Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [113]
The Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern are the southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley of California. They are the only rivers that do not ultimately end up in either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin drainage, because a low rise of land in the upper San Joaquin Valley, south of Fresno, effectively divides the valley into two hydrologic basins. The southernmost one, which receives the runoff of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern, is known as Tulare Basin. Historically, the four rivers of Tulare Basin went into two terminal lakes, Tulare and Buena Vista, which appeared and disappeared every year like phantoms. During the wet winters, the lakes would begin to fill; they would reach their largest size in May, after twenty feet of Sierra snow had melted into them in a matter of weeks; and, in all but the wettest years, they would evaporate so quickly under the glaring summer sun that they were dry again, or mostly dry, around September. Tulare, the more impressive of the two lakes, often grew larger than Lake Tahoe, though it was not more than a few feet deep. From year to year, its shoreline would shrink or grow by miles. It was a wonderful sight to see all of that water glimmering amid the merciless dryness of the San Joaquin Valley in summer, and the lakes were a stopover for millions of migrating ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes.
Before World War II, most of the agricultural lands around Tulare and Buena Vista lakes—and the lakes themselves—were owned by four private landholders. They were, in a sense peculiar to California, “family” farms. Buena Vista Lake and the land around it was the largest remnant of the million-acre domain amassed by Henry Miller, and later squandered by a succession of dissolute heirs. The property encompassed about eighty thousand acres, seven times the area of Manhattan Island. The adjacent Kern County Land Company, the estate originally put together by Miller’s archenemies James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, was even larger. According to testimony by Senator Paul Douglas before the Senate Interior Committee in 1958, the company controlled some 1.1 million acres in 1939, of which 413,300 acres were in California—most of it in Kern County. (The Kern County Land Company later became the main agricultural holding of the Tenneco Corporaton, one of the nation’s largest conglomerates.) The Salyer and Boswell farming empires were in and around Tulare Lake, each of them comprising tens of thousands of acres. Since most large California growers also lease land, the total acreage under their control could only be guessed at; they may not have known themselves. Without a doubt, however, Salyer, Boswell, Kern County Land, and Miller and Lux were among the very largest and richest farmers in the entire world.
To the four companies, Tulare and Buena Vista Lake were both a convenience and a nuisance. Usually, as the lakes shrank, their exposed beds would be quickly planted with grains or row crops, which were irrigated by pumping back the remaining water. After particularly wet winters, however—and there had been a string of them in the 1940s—the Sierra snowmelt kept filling them into July and August, by which time it was too late to plant. Both water and available land were therefore unpredictable, and, though farmers around the world have learned to live with unpredictableness, it is something that California’s big growers, accustomed as they are to perfect summer weather and unfailing man-made rain through irrigation, intensely dislike.
Although Tulare and Buena Vista lakes were privately owned, for the most part, the rivers that fed them were in the public domain. The four big farming companies held rights to a substantial amount of their water, but there were still big surpluses in all but the driest years—especially in the larger rivers, the