Tulare Lake Drainage: The Forty-Year Erasure of Seven Hundred Square Miles
California
What is under the cotton field is the lake. That is the essential fact about the flatlands of Kings and Tulare counties, and almost nothing about the landscape as you drive through it gives you that information. The road is straight. The fields are square. The sky is large and the ground is flat and this could be any irrigated agricultural basin in the American West. What it actually is, is a drained lake bed.
In eighteen fifty, Tulare Lake covered approximately seven hundred square miles of this floor. It was fed by four rivers, the Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern, all carrying Sierra Nevada snowmelt west into the lowest depression of the San Joaquin Valley. The depth varied, but in the deepest channels it reached thirty feet. The tule marshes around it extended for miles. The combined water surface made it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.
The Miller and Lux cattle empire, which controlled vast acreages in the Central Valley in the latter half of the nineteenth century, began the drainage. Agricultural interests that followed completed it. The tools were levees, drainage ditches, and water diversion structures that redirected the inflow rivers away from the basin. By nineteen hundred, the lake was substantially reduced. By nineteen twenty, the basin floor that had been open water for millennia was planted in cotton.
The drainage was an engineering choice, not an ecological inevitability. The water did not want to leave. The channels built to carry it away required constant maintenance, and the maintenance worked right up until the winter of two thousand twenty-two into two thousand twenty-three, when a sequence of atmospheric rivers delivered more water than the engineering was designed to handle.
The lake came back. It covered more than one hundred fourteen thousand acres of what had been farmland. The farms were gone, temporarily. The lake was back, temporarily. How long each of those conditions persists is the open question the valley is currently living inside.
