Old maps of California depicting remnants of lakes Tulare, Kern, Buena Vista, and Goose Lakes

Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, was destroyed by the prodigious thirst of farmers, in particular, a voracious cotton king—which led to the destruction of an entire ecosystem. 

Facebook’s California Geology Forum moderator reposted an “imagined map” from another site, Simon shows you maps. Aussie map collector Simon, who was riffing off a 2012 “Big Think” article, said, “The map imagines a satellite view of California is (sic) 1851.” Simon had the poor map imagining itself as being viewed by a “satellite” which had me doubting both its sentience and its veracity, as well as wondering about Simon’s grasp on the English language. Research was required.

I was on a roll. After consulting several old California maps from the 1830s to the 1890s, I can safely say that the fake Google satellite flyby didn’t happen in 1851—perhaps would depict the state of the lake ca. 1875. In 1851, the lake was much, much larger. No, seriously, folks, all that silly steampunking aside, geographer Mark Clark’s imaginary map, though very cool, seems to represent a much later version of the Tule/Tulare Lake(s)—more like something out of the 1880s or ‘90s, when it was being drained. All of which led me on a merry snow goosechase hunting down some of the backstory of Tulare Lake, and co., by way of old maps. The maps and storyline posted below are presented more or less in chronological order. 

For starters, I learned that the depiction that Clark used to represent an imaginary 1851 Google map of Tulare Lake was far too small, as Tulare Lake(s) was something like 8 times larger than Tahoe, at 800 square miles (later 687 mi².) it was shallow, with an average depth of about 40 to 50 feet, but deeper in winter. It was massive. After the demise of archaic Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea) in the 1700s, Tulare Lake was the largest baddass lake and wetlands West of the Mississippi. It was king.

Tulare Lake 1875 —Wiki

I discovered that prehistoric Tulare Lake—remnant of vast Pleistocene Lake Corcoran—dried up within living memory, after all its tributary rivers were diverted for agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s. The 81-mile-long lake, named for the vast sea of tule rushes (Schoenoplectus acutus) lining its marshes and sloughs, with three other remnant lakes, Buena Vista, Kern, and Goose lakes, was part of one of the largest wetlands in North America. 

The term la ciénaga (or cienaga) has several meanings besides swamp. It was a Spanish Colonial term for spring, or wetlands, in the Am SW. It also meant "drowned land." The Yokuts Tachi name of the lake is Pa'ashi which translates to big water, not exactly a swamp term, and it’s the eponym of the tribe as well. 

 Some Yokuts subtribes called Tulare Lake Pah-ah-see for the way it grew and shrank with the seasons. Pah- is the universal Shoshone word for water. The vast lake ecosystem supported about 60 Yokuts subtribes so there were probably more lake names lost to history.

Tulare Lake also had an archipelago of sand islands, home to the densest population of Native Peoples in California. The Tulare basin, at 16,400 to 20,000 square miles, depending on who’s counting, was so vast, that the lake’s fisheries fed all the major cities of California. It was a major pathway for migrating birds, and also home to the southernmost range of the Chinook salmon on the West Coast. 

There was so much seasonal snowmelt water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains that farmers built dams, levees and canals in the 1880s and 1890s to tame it, in order to farm its rich bottomlands. Check out this 1830s Mexican map of California's Central Valley submerged beneath a 300-mile long, 30-mile wide seasonal lake. There’s a reason why so many Central Valley towns had the word Ferry embedded in their names. I remember reading early pioneer accounts of how the Central Valley turned into a vast inland sea. You can also see a flooded Tulare Lake in this map.

In 1830, the Central Valley was a vast inland sea 30 miles wide & 300 miles long.

Tulare Lake, which wasn’t seasonal, not only supplied fresh fish to San Francisco, it also served as a major water road for paddlewheel ferries during the 1880s-90s. No one ever imagined that the lake would disappear forever.

Apparently, during the 1920s, a southern farmer, JG Boswell, in an act of extreme hubris, drained one of the largest lakes in America to build the biggest little ole cotton empire in the world. It was the coup de la mort, the final blow—even the canals and levees constructed during the 1890s did nowhere near the damage Boswell did in the name of cotton. Look away, Dixieland. California cotton was king. it took a Texan to bring down California’s biggest lake.

That headline is so problematic, it made my eyeteeth hurt. Hysterical juxtaposition. The map itself can’t imagine what happened, no matter how hard it tries. No matter how sentient it thinks it is. The cartographer, Clark, whom we hope is sentient, could, and did imagine it, however, Simon still needs an editor. Let's move on, shall we? But what about the maps?

I just so happened to have a motley collection of old maps on my iPad from the 1830s to the 1860s—they depicted significantly larger bodies of inland water than in Clark’s “imagined” 1851 map. Maybe it was a drought year. Note that the 1873 map is similar to the imagined map.