Tulare Basin

TULARE LAKE, IN CALIFORNIA'S CENTRAL valley, was often in the news this past year, due to flooding concerns from the record snowpack that had accumulated in the Sierra over the previous winter. That a normally dry and disappeared lake would suddenly become a flood hazard is a reminder that the way things seem at any given time can quickly flip, and become the obverse (and not for the first time, in the case of Tulare Lake).

Once occurring at a more glacial rate, oscillations of large-scale inundation and desiccation are accelerating in human-altered times. Tulare Lake, at the bottom of the Tulare Basin, could be a new kind of “paradox lake,” where opposite conditions, wet and dry, exist in one place, simultaneously. Perpetually actual or potential, Tulare Lake is there even when it is not.

The Tulare Basin, at the southern end of California’s Central Valley, is a semi-landlocked watershed, whose drainage ends at Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake in the west. The lake was part of a vast and biologically rich marsh that supported a Native American population. Starting in the mid 19th century, canals changed the basin’s hydrology, draining the swamps to create agricultural land, and diverting the flow of the rivers away from the lake to farms. The lakebed dried up, fell under the plow, and disappeared from maps. By the 1980s, the lakebed was one of the largest contiguous industrial farms in the nation, as it is still today.

But despite all the engineering on it and around it, Tulare Lake stubbornly remains the lowest point in the basin, and when larger than typical flows from the Sierra Nevada’s streams occur, the water has to go somewhere. Floods overtake the levees and ditches of the modern farms, as occurred in 1937, 1952, 1969, 1983, 1998, and 2023. The old Tulare lakebed is still the end of the line, and the bottom of the bowl.

A conventional view of the Tulare Basin (not taking into account its connections to watershed-spanning aqueduct systems like the Delta-Mendota Canal and the California Aqueduct) is of a large endorheic watershed, with no typical drainage to an ocean, covering more than 20,000 square miles. The basin extends from Fresno in the north, to Frazier Park in the south, and ranges vertically from the highest point in the Lower 48 (Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet), to the basin’s lowest elevation, the bottom of Tulare Lake (around 175 feet above sea-level). However, land subsidence from groundwater pumping is changing even this fundamental topography of the Tulare Basin.

Drifting Down the Former Rivers of the Tulare Basin
In many watersheds, a journey upstream is the course that brings you closer to the truth, the goal, the source. In Tulare, it seems, as perhaps is the case in other endorheic basins, the reverse is true. Going with the flow takes you closer to a conclusion, to the end zone.

Going downstream in the Tulare Basin, however, is not a clear path. The flat lands of the basin are a dynamic network of converging deltaic fans of former episodic river channels, some consolidated and reinforced, but most disappeared, circumvented by irrigation canals, ditches, and other diversions. Here we will attempt to travel down the five principal rivers that drain into the basin, starting from their respective modern “headwaters”—their flood control reservoirs, perched in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, above the valley floor.

These reservoirs are the buffer between a watery feast of snowmelt in the spring and summer, and the relative drought that exists for most of the rest of the year. Each reservoir is the fulcrum between the dendritic capillaries of the tributaries upstream, and the river’s engineered downstream distribution network. Collection, storage, and delivery. Starting at the top, with the San Joaquin.
 

San Joaquin River
Before agricultural canals and reservoirs, the San Joaquin River emerged from the mountains near Fresno and flowed north along the bottom of the Central Valley, adding the waters of the Merced, Tuolumne, and Stanislaus Rivers on its way to the Delta, past Stockton, where it slowly blends with the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Since the San Joaquin River flowed north, and drained into the ocean, the river and its watershed was not part of the Tulare Basin, but rather defined that basin’s northern edge. This changed in 1949, with the opening of the Friant-Kern Canal, which begins at the base of the dam, and diverts nearly all of the water from the river south, along the Sierra foothills, all the way to the Kern River in Bakersfield, 152 miles away.

Construction of the Friant Dam started in 1937, as part of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project, a New Deal federal program to build irrigation and water resources during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Though the dam and the resultant reservoir, known as Millerton Lake, help control flooding in the valley below, and some water is dispatched northwards through the Madera Canal, its primary purpose was to bring additional water to the southern parts of the Central Valley, where groundwater levels were dropping, after nearly a century of farming.

The diversion of the water southward meant that little remained for  the San Joaquin River itself, and the river channel, extending for more than 50 miles from the base of the dam, soon dried up. Some of its waters have since been replenished with water flowing in reverse from the river’s terminus at the Delta, delivered by the Delta-Mendota Canal.

Upstream of the dam, the San Joaquin River and its tributaries collect water from snowmelt in the High Sierra, over an area that spans the geographic center of California, and extends north of Mammoth Mountain and into the Ansel Adams Wilderness, on the edges of Yosemite National Park. Much of the river above the dam is engineered by the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, a series of dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and powerhouses, which collectively generate around 12% of the hydroelectricity produced in California. 
 

Downstream, the old riverbed emerges at the base of the dam, runs past the town of Friant, and through a mixture of parkland and former gravel quarries. The river channel delineates the limit of the northern sprawl of Fresno, holding housing blocks back like a horizontal wall, with the grid of farmland on the other side. 20 miles from the dam, the riverbed passes under Highway 99, the central artery of the Central Valley, and under a massive viaduct for California’s new (and interminable) high-speed rail project.

After another 25 miles flowing west, across the center of the Central Valley, intensely developed with farms and dairies, the San Joaquin River curves northward at a complex hydrologic intersection, known as the Mendota Pool. Several canals converge here, ending or beginning, depending on how you look at it. Foremost among them is the Delta-Mendota Canal, which brings water from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, 117 miles north, and terminates here, filling up the channel of the San Joaquin River back to the dam, and feeding other irrigation canals, radiating from the vortex of the Mendota Pool.

The San Joaquin River north of here is a historic waterway that once allowed boats from San Francisco Bay to travel upstream to this point. As the valley developed with cities, farms, and canals, the river became less and less navigable.

Precedent-setting water rights battles over the San Joaquin made the San Joaquin River one of the most litigated rivers in America, especially since its waters passed though a big part of the powerful empire of the Miller & Lux Corporation, which in the late 19th century owned more than 1.4 million acres of land in the west, making it among the largest ranching and farming concerns in the nation, even by today’s standards.

Much of the land around the San Joaquin River near the Mendota Pool is now farmed and owned by the Resnick family, who are often cited as the largest farmers in the nation today, with close to 200,000 acres under cultivation, most of it in the southern San Joaquin and Tulare Basins. Their company, called Wonderful, owns several brands, including POM Wonderful pomegranite juice, Halos mandarins, and Fiji Water bottled water. They are likely the nation’s largest producers of pistachios and almonds, and one of their nut packing plants is four miles northeast of the Mendota Pool.

Though located outside of the Tulare Basin, the Mendota Pool is connected to it in an important way, as this is also the northern end of the Fresno Slough, which, historically at least, and in various channels, runs southeast for 40 miles, providing a drain for the Tulare Basin during times of extreme flooding. This has rarely occurred in history, but did for the last time in the 1870s, when the normally endorheic Tulare Basin drained into the San Joaquin, connecting Tulare Lake to San Francisco Bay.

The southern end of Fresno Slough is also connected to the Tulare Basin by engineered channels to a branch of the Kings River, which flows out of the Sierra as the principal river feeding Tulare Lake.
 

Kings River
The Kings River is the northernmost of the four principal rivers that once naturally drained into the Tulare Basin, and it supplies more surface flow to the valley than any of the other rivers. The reservoir was created by the Pine Flat Dam, completed in 1954, after years of controversy over who would ultimately build the dam, and control the allocation of water it held back.

Originally planned as a Bureau of Reclamation project, like the Friant Dam, the Bureau’s plan expressed New Deal ideals, and would favor small farmers, with operations of 160 acres or less. Larger downstream farmers lobbied hard for a different plan, that would allow them to grow even larger still—a plan that engaged the Army Corps of Engineers as the builder and operator of the dam. Large farm interests eventually won, and the Pine Flat Dam was built and managed by the Army Corps, as were the dams built later on the other rivers flowing into the Tulare Basin.

The Pine Flat Dam is a concrete dam 440 feet tall, by far the largest dam in the Tulare Basin. The reservoir behind it, Pine Flat Lake, has a capacity of one million acre-feet, almost twice that of the next largest reservoir in the basin. Like the others, it was built for flood control, as limiting floods enabled development to take place along the river, including farming along its watershed, especially at the terminus, Tulare Lake. As a storage reservoir, water can be let out in a measured, anticipated way, helping farmers mitigate the normal uncertainty of the weather.

The Kings River originates at the crest of the Sierra Nevada, in Kings Canyon National Park, and flows through one of the largest pumped storage hydroelectric plants in the nation. After settling in the reservoir, the river flows out the bottom of the dam, and in just four miles the river hits Cobbles Weir, the first of dozens of diversion structures that deflect their water into canals and irrigation ditches, along a complicated course to Tulare Lake.

A few miles further, another weir diverts some flow into the Enterprise Canal, at the Kings River Packing Company plant, a large citrus packing plant. Agriculture along the eastern foothills of the valley primarily includes citrus, and primarily oranges. California produces more than half of the nation’s citrus, and most of that comes from the Central Valley.

Eight miles downstream from the dam, the Kings River meets the Friant-Kern Canal, which carries most of the San Joaquin River’s water, heading south to Bakersfield, under the Kings River through a half-mile-long underground siphon. Water can be diverted from the canal into the Kings River here, too, further mixing up the region’s watersheds.

The river continues to meander west, east, and south, bifurcating and re-forming to spread its waters around, flowing past more fruit packing houses in Reedly, then heading southwest past Kingsburg, with its Swedish-themed downtown, and the largest Sun-Maid raisin box, outside what may be the largest raisin plant in the nation.

After passing under Highway 99, the Central Valley’s thoroughfare, the Kings River meets the People’s Weir and Pool, the largest of the weirs on the river. Water from the pool can be diverted into the People’s Ditch, which heads to Hanford, or the Lakeland Canal, which heads south towards Corcoran and Tulare Lake.

The larger river channel heads west as the North Fork of the Kings River, which meanders and bifurcates its way west for another 20 miles or so, until it hits another crucial diversion at the Crescent Weir. Here the river can be steered north, towards the Fresno Slough, and from there into the San Joaquin River Basin.

This rarely happens though. The bulk of the river heads south, between the Lemoore Naval Air Station, a busy Navy fighter jet training base, and the Leprino Foods West Lemoore facility, one of the largest cheese plants in the nation, which makes mozzarella for the national pizzascape out of milk made by cows, from Kings River water.

A few miles south, near the town of Stratford, this branch of the Kings River meets Empire Weir Number 2, at the north end of the Tulare lakebed, where it is split into a number of canals that flow to different parts of the lakebed. The largest channel, in the middle, is the Kings River-South Fork Canal, which heads due south for a few miles into the middle of the lakebed, where it meets a canal coming in from the east, that contains the remains of the Tule River.

This point marks the end of both the Tule and the Kings Rivers. From here their blended waters are pumped around the lakebed’s fields, evaporating into the heat, or absorbed by the likes of cotton, pistachios, and tomatoes.

Kaweah River
The Kaweah River once drained directly into Tulare Lake, in high water. Though its main channel is only 33 miles long, and its flow much smaller than that of the Kings and the Kern, it remains an important contributor to the Tulare Basin. It was the last of the four principal Tulare Basin rivers to be dammed. The Terminus Dam was completed in 1962, by the Army Corps of Engineers. The 255-foot-high earthfill dam has six large fuse gates on top of it, which were added to the dam in 2004 to increase its capacity.

The river forms from tributaries inside Sequoia National Park, where the snowmelt waters the world’s biggest trees. The river is very steep, dropping more than two miles in less than 20 miles, before being impounded by the Terminus Dam.

The Mount Whitney Power Company, now operated by Southern California Edison, has six small dams and three small powerhouses along the river, dating back to the early 1900s, with many miles of flumes that flow as a kind of separate parallel river to feed the penstocks.

Downstream of the Terminus Dam is the Sierra gateway community of Lemon Grove, where the Kaweah River splits into two channels at the MacKay Point, with the St. Johns River going northwest around Visalia, and the main channel heading southwest.

Ten miles further, the main channel splits again, into Mill Creek and Packwood Creek, officially ending the named Kaweah River. Mill Creek, the larger of the two channels, continues on through Visalia, but is usually dry. Mill Creek ends north of Corcoran, when it meets Cross Creek, a channel that heads south towards Tulare Lake.

Tule River
The Tule River has the smallest watershed and the lowest discharge of the four principal rivers of the Tulare Basin, but it is the one most directly linked to Tulare Lake, in both name and its historical flow directly into the lake.

The R.L. Schafer Dam, the earthen embankment dam that holds back the reservoir, was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and completed in 1961. There is a recreation area on the lake, with a number of boat ramps and a small marina.

Downstream of the dam, the Tule River flows west along the southern edge of Porterville, until it splits into a north branch and a south branch, aided by a concrete divider, a few miles west of town. The two branches follow close to one another through the farmland, then rejoin into one channel again west of the roadside rest area on Highway 99, between Tipton and Tulare.

After another ten miles of westward meandering, the Tule River passes under Highway 43, where a viaduct is being constructed for California’s high-speed rail project. The high-speed train tracks will pass over the existing highway and the busy BNSF freight rail line here, as well as the Tule River channel.

Two miles west of the viaduct, the Tule River ceases to meander at a kind of backwater, which connects to a canal that runs across the north part of the Tulare lakebed.

Kern River
The Kern River is the southernmost of the four principal rivers feeding the Tulare Basin, and the most complex in its long and circuitous path to Tulare Lake. Its dam and reservoir were built at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada, where the river’s north and south forks meet, 40 miles northeast of Bakersfield. The dam was completed in 1953, and the lake filled up over the following years, flooding the townsites of Isabella and Kernville, whose residents had been relocated.

The lake’s capacity was reduced dramatically in 2006, when the dam was determined to be vulnerable to earthquakes. After a lengthy study and planning process, a reconstruction project began in 2017, including raising the dam by 16 feet, and adding a new emergency spillway. This was completed by 2023, just in time for a wet winter and big spring snowmelt. The reservoir was close to full capacity in July 2023, for the first time in 15 years, before being drawn down through the summer and fall.

Upstream of the dam, the Kern River channels extend northward, deep into the Sierra, draining the western slope of Mount Whitney. Downstream, the river flows through Kern River Canyon, dropping 2,000 feet in 20 miles, to the flatlands of the Central Valley, east of Bakersfield. This dramatic stretch of white water has drowned more than 300 people over the last 50 years, giving the Kern the title of the deadliest river in America. There are a number of old powerhouses, fed by pipelines and flumes along the river, which provided power to Bakersfield, and fueled the former electric Red Car rail system in Los Angeles.

Entering the valley, the Kern River runs for 30 miles through the flat lands of Bakersfield, a region engineered with numerous canals and restoration projects, 6,000 acres of which are known as the Kern River Parkway. The Parkway begins at the Kern River Golf Course, then continues past old and new estates along the river, a belt of green surrounded by dry and barren hills. The river then runs through the Kern River Oil Field, the fifth largest oil field in the nation, by some ways of measuring.

After that, a portion of the river splits off to the south in canals, including the East Side Canal, which roughly follow the former south fork of the Kern’s deltaic fan, and irrigate the region southeast of Bakersfield—an expanding suburb, and a major dairy and vegetable growing and packing region.

On the river near downtown Bakersfield, at Chester Avenue, is the point where Frank Lotta, a local teacher and historian, began a journey to San Francisco Bay, in the high flood year of 1938, before dams tamed the rivers of the basin. He, along with three others, traveled downstream in a 15-foot boat equipped with an outboard engine. They followed the drainage to the normally dry Buena Vista Lake, then north through the swollen Buena Vista Slough to the flooded Tulare Lake, then north through Fish Slough and the Kings River channel to the Fresno Slough, and into the San Joaquin River, dragging the boat through swamps and over levees and berms as necessary. They made it to Treasure Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay, after just ten days.

At Coffee Road, a few miles past downtown, the Friant-Kern Canal brings water from the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River into the Kern River Basin, at a complex hydrological hub in the mostly dry Kern River riverbed, where several canals that carry water from one end of the basin to the other, converge. From there, with or without water in it, depending on seasonal fluctuations, the Kern River channel continues westward through the Kern River Parkway for another ten miles.

At the end of the Parkway is the 2,800-acre Water Bank, a groundwater recharge and water storage area. The 2,800 acres here were acquired by the City of Bakersfield as part of a package of land, canals, and water rights around the city, including rights to a third of the water from Lake Isabella, purchased from the Tenneco West oil company for $18 million in 1976. Known as the Kern River Purchase, this was a foundational moment for the City of Bakersfield, where it gained some control of its water resources, helping it to grow to its current form, California’s 9th largest city.

One “End” of the Kern River
The Kern River Parkway ends at Interstate 5, and the river channel passes under the interstate and continues southwest for another three miles, then reaches a pool, which is often dry, next to a gas refinery. This point marks either the “end” of the Kern River, or its continuation into at least three different directions.

Extending north from the pool is the West Side Canal, a channel that follows the course of the former Buena Vista Slough, which can take Kern River floodwater all the way back to the Tulare lakebed, 50 miles away.

At the west side of the pool is a short channel leading to a gate that connects directly to the California Aqueduct, the 400-mile-long canal that brings Northern California water to Southern California. Known as the Kern River Intertie, the control structure here exists to provide an additional outlet for Kern River floodwaters. In May 2023, it was opened for the first time in 17 years, to prevent more floodwaters from reaching the already flooded Tulare Lake, adding Kern River water into the water supply for Los Angeles.

At the south end of the pool is a channel which heads south, allowing the Kern River to drain into Buena Vista Lake, or, conversely, for Buena Vista Lake to drain into the Kern River. The channel splits in two, with one branch becoming an irrigation canal for the lakebed.

Buena Vista Lake is the second largest of the four historic lakes in the Tulare Basin, which, like Tulare Lake, dried up after irrigation took over the valley. Before that happened, Kern River water flowed here, usually after draining into Kern Lake, before draining north to Tulare Lake. The Buena Vista lakebed is now farmed intensively by its owner, the J.G. Boswell Company, which also farms and owns most of the Tulare lakebed.

The second branch of the channel from the pool connects directly to Lake Evans and Lake Webb, two adjacent lakes constructed at the northern edge of the Buena Vista lakebed, known as the Buena Vista Aquatic Recreation Area, a county park that provides boating, camping, picnicking, and swimming opportunities for the public.

At the eastern end of Lake Webb, just outside the park, is Buena Vista Ranch, the J.G. Boswell Company’s management center and equipment yard for its operations on the Buena Vista lakebed. Ten miles southeast of it is Boswell’s Kern Lake Ranch, the center for its operations on the Kern Lake lakebed, which is also owned and farmed by the company.

Like Tulare’s, the Kern and Buena Vista lakebeds are intensely flat, uniform, and monolithically farmed—principally planted with cotton, though increasingly with pistachios, almonds, and tomatoes.  

Deserts vs. Swamps
Boswell’s industrial farming operations on Kern and Buena Vista Lake, and Tulare Lake as well, are based on the heritage of the Miller & Lux Company, which acquired control of these former wetlands in the late 19th century, as part of the government program known as the Swamp Act, which allocated land to people if they “reclaimed” it, by draining the water to make farmable land.

San Francisco-based business partners Henry Miller and Charles Lux owned more than a million acres of farms and ranchland in the west, but the largest contiguous portions were two properties on the west side of the Central Valley. The larger of the two, around 100,000 acres, was along the San Joaquin River, between Modesto and the Fresno Slough. The other, more than 50,000 acres, was the Buena Vista Slough, the swampland between Buena Vista Lake and Tulare Lake.

In the late 1870s, Miller & Lux was at work reclaiming this 50-mile-long swamp by digging a canal through its midst, using massive Fresno Scrapers, pulled by 50-horse teams, creating a new channel for the Kern River. Their channel was running dry, however, as a rival developer upstream, James Haggin’s Kern County Land Company, claimed most of the Kern River water as his, diverting it into hundreds of thousand of acres he acquired around Bakersfield as part of the government’s Desert Land Act (similar to the Swamp Act, but applied to land normally too dry to farm).

This conflict over water rights, and between swamps and deserts, evolved into a precedent-setting court battle that required defining what a “river” actually was. Though the Lux vs. Haggin case was finally settled after many years by the California Supreme Court, both the draining of the swamps and the irrigating of the desert continued on a vast scale, leading to the disappearance of more than 95% of Tulare Basin’s wetlands.

West Side Freeway and Buena Vista Swamp
Today, motorists on Interstate 5, heading from Los Angeles towards the Bay Area, descend through the deep V of the Grapevine into the Tulare Basin grid of the Central Valley, revealed as if a theatrical curtain was opening to expose an agricultural stage, with a backdrop dissolving into the hazy distance. Highway 99 soon splits off the interstate, northbound towards Bakersfield, and continues on to connect the Central Valley’s agri-towns, while I-5 veers left, up the relatively dry and barren west side of the valley.

In five minutes, the highway passes imperceptibly over the New Rim Ditch that marks the southern edge of Kern Lake, which is otherwise now invisible as such, just part of the grid of dusty fields and mega-dairies. Minutes later the highway passes, exit-less, over Millux Road, which runs east-west through what was once the marshland between Kern Lake and Buena Vista Lake. A few miles later the grid dissolves a bit, where the interstate passes over the Kern River, and through the 2,800-acre groundwater recharge area, where in wet times pooled surface water almost laps against the shores of the highway.

After this point, and for dozens of miles more, the interstate travels through what once was the 50-mile-long, eight-mile-wide swamp along the Buena Vista Slough, now long dried out and converted to farmland.

Just west of the Buttonwillow exit, at Highway 58, is a large J.G Boswell tomato processing and packing plant, one of two that the company has in the Tulare Basin. In the other direction, east, past the big steer statue serving as the sign for the Buttonwillow Land & Cattle Company, is Frito-Lay’s Kern facility, one of the largest snack food plants in the nation.

Approaching Lost Hills, Interstate 5 crosses over the Main Drain and West Side Canal, first dug by Miller & Lux, carrying the Kern River northward in times of flood, to Tulare Lake. The bulk of the drainage shifts from the west side of the interstate to the east side at this point, while the highway continues northwest, eventually following the west shore of Tulare lakebed itself, at Kettleman City.

The dominant grid of farmland squares and rectangles, inside square-mile sections, dissolves after the Kern River drainage crosses the interstate, wiped out by something like a skeletal deltaic fan, spreading out as it merges with the ghost of Tulare Lake. In the middle of this zone is the Kern National Wildlife Refuge, which was established in 1959 to restore some of the wetlands and bird habitats that existed 150 years ago, when this was the largest freshwater wetlands west of the Mississippi.

North of the preserve are leveed floodlands, spreading grounds used to hold water in times of flood, and to provide further bird habitats. The ponds abut the Sand Ridge, an eight-mile-long east-west rise in the ground formed by historic sediment deposition. Mostly less than 20 feet high, the ridge is enough to create a barrier to normal flow, and defines the southern shore of the historic Tulare Lake.

During floods, flow from the Kern River, coming from the south, crosses the Sand Ridge into the lake at control gates on canals. Beyond, the lakebed itself is a dense rectilinear network of canals, ditches, levees and roads surrounding fields shaped, watered, planted, and harvested by machines. Portions of which are sometimes underwater.

On the Periphery: The Towns of Tulare Lake
If Tulare Lake was at its maximum size, as it was in the 1870s, it would have flooded the communities around it, had they existed at the time. These include Stratford, at the northern end of the lake; Alpaugh, at the southern end of the lake; and the historic African-American community of Allensworth, reconstructed in recent years by preservationists, and now a California State Park.

Nearby Atwell Island would have been the largest of a few islands in the full-sized lake. An overlook at Atwell Island, which was constructed to provide a view over a small piece of pre-agriculture land restored by the Bureau of Land Management, would instead provide a vista across the vast lake, whose distant shores would be too far to see.

More drastically in this hypothetical scenario, the city of Corcoran, with a population today of more than 20,000, would be underwater, too. Corcoran is the largest community on the periphery of Tulare Lake, and is the agricultural services hub for the region.

Packing and processing plants for local agricultural products are located here, as are fertilizer and pesticide suppliers and crop research facilities. However, the largest employers in town, by far, are the two adjacent state prisons, where close to half the population of Corcoran lives, incarcerated.  Charles Manson was a resident until he died in 2017.

The first prison opened in 1988, and the second, specializing in substance abuse treatment, opened in 1997. During World War II there was a German POW camp at Corcoran, where prisoners were forced to pick cotton.

Corcoran was incorporated in 1914, founded by the developer Hobart Whitley, who purchased more than 3,000 acres and laid out the town. The main street through Corcoran is named after him. Whitley was an early developer of Hollywood, too, and Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, where he worked with other notable Los Angeles boosters, and land profiteers such as Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, the successive publishers of the Los Angeles Times.

Historians have described Corcoran in its early years as a Southern cotton town meeting the Wild West. From then till now, in the middle of the fray, is the J.G. Boswell Company, Corcoran’s second largest employer, which has been based in town and farming the adjacent Tulare lakebed for close to a century.

Cotton has been the main crop for the company, beginning when Colonel James Griffin Boswell moved from Georgia to California, and founded his land and farm company in 1925.  Colonel Boswell worked with Harry Chandler, and married his daughter, Ruth. They lived together in a mansion in Pasadena, were part of L.A.’s high society, and spent little time in Corcoran.

After the colonel died in 1952, the company was led by his nephew, J.G. Boswell II, who acquired more land and water rights over the years, including the Miller & Lux land at Buena Vista and Kern Lakes in the 1970s. By 1980, Boswell had almost 200,000 acres under cultivation on an industrial scale, making him the largest farmer in the nation.

The J.G. Boswell Company’s cotton gins, storage silos, and processing buildings are on the east side of town, along with the company’s private airport, with a 7,000-foot paved runway. Some of the site was acquired when Boswell bought out its chief rival, the Salyer family, whose cotton operation once covered 88,000 acres. The bale yard next to the processing plant covers half a square mile, storing cotton brought in from the fields as large loaves wrapped in plastic.

At a small airport on the west side of town, the J.G. Boswell Company contracts with Lakeland Dusters for its crop dusting needs, delivering chemical growth enhancers, pesticides, and defoliants with its fleet of Air Tractor planes.  

In the middle of town, on Whitley Avenue, is the city’s park, named after J.G. Boswell II, who died in 2009, passing on management of the company to his son, James W. Boswell.

Next to the park is an unmarked Boswell compound with a swimming pool and a hedge in the shape of the corporate logo. Over the years, this is where family executives would stay when they were in town. Known as the “Lanai” for its shady porch, it is a locally legendary place, where decades of dealmaking, politicking, and entertaining has taken place, across the street from a McDonald’s.

Dairy Avenue and Beyond
The Lanai is at the intersection of Whitley Avenue and Dairy Avenue, the primary crossroads of town—the Hollywood and Vine of Corcoran, though in this case, at one end of each road is Tulare Lake.

Heading south on Dairy Avenue, at the edge of town, is the official corporate ranch office for J.G. Boswell, where local administrative business for the company takes place. (The headquarters for the company is 175 miles away, in Pasadena, next to the corporate campus of the Parsons Corporation). 
Across the street from the Ranch House is one of the two tomato processing plants owned by the company. J.G. Boswell has expanded beyond cotton, and is now one of the nation’s largest growers and processors of tomatoes, which are used to make paste for others to integrate into manufactured foods.

Across the street from the tomato plant is the principal maintenance compound for J.G. Boswell farming and pumping equipment, the Paul Althorp Shop, named after a long-serving and inventive manager. Equipment being stored and serviced at the shop fluctuates, depending on the season, and the different machinery used for the various farming operations on the Tulare lakebed.

The lakebed begins, south of the equipment shop, on Dairy Avenue, past the prison, and on the other side of the 14-mile-long levee that protects Corcoran from floods, up to a point.

Canals of Tulare Lake
Canals bring the water from throughout the Tulare Basin to the hydrological terminus of Tulare Lake, and canals on the lakebed circulate their combined waters through a network of pumps and ditches. The water is then flooded onto fields, to be absorbed by the ground, crops, and atmosphere.

Major canals on the lakebed include the Tule Canal, which originates on the east side of the lake, carrying the last of the waters of the Tule River. The two branches of the Cross Creek Canal, part of the channel network of the Kaweah River drainage, also enter the Tule Canal from the north. Then the canal runs west across the lakebed for 12 miles, until it hits the South Fork Canal, which brings Kings River water south to the lakebed. The two canals meet head on, effectively ending the run of both rivers at a set of gates.

The intersection is near the South Central Levee, also called the “Big Daddy,” which is 120 feet wide and runs for seven miles north-south. Tanks for refueling equipment with gas and chemicals are stored here, as this is a busy crossroads at the western end of Boswell’s portion of the lake.

The South Fork Canal begins nine miles north of the intersection, on the edge of the lakebed, near Stratford, where the Kings River drainage meets Empire Weir No. 2. A few other canals originate at this pool, including the Tulare Lake Canal, which runs southeast for 12 miles, inscribing the northeast edge of the lakebed, and the Blakely Canal, which runs in an arc southwestward for 25 miles, inscribing the west edge of the modern lakebed.

Water is pumped in and out of the southern end of the Blakely Canal where it meets the Wilbur Ditch at the South Central Number 3 Pump Station on Utica Avenue, the main paved road crossing the lakebed from west to east. The 12-mile-long Wilbur Ditch runs north-south, with its northern half in J.G Boswell territory, and terminates at the Tule Canal.

Six miles east along the Tule Canal is the northern end of the Great Jones Canal, which runs for 12 miles south to the Homeland Canal, and follows 10th Avenue, one of the few public north-south roads that crosses the lakebed.

The Homeland Canal is another major canal, that inscribes the southeast side of the Tulare lakebed. It runs for nearly 20 miles, from its western end at a pumpstation near the Kern River channel retention ponds at the Sand Ridge, to Highway 43, near Angola, a few miles south of the Tule River.

The Fields of Tulare Lake
These primary canals ring the lakebed, and provide a north-south and east-west grid of flow across it. Feeding off this basic outline are many more canals and ditches, which run along the edges of farming cells that are isolated from one another by levees and canals. The individual fields within the cells are generally one half-mile by one mile in size.

Boswell farms around 130,000 acres of the lakebed. Most of the acres are planted with pima cotton, a soft cotton that is used in the clothing industry. Many other products are made from parts of the cotton plant, too, including animal feed. Boswell has planted as much as 90,000 acres of cotton in as little as nine days, with 65,000 plants per acre. Cotton is harvested starting in late September, a few weeks after the fields are sprayed with defoliants that kill the plants, causing the leaves to fall off. This makes the bolls easier to pick for the dozens of picking machines that run simultaneously and continuously for over a month, finishing before the possible winter rains start.

Other crops are planted on the lakebed too, including tomatoes, safflower, pistachios, wheat, and alfalfa. A variety of equipment is used to plant and harvest the crops, and to engineer the fields, ditches, and pumps, including some specialized machinery devised at the company’s shops. Tractors run on roller tracks, towing draglines, discs, rippers, and floaters, and pull land planes that make the ground flat as a tabletop. Fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and defoliants are applied by sprayers rigged to tractors on the ground, and by crop duster planes from above.

While the heart of the lakebed is owned and farmed by J.G. Boswell, the western end is mostly owned by Westlake Farms and Sandridge Partners, and it is less intensively irrigated and farmed than the Boswell portions of the lake. Los Angeles County also owns a thousand acres on the west side, which it has developed into the Tulare Lake Compost facility, to process dried sewage sludge, trucked from Los Angeles, into fertilizer.

Portions of the east side of the lake are also owned and farmed by other companies, such as Hansen Ranches, and Gilkey Farms, and dozens of small farmers. This part of the lake was flooded for the first time in a long time, in the big Sierra snowmelt of 2023.

The Floods of Tulare Lake
The most flooded parts of the lake in 2023 were generally the lowest parts of the lakebed, moderated somewhat by levees and canals. Most of the flood was on Boswell land, especially in the north end of the lakebed, where the entirety of the company’s Loveland and R.D. 749 farm cells were underwater, as well as much of the Basin, North Cousins, and El Rico cells. The floods abutted the levee that protects the town of Corcoran and the state prison, which was on alert for possible evacuation.

The floods extended southeast, following the lowest contours of the lakebed, beyond Boswell land, flooding several equipment yards and thousands of acres of pistachio orchards. A Foster Farms chicken operation, with 48 500-foot-long sheds, was evacuated before it flooded, and remains vacant, with a bathtub ring at mid-level around all the buildings. Power companies removed transformers and other equipment with helicopters, and constructed a protective dam around an important substation on Dairy Avenue.

The floods peaked in early June 2023, when 120,000 acres of the lakebed were underwater, making a lake of 175 square miles, about the size of Lake Tahoe. The last flood at this scale was in 1983, and before that in 1969. It was worse in 1938, when 220 square miles of Boswell land were flooded. But that was before the dams in the Sierra foothills were built.

By July 2023, the water levels were falling, due primarily to evaporation and pumping, slowly exposing a transformed landscape, both inundated and desiccated. A temporary condition that may persist, perpetually, at this wet dry lake, or this dry wet lake, at the bottom of the basin, and the end of the road. ♦