Commentary: California was once home to the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, but Tulare Lake disappeared as water was diverted to irrigate crops. This year, however, the lake will once again re-emerge.
A water release from the concrete gravity Pine Flat Dam built on the Kings River in Fresno County in 1967. The facility was completed in 1954 by and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which created one of the largest reservoirs in California. Photo by the California Department of Water ResourcesCalifornia was once home to the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, but Tulare Lake disappeared as water was diverted to irrigate crops.
Situated between the later cities of Fresno and Bakersfield, Tulare Lake, as it was named in English, was the nation’s. It spread out to as much as 1,000 square miles as snow in the Sierra melted each spring, feeding five rivers flowing into the lake. When the snowmelt was particularly heavy, the lake rose high enough that a natural spillway would divert water into the San Joaquin River and thence to the Pacific Ocean through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay.
As those diversions expanded in the 20th century, Tulare Lake gradually shrank and disappeared altogether after World War II, whenOnce dry, the lakebed became the site of immense cotton farms, principally those of the Boswell and
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