For centuries, the Tache,
a Yokut Indian people,
built reed-boats
and fished in the lake
of their homeland.
Hunted deer, elk, antelope,
numerous on the lake’s shoreline.
Until after their arrival
Spanish and American colonists
who overtook the lake.
Late 19th-century settlers
drained the wetlands,
Farmers plowed rich soil
in the dry-lake bottom,
planted regular crops
for over a century.
Tulare Lake was dried up,
Kern, Tule, Kaweah,
the southern Kings River,
the tributary rivers
diverted and dammed
for agricultural irrigation.
During the wet years,
heavy rain and snow
in the Southern Sierra Nevada,
the highest water level
on record in the lake,
was 220-feet above sea level.
The lake overtopped
its earthen “spillway,”
at Fish Slough,
5 miles west of Halls Corner
and State Rt. 41
flowed to the Boggs,
and Fresno sloughs.
Streaming northward,
joined the Mendota Pool
at the San Joaquin River,
then to the San Francisco Bay
and finally into the sea.
Large fishing boats
and flat-bottom steamers
reached the Tulare Lake,
through the inland waterway
As the sloughs filled
when the lake flooded.
A significant stop
for hundreds-of-thousands
of migrating birds
along the Pacific Flyway.
INSTANT NOODLES 