A Fabled Lake Returns, But Can Its People Do The Same?

Resurgent Tulare Lake is a media sensation, but the Yokuts want more.

The ancient, ephemeral Tulare Lake has risen again, and mainstream media can’t get enough of the novelty. For the Native Yokuts people, though, who have always defined themselves in relation to this massive, vanquished lake, a return is nothing novel. The Lake, they know, comes and goes depending on snowmelt. The difference now is that, in our era of large-scale water diversion, engineering was unable to thwart its return. And now that it’s back, the Yokuts have proposed letting it live on in something like a national park.

Four years of drought preceded this story. Then, last winter, storms that meteorologists called “atmospheric rivers” dumped huge amounts of rain and snow on California. Melting snow swelled the rivers that drain the Sierra Nevada. As the rivers poured over their banks in the San Joaquin Valley, waters broke through levees and inundated the flatlands. The volume was relentless.

State, local and federal agencies worked to contain and divert this much-needed water, but the efforts only partially succeeded. By March, water covered over 10,000 acres of the Tulare Lake’s 790-square mile bed. By June, it covered 113,000 acres — almost the size of Lake Tahoe and larger than Tulare Lake has been since the flood year of 1983.

And yet, 113,000 acres is a little more than half of Tulare Lake’s historical size. At its peak, it was the largest freshwater body west of the Great Lakes. Often covering 200,000 acres, it averaged 75 miles across and 25 miles north to south. Its highest recorded level was 41 feet deep when it spread across 486,400 acres in 1862. But the way it has been erased from the landscape has also erased it from popular consciousness — so much so that its return has shocked people who either didn’t know about it or didn’t plan for it.

This July, Tulare Lake expanded 10 miles across and swallowed fields, homes, roads, wells, electric lines and transformers. In the place of grand-scale agri-business, a shimmering sheet of water stretched as far as the eye could see. Americans had dammed the rivers and drained the lakebed to reengineer it as farmland. With cotton, pistachio, dairy, and tomato farms underwater, damage to Kings County’s $2-billion-dollar agricultural industry is estimated at over $300 million dollars. By comparison, state officials estimated that the 1938 floods damaged $7.5 million worth of property and crops in the Valley — about $86 million in today’s dollars. In 1983, the Lake refilled 130 square miles of its bed and cost agriculture approximately $300 million in today’s dollars. Lake damage is nothing new here. Farmers just keep rebuilding, praying that the dams and levees will hold the next time.

Residents of drought-plagued areas often “pray for rain.” As Kings County Sheriff Sargent Nate Ferrier told NBC News this summer, “We just all prayed a little too hard.” In that liturgical way, it was hard not to see the flood as biblical. But instead of a blessing from God, some may be inclined to view the lake’s resurgence as a supernatural intervention cast down to scour this persecuted land of the forces that had drained its wetlands, killed its Indigenous people, and caused fertile land to subside?

It wasn’t that either. 

California is just a land of extremes. Floods follow droughts. Fires precede super blooms. The land is as boom and bust as the people who try to make their living from it. And Tulare Lake’s return was another glaring reminder that climate change has just made the state’s extremes more extreme. 

The reappearing lake is different things to different people. To the news, it is an anomaly. To the public, it is a startling contrast to extreme heat and dry wells. To locals, it is a massive pool that costs a fortune. To the long view of history, it is also an artifact of an earlier California — the one that Joaquin Murrieta rode through and John Muir wrote about, before William Mulholland and Hollywood shaped the modern state. Those waters are a literal bridge back to what California’s fertile, flat interior was before Americans subjugated it to grow food on Native land.

***

To the Indigenous Yokuts who still live here, the Lake is Pa’ashi, “the life-giving lake.”

“I am very happy the lake is back,” Leo Sisco, Chairman of the Santa Rosa Rancheria Tachi Yokut Tribe, told The Los Angeles Times. “It makes me swell with pride to know that, in this lifetime, I get to experience it. My daughters, my grandson get to experience the lake, and the stories that we heard when we were kids, for us it comes to fruition.”

By some estimates, Indigenous people have lived around Tulare Lake for over 10,000 years. Of the approximately 150,000 Native Americans who lived in California before Spaniards arrived, between 30,000 and 80,000 of them were Yokuts people living in the San Joaquin Valley. They formed what William Preston’s landmark book Vanishing Landscapes calls “the densest nonagricultural population in North America.”

According to the mostly white ethnological sources available, the Yokuts did not have one leader or capital, so they were not technically a tribe, though ethnographers tended to group them that way. Rather, they were comprised of between 50 and 60 separate, individually named subtribes who had their own leaders, territory, beliefs and customs. They were the Wowole, the Tachi, the Chunut, Yokodo, Tulumne, Yowlumne, Wukchumne, Chukchansi, Kaweah, Koyeti, Wechikit, Nutúnutu, and Chaushila, to name a few.

Instead of farming, the Yokuts moved seasonally through different habitats, collecting acorns and piñon pine nuts, hunting antelope, ground squirrels and deer, ducks and grebes, roots, berries and seeds. In clothing stitched from grass and bark, they fished wetlands in boats made from local tule reeds. They caught ducks in flight and seasoned wild, roasted Tulare Lake salmon with salt grass. They herded rabbits into ingenious nets made from tree branches and plant fibers, gathered shellfish from Tulare Lake with their toes, and burned grasslands to flush out protein-rich grasshoppers by the thousands.

Yokuts called themselves Yokoch, “the people.” When asked what that meant, some used the word to mean “they come everywhere” because they were so numerous. That’s how rich this lake-land was, even though huge swathes were arid and suffered seasonal drought. 

For them, the lake is not some piece of the past. It is a living thing. 

“It provided food,” said Sisco in the Los Angeles Times piece. “It provided clothing. It provided shelter. It provided water. Tulare Lake, Pa’ashi — That’s who we were as Tachi people. When that lake was there no more, we had nothing else to survive off of.”

Some Yokuts called Tulare Lake Pah-ah-see for the way it swelled and contracted. Because that is one thing this ghost lake can teach Americans: That as real as climate change is, California has always had wet and dry years, so there are always more to come, and interior California’s impressive water storage and delivery systems may not be enough to keep existing agricultural and urban systems functioning the way they have. To know Tulare Lake is to know that it was never a consistent, static presence like Lake Tahoe. Instead, it has always grown and shrunk dramatically based on the amount of Sierra snowmelt that came year to year. 

Now that it is back, the Tachi and certain environmental groups are talking about the cultural and environmental value of designating the Tulare lakebed Pa’ashi National Park, to revive some of what got lost with its waters. The Tachi Yokut Cultural Department used AI to help generate a striking, futuristic design for what the park’s Tachi Yokut Arts & Cultural Center could look like: a conical glass building literally perched out in the water. A group even supports the campaign with its own Instagram feed (@tularelakepaashi), cleverly calling the would-be park, “The World’s 1st Pop-Up National Park,” after the lake’s surprising rebirth. 

The Wowol, Chunut, and Tachi Yokuts tribes lived by the lake in both seasonal and permanent habitations. The Wowol had about 1,300 members. The Tachi were the lake’s largest group, with 4,000 people. And yet, in 1934, 1,200 modern-day Tachi Yokuts received just 40 acres for their Santa Rosa Rancheria reservation — 40 acres and no lake — in one of the most productive agricultural regions in human history.

“The lake was a lifeline,” Robert Jeff, Vice Chairman of the Santa Rosa Rancheria tribal council, said from the lakeshore this summer. He sympathized with the farm communities — all those homes and sales the water took. “But at the same time, they gotta remember thousands of tribes are extinct because of the loss of this lake. Languages were lost, dances were lost, our way of life was lost, so all of this could be here. All of this farming out here is here because they removed our people.”

People use the term “reclamation” for the process of draining natural wetlands to dry and develop flooded land. It should be called “claiming.” What Tulare Lake did this summer was actual reclamation: it returned to where it always naturally settled, the lowest point of land. That is not a flood. That is water doing what water does. And the Tachi are now trying to reclaim the water to reclaim their culture that springs from it.

“As Native people, there has been something missing in our spirit. There’s been something missing in our souls. And what you see behind us now is Pa’ashi has reawakened,” Jeff told The Los Angeles Times. “At the same time, it’s reawakened a lot of spirits.”

The lake is not just an environmental story. It is a people story. And the lake’s history is one of the most interesting and complex in the American West — possibly the world. And one of the most detailed accounts of this lake was recorded by an oral historian named Frank Latta.

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Born in 1892, Latta spent life interviewing settlers and Native Americans, recording their stories before time claimed them. At age 24, he started creating lists of translated words from different Yokuts dialects and assembled his lists into dictionaries complete with pronunciations: aw-gáwish, “sister” and skée-til, “squirrel.” 

While Latta raised his kids and worked as a high school teacher, he and his family drove the San Joaquin Valley and Sierras to interview people like Sínel, a Tachi doctor known for having what Latta described as “supernatural curative powers.” He interviewed Yoimut, the last of the Chunut tribe and last person who spoke their native Croo’-noot and Wo’-wole dialects. In 1916, Latta spoke with Thomas Baker, the founder of Bakersfield. He interviewed so many Native Americans that some nicknamed him Weé-chet-e, meaning “little sticks,” after the bundles of pencils he brought to interviews.

Latta saw a world of dams and farming changing the old California and eradicating Native peoples, so he wanted to preserve cultural details: how Yokuts learned to use bird wings to dust their houses; how they threw huge Tulare Lake clam bakes; how they made chewing gum from milkweed. The approximately 18,000 people he interviewed formed the basis of the 14 or so books he published, depending on how you count them. “Often we are in daily contact with remarkable people,” Latta once said, “and fail to recognize that fact.” 

His best-known books are Handbook of Yokuts Indians and Tailholt Tales, which is the record of one white 19th century settler’s life with the Yokuts people. I really love his 1937 book of loose dispatches and profiles, Little Journeys in the San Joaquin, because it is filled with Tulare Lake details. 

These were some of the Valley’s flood year: 1862, 1868, 1906, 1916. Then, in 1938, water filled enough of the Valley’s wetlands for Latta to boat across them all the way from Bakersfield to San Francisco. His route took him across Tulare Lake, the largest of the San Joaquin Valley’s four original, natural lakes. Tulare sprawled across the flatlands between what is now Interstate 5 and Highway 99, with the cardinal points of its shores vaguely marked by Kettleman City, Allensworth, Corcoran, and Stratford.

Early maps show topographical features that have not existed, and names that have not been widely used, for ages. A 15- to 25-foot-high dune field called Sand Ridge ran eight miles northeast to southwest and divided the shallower, marshier south lake from the deeper waters to the north. In dry years, the ridge connected to the mainland. In wet years, water surrounded them to form an archipelago. Spanish explorers called the westernmost island Calaveras, or Skull, Island.

Stretching six miles long and a half mile across, Latta wrote that, “Skull Island has been the basis of several very remarkable tales concerning a great Indian battle which is supposed to have taken place there in prehistoric times.” In the 1870s, a ranch hand named Jose Messa traveled regularly through the area to tend cattle. During one trip to Skull Island during high water, Messa found beads and skeletons on the shore, and he figured out once and for all that this was not a battle ground. It was a Yokuts burial ground where high winds and waves were eroding the graves. These were likely their own people they had buried after they died from smallpox. As if epidemics and taking Yokuts’ land was not enough, many white settlers routinely pillaged these graves, removing bones and artifacts as souvenirs. Dr. William Ferguson Cartmill, a notable local settler whose name appears on multiple streets, had more than one skull in his home.

Further east, Sand Ridge formed Pelican Island at the mouth of the Kings River. According to Latta and other sources, Gull Island stretched from the Tule River’s southern bank as it emptied into the Lake. Then there was what white settlers called Atwell’s Island, after its first American owner, but it started as a 700-person village named Bubal. The village of Bubal was the Wowol tribe’s largest settlement. 

Bubal used to be located on Tulare Lake’s western shore, but the Wowol seemed to have moved it to Sand Ridge because of all the Spanish territorial activity to the west near the Camino Viejo. There, between the northern and southern wetlands, the people could keep dry, access lake and grassland food supplies, and conduct trade in a vast network. In wet years, you needed a boat to reach Bubal. In low water, the island stretched nine miles long and two miles across. 

The lake was low enough that when Father Juan Martín searched the area for Spanish mission sites in 1804, he walked over Sand Ridge to Bubal. Like so many of these pioneer missionaries, he came to take Yokuts children away from their families to work at the infamous coastal missions and learn about salvation — his “harvest of heaven” as he put it. He had gathered 200 kids when he arrived at Bubal. Fortunately, the village chief put a stop to that and Martín left empty-handed. This was still only the beginning of the end for these peaceful people. 

It took a while for most Americans to notice the island through the 18-foot-tall reeds. Latta wrote how the wealthy attorney Judge A.J. Atwell and a business partner Ike Goldstein knew it was there but did not realize how big it was. Grazing their sheep in the Sierra foothills one night in 1859 or 1860, high above the Valley, the moon lit Tulare Lake, and the island’s true size revealed itself. Atwell told his partner, “Say, that would be a fine place to raise hogs.” They hired a Yokuts man to ferry the first hogs over on a reed boat. Surrounded by water, Atwell didn’t need fences, and the hogs loved the natural grasses and green tule shoots. Locals started calling it Hog-Root Island, then Root Island, then Atwell’s. 

When other people started keeping pigs there, the animals started eating the lake’s freshwater mussels, and customers grumbled about the meat’s fishy flavor. Farmers set the pigs free and started grazing cattle in the 1870s. 

The U.S. Army forcibly moved the Wowol to reservations in 1854, but some families returned to build secret houses in the reeds, trying to get back to their old lives. Cattlemen kicked them off.

Judge Atwell used to take his son Arthur duck hunting on the Island. “When my father first obtained possession of Atwell Island,” Arthur Atwell told Latta, “there were still many of the [dome-shaped] Indian houses standing there. These houses were made by weaving and tying the standing tules into a thatch which shed water as well as a good shingle roof.”

Built 10 feet high and 12 feet in diameter around a fire pit, their doors faced south to keep the water out when the north wind blew. While hunting, the Atwells hid in the houses during rainstorms. Arthur once spent the night in one. The next morning, he woke up a few feet from the dead body of a Wowol person. The records do not say, but their family probably had to abandon them because settlers ran them off their own island, or they died from starvation, maybe got murdered, while hiding from white ranchers. This was someone’s family member — a mother, a daughter. This is what our modern farm products cost: a whole people.

As Shana Powers, the Tachi’s historic preservation officer, told The Los Angeles Times, this June: Draining the lake and its wetlands was akin to “destroying the Garden of Eden.”

Even before California passed from Mexico to the United States, settlers had started pouring in, but the Gold Rush unleashed a swarm on these lands. One settler was named Thomas Jefferson Mayfield. His family entered the San Joaquin Valley in the spring of 1850 in search of a place to homestead. I have read a lot of Latta’s work — which formed the basis of my book The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley — and Mayfield’s story is one of my favorites. At age 86, Mayfield told Latta his whole life story. One highlight is how Mayfield’s family stood on the banks of the swollen San Joaquin River, contemplating the wisdom of crossing it, when a group of Yokuts, who had been washing their hair on the opposite shore, swam across to offer assistance. “Finally a young girl about 16 years of age offered to take me on her back and swim the river with me,” Mayfield told Latta. “So, Mother took off my clothes… I clasped my hands around [the Yokut girl’s] neck, and she took my feet under her arms and waded into the water… until we arrived at the south edge of the stream in shallow water… [The girl] was very proud of me and, holding my hand, kept the rest of the Indians at a distance of several feet. She would talk to me and laugh, but, of course, I understood nothing she said and remembered only the words…” 

Chólo-wé-chep, the girl called him, “little white boy.” 

The comity was not reciprocated. Between the 1840s and 1900, disease and settlers’ systematic violence shrank the state’s Native population from 150,000 to 16,000 people.

Americans started planting wheat on Tulare Lake’s receding shore. Farmers thrived between floods. They built levees to solidify the lake’s edges, but this calculated risk often left farms wet, so they needed to dam the rivers and “reclaim” the wetlands permanently. When Tulare Lake dried up in 1898, The New York Times wrote that, “Already surveyors are out with their instruments running lines across the mud. They say the land will grow any kind of crop with very little irrigation.”

A few miles south of what became Kettleman City was something called Gordon’s Point. This boat landing stood on a half-mile-long sandy spit that created a cove that boats used for shelter in storms. Fisherman called it Terrapin Bay for the staggering amount of turtles that coated the shoreline and the drifting mats of reeds. 

Coastal restaurants made turtles into soup, so fisherman hauled them in with huge seine nets. Two men would walk the shallow water, spaced 200 feet apart, and scoop everything in their path. When fisherman exhausted a section of shoreline, they moved to another. 

In the mid-1800s, duck eggs were also a delicacy. So were the ducks themselves. Tulare Lake fisherman caught catfish, carp, chub, salmon, sturgeon, mussels and frogs, but perch sold best. 

Fishing camps became foul places circled by hungry seagulls and coyotes and whose dirt was stained with the grease of dead sucker fish. Suckers were good money. Sucker fishing camps in Lemoore were covered in so many fish bones and barrels of leaky oil that a longtime Tulare Lake fisherman told Latta that area was “a lovely place to be away from.” 

A lake is more than its water, and Tulare Lake died piecemeal, from exploitive fishing, increasing farming, and the Yokuts’ systematic removal. But dams sealed the deal, by keeping the lakebed from flooding so farmers could use the soil, and people like me eat what they grow there. J. G. Boswell Company owns most of the lakebed now.

Dams and levees keep farmland dry and productive for years, but even in 1937, Latta knew the place’s true nature. In his book Little Journeys he wrote, “The safe guess is that Tulare Lake will continue to play the phantom role regardless of levees, ditches and dams built by white man.”

In 1969, high waters swelled Tulare Lake to 139 square miles. In spring 1983, flood waters breached another one of its levees and spread across 30,000 acres of farmland, lingering for nearly two years. In May 1983, Boswell pumped those floodwaters from the lakebed into the San Joaquin River, possibly sending noxious, destructive white bass with it, an invasive fish which biologists had until then been able to keep out of the Delta and river system. 

But 2023 is different.

People who have never heard of Tulare Lake have now read about it in The New York Times. And through the noise of news stats about damaged, flooded farms, they may even hear the words of the Yokuts about what they lost and may hear their suggestions for Pa’ashi National Park. 

But maybe 2023 will not ultimately be that different. The lake will evaporate, as it always does. Experts say it will take a year this time. Between now and then, few outsiders will see it. Then, we will have to see what next year’s rainfall and snowmelt do to the water levels. Evaporation doesn’t account for the spilled fuel and agri-chemicals that water will leave behind, but we’ll move on.

The Yokuts will not move on. Hopefully, the Yokuts and their environmental allies will keep advocating to protect these waters for environmental and cultural reasons. If a national park is not the solution, then perhaps the lake’s return offers an opportunity to find ways to resolve the area’s chronic over-pumping of groundwater, soil salinization, and land subsistence — a wholesale lack of sustainability in current agricultural practices. And hopefully, the lake’s return will finally ring loud enough get the Tachi what’s called first water rights, which a 1908 Supreme Court ruling is supposed to grant to tribes like them.

Pa’ashi’s return has to mean something. The evaporating water may not leave a mineral stain on the land, but it can leave a mark on this part of the world. California’s rural interior can remain one of the most productive and important sources of food on earth while still addressing the Yokuts’ needs. They are speaking loud and clear. As Chólo-wé-chep, it is our choice to hear.

***

Of the thousands of pages that Latta published, I keep coming back to the two pages about Yoimut, the last member of the Chunut tribe. Like her people always had, she’d lived on Tulare Lake. When Latta spoke with her in the 1930s, she had been forced from the Lake and lived in the town of Hanford at age 80.

“You ask me, ‘Will Tulare Lake ever fill up again?’” Yoimut said. “I got only one thing to say. Yes. It will fill up full, and everybody living down there will have to go away. I’d like to see that time myself. I am the last full-blood Chunut left. My children are part Spanish. I am the old one who knows the whole language. When I am gone no one will have it.” 

She temporarily lived near the shrinking carcass of a boat named the Alta I, which got stuck in the lake’s drying marshes and abandoned. She collected whatever wild foods were left and tended her traditional tule reed house as settlers picked off the old boat’s scrap and burned it for fuel. In another world, that rotting hull represented the failure of the new settlers. In another world, it represented the future of all human endeavor, a long hard look at the Western impulse to exploit and profit until nothing was left, and of the dangers of misjudging a temperamental land. In this world, it signaled the end of hers. 

“All my life I want back our good old home on Tulare Lake,” Yoimut said. “But I guess I can never have it. I guess I can never see the old days again. Now my daughter and her Mexican husband work in the cotton between Tulare and Waukena. Cotton, cotton, that is all that is left. Indians cannot live on cotton. They cannot sing their songs and tell their old stories where there is nothing but cotton.” 

Yoimut died soon after talking to Latta. She could never return to Tulare Lake. But maybe this time, California can help the rest of the Yokuts return.

*Published in Red Canary Magazine. Header photo of Tulare Lake by Jake Longstreth.