for the first time and efforts to remove the remaining tule
marshes and contain the lake continued well into the 20th
century. The Lake continued to alternate periods of dryness with
large floods. From 1923 to early 1936, the lake was gone, only to
have more than 200 square miles inundated in 1937-38. The completion
of large dams on the Kings, Tule, Kaweah and
Kern
Rivers in the 1940s and 1950s has helped to control the rivers
although the persistent waters still return in years like 1983 and
1997.
Since 1949, water has been provided for manmade marshlands as habitat for ducks and other wildlife in several refuges in nearby counties.
Text submitted by: Joyce Hall
