Tachi Yokut: The People the Lake Belonged To

Before the levees, before the cotton fields, before the drainage ditches that redirected the Kings and Kaweah rivers away from the basin floor, Tulare Lake was a working landscape. The Tachi Yokut and related tribelets had managed it for thousands of years, and what that management produced was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi: a seven-hundred-square-mile system of open water, tule marsh, and seasonal wetland that was among the most ecologically productive environments in North America.

The management was not passive. The Tachi Yokut burned tule marshes on seasonal cycles to promote new growth, which attracted waterfowl and game. They set fishing weirs to regulate the harvest of the lake's fish populations. They maintained trade networks connecting the lake communities with foothill peoples, exchanging valley products for obsidian and pine nuts from the Sierra Nevada. The ecosystem the first Euro-American settlers encountered in the eighteen forties was not a natural feature in the sense of untouched wilderness. It was the cumulative result of four thousand or more years of deliberate management. When the settlers saw a productive lake, they were looking at Yokuts work.

Tule elk, an endemic California subspecies, existed in herds across the valley floor and were central to Yokuts subsistence. Euro-American hunters reduced the tule elk population to fewer than ten individual animals by the eighteen seventies. The entire system, lake, elk, marsh, burning cycle, fishing weir, the full integrated economy, was destroyed within approximately forty years of sustained Euro-American settlement.

The Tachi-Yokut Tribe holds federal recognition through the Santa Rosa Rancheria south of Lemoore, approximately ten miles from where you are now. They maintain an active tribal government and operate economic enterprises. They have not disappeared. The direct testimony of Tachi Yokut people about this landscape, what it meant, and what its loss meant, is not represented in the secondary scholarship available to this production. The tribe's public record and the UCLA Center for Oral History are the appropriate places to look for that testimony. It exists. It has not been collected into the standard historical account.