USA > California > Tulare County > History of Tulare County, California with biographical sketches > Part 30
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There are within the boundaries of our State many different climates. At San Francisco in summer it is absolutely cold, whilst within three hours' travel by rail, in the interior, toward the San Joaquin, you reach a region where it is, in the daytinic, absolutely hot.
Snow is very rare on the coast and in the valleys, and never remains on the ground in the valleys, except in the extreme northern part of the State. The Sierra Nevada Mountains, above an elevation of 8,000 or 9,000 fect, are generally covered with snow the entire year, and in many mining towns there are several months when snow remains on the ground.
A marked phenomenon of the climate is the comparative absence of thunder and lightning, which rarely occurs, except in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where thunder-storms are often as severe as in the Atlantic States. A residence of fif-
teen years has not witnessed thunder loud enough to disturb one from a noonday nap. The coast and valleys of California are remarkably and wonderfully free from all violent stormns of any nature, which occur so frequently east of the Rocky Mountains. Wind, hail, and thunder-storms, so frequent in the Atlantic States, never occur here.
Out-door life here is practicable at all seasons and almost every day in the year. Oppressive heat is seldom felt, and nothing colder than a slight frost during the coldest mornings of winter. During all the summer months, from April to November, there is steady temperature.
Fogs occur only occasionally, and then in the winter time; generally they do not hang over us long, disappearing as sud- denly as they came.
VARIETIES OF CLIMATE.
The climate of California may be divided into three classes; that of the Coast Range, of the interior valleys, and of the Sierras. The climate of the coast, and about San Francisco, is perhaps the most evenly tempered in the world-cool, invig- orating, and bracing. This evenness of elimate and tempera- ture extends the whole length of the State, with but little variation.
The seasons in California seem to be the reverse of the seasons in any other part of the world. December, at which time the rains have fully set in and the season when winter develops its severity in most parts of the world, and the succeeding months until May, are termed winter, or the " rainy season" in California. About the middle of November the rains begin to fall in the valleys, and the Sierras receive their new fleecy robes of winter, the skirts of which grow thin and ragged as they reach down the western foot-hills of the Sierra range, until they entirely disappear at the edge of the green sward, where, under the same sun and in the same latitude and longitude, the icicle and the honeysuckle struggle for the mastery.
TEMPERATURE TABLE
PLACES.
sea-in fect.
Height above the
ture for the year
Mean of Tempera
ture for the cold-
Mean of Tempera-
Lowest Temperature shown by thermometer in any year.
Sacramento.
301
60.48|
46.21 28-December,
1849
Auburn
1363
60.71
45.88 27-January,
1871
Colfax ..
2421
60.05
45.49 26-January,
1874
Marysville.
67
63.62
48.70 27-December,
1876
Chico .
193
62.46
45.1923-December,
1872
Tehama
222
65.20
47.01,23 -- December,
1871
Red Bluff.
307
66.22
48.29,26-December,
1873
Redding
558
64.14
46.7227-January,
1876
Merced .
171
63.16
48.1428-January,
1876
Modesto.
91
63.68
47.69 22-December,
1874
Stockton
23
61.99
47.4321-December,
1872
San Diego
150
62.49
53.30 26-December,
1854
Los Angeles
457
67.69
58.95 39-Deeember,
1876
Soledad ..
182
59.08
45.2324-January,
1877
Salinas .
44
57.95
48.2524-December,
1874
Holllister
284
61.46
46.53,27-December, 1874
est month.
LOOKING INTO GRAND CANON.
FIILI . WITH.4ZIMONT.ST.
ITALIAFETTON ...
SKETCHED FROM ALPINE CAMP BY GUSTAVE EISEN.
SOUTH SIDE OF TEHIPITEE VALLEY.
ITALIAFERMO
2
ELLIOTT LITH,421 MONT. ST.
151
EXPLORATIONS ON TULARE LAKE.
Lakes of Tulare County.
WHILE Tulare County has the largest lake in the State, it also has many small mountain lakes that are beautiful and worthy of mention.
Many of the lakelets in Mineral King are the work of glaciers. They can be ascribed to no other agency. They are in solid rock, their outlets are over solid rock. Nothing but a moving mass of ice could have worn out these depres- sions and removed the firm rock that filled them. This would plow up or gouge out the softest rock in its bel deeper than it would that which was harder. Instance, Silver Lake at the head of Lady Franklin Canyon. Its outlet is over the hardest metamorphic rocks. The lake basin is mostly in granite.
MONARCH LAKES,
These lakes are in the high Sierras. Lower Monarch Lake is at an altitude of about 10,500 feet at the foot of Miners Peak on Saw-tooth. The lake is surrounded by meadows cov- ered by nutritious grass. The lower lake covers about twenty- five acres, and the upper, perhaps as much as 150. The depth of these fine lakes probably exceeds fifty feet, and the larger may be 100 feet deep. But this can never be known definitely till there are boats and sounding apparatus upon their smooth, blue waters.
Any enterprising citizen who will put boats and suitable shelter there, will provide most admirable sport for all who are fond of peak climbing, trout fishing and mountain sports in general. There is no better point in all that region from which to visit its deepest and grandest gorges and its lofty peaks that surround you on all sides, within tive or six miles.
The upper lake is about 300 feet higher than the lower one. The whole mountain region abounds in beautiful lakes of clear cold water.
TULARE LAKE.
This fresh water lake, or inland sea, is a fine body of water and the largest lake in the State. It is elliptical in form and extends at least thirty-three miles from north west to southeast, and twenty-two miles in width fromn northeast to southwest. It covers an area of probably 600 square miles, equal to one- half of the size of the State of Rhode Island. The area of the lake is a very uncertain quantity; several times within the memory of the oldest inhabitant it has been four times as large, and on two occasions, at least, as small as it is now, leaving dry vast tracts of level, rich soil, capable of producing the finest crops without irrigation. Lands now under cultiva- tion have been for years ten or fifteen feet under water.
In 1860 Tulare Lake stood at very near the same level it occupies now. It was raised several feet by the great freshet of 1862, and its area about doubled, and a large streami was discharged from it into Fresno Slough, by way of Summit
Lake. From this period the lake began to retire again toward its former level. The freshet of January, 1868, caused Tulare Lake to discharge a sheet of water over the surface of Summit Lake one mile wide and six feet deep. It then covered about one thousand square miles of territory. Much of the land inundated had been surveyed in 1857 and returned as dry lands.
Since 1868 the lake has lowered from one to two feet every year, and is now some twenty feet below high water mark. Since that time it has been gradually decreasing, until now it appears to have reached its minimum. The diversion of the various streams from Kern to King's River has something to do with this shrinkage of its waters undoubtedly, but this would avail little to prevent their expansion to the utmost limits they have attained in the event of a wet season. Should one again occur the settlers on the land bordering the lake would find themselves in an uncomfortable situation, unless in the meantime an outlet, anl its prosent levee, should be pro- vided in the direction of the San Joaquin River.
A large tract of the lands thus laid dry have been surveyed and were returned to the Government as swamp lands; but a ruling that lands laid dry by the retiring of a lake are not swamp lands, caused Geo. Hardinburg of San Francisco, to be appointed to re-examine them, and in many places he found them covered with heavy wheat stubble, without any other reclamation than that of plowing and seeding.
These lands are of a light loam, very fertile, and kept con- stantły moist by their proximity to irrigate lands on the one side and the lake on the other. They areabout as fine looking lands as the American farmer ever cast eyes over.
Some five thousand square miles of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains drain into Tulare Lake without counting the discharge of King's River, one outlet of which enters the San Joaquin. Half of all the water entering Tulare Lake hereafter will come from Kern River.
In Kern County most of the water has been taken for irri- gation, and Kern and Buena Vista Lakes have been very much lowered and much of the lands along Buena Vista Slough have been brought into a state of cultivation. In case of an extraor- dinary freshet in Kern River then these lakes must be filled and all the low lands of Kern County must be first to suffer before any great disaster befalls the settlement on Tulare Lake.
EXPLORATIONS ON TULARE LAKE.
The only thorough exploration of this inland sea was made in 1882 by Capt. G. W. A. Wright, to whom we are indebted for his very valuable records of the trip and results of explora- tions.
The first boat of any consequence placed on the lake by a white man, was a fore-and-aft schooner, built for A. J. Atwell, a lawyer in Visalia, and named by him the Mose Andross, from a friend of his in the United States Land Office there.
152
EXPLORATIONS ON TULARE LAKE.
She was about fifty by fifteen feet, and flat-bottomed, that she might draw as little water as possible. She was built in 1875 and was used (as also a small boat had been used before her), to carry cattle and hogs from Atwell's Landing, on the north- east shore near Creighton's point of timber, and from Gordon's Point on the west side, to Root Island or Atwell's Island, then in the south end of the lake, now part of its southern main- land. The next year, this craft was equipped as a sidewheel steamboat, and continued her business for Atwell, until the lake water so receded that Atwell's Island and its neighboring Bird Island, Brown Island, and Pelican, or Skull Island, ceased to be islands and became, as they now are, parts of the main- land on the south shore of the lake.
In February, 1879 Mr. Wright saw this steamer stranded near the mouth of King's River. Soon after that the machinery was removed, the boats dismantled and finally abandoned, and the waters of Tulare Lake knew them no more.
A sail-boat twenty feet long was built by Jim Mc, the boat hermit, and used on the lake for several years, until it was stranded in the summer of '78, and remained on shore occupied by him as his home.
A schooner thirty-six feet long was built for a Mr. Hill, of Lemoore, several years ago, to be used in fishing for terrapin. But she was wrecked in a gale one night on the western shore, and abandoned. She was afterwards drawn out on the beach and dismantled. Near her lay also another smaller sail-boat, no longer in use, though it made regular trips in the spring and summer of '80 and 'S1 to carry butter from Clark & Cox's dairy ranch to the mouth of King's River for the Lemoore market.
SCHOONER WATER WITCH.
We give in our illustration a view of this, the only vessel on Tulare Lake. We also show the stumps of a former forest near the edge of the lake.
The Water Witch has been employed on the lake for the last four years to catch terrapin for the San Francisco market; also, for occasional fishing and hunting excursions. Though small, she is really a well-built boat, and in her our late sail around and over the lake was successfully made. But how came such a boat on Tulare Lake ? She was built at least ten years ago at Mare Island Navy Yard, as a dispatch boat to Alcatraz and to the city. She was then called the Alcatraz, and was fourteen oar boat, sprit-sail rigged, though used chiefly for rowing. The best Eastern wood was used in her construc- tion, so that her entire hull is in excellent condition to-day, and she leaks scarcely any. She is clinker built-that is, weatherboarded, and fastened together with copper rivets and bolts. She is clipper built-that is, narrow and sharp at both ends, for speed. She is six feet beam, thirty feet keel, and thirty-two feet over all, being about three tons burden. She has a six-inch keel, and a five-foot centerboard.
After several years employ as a Government boat, the Alca- traz was sold to parties on the Sacramento, and used a season or two as a hunting boat. She was then bought by a queer fellow, such as is known in these days as a crank, who deter- mined to bring her to Tulare Lake, and make a fortune by gathering the eggs of ducks, gulls, and other wild fowl to sell in San Francisco. He was familiarly called "eating Smith," so morbid was his appetite and so great a dread was he to hotel-keepers. He spent most of the summer of 1878, bare- headed and barefooted, tugging away with pole and paddle and rope to get this boat out of the Sacramento River, and up the San Joaquin to the head of navigation on Fresno Slough, at Watson's, now White's Ferry. He then had it brought on a four-horse wagon to Kingston, launched it there on King's River, and floated it to the lake, eighteen or twenty miles distant. Making one or two trips on the lake, he found that he could not realize his dreams. In fact, he could not get enough to eat on the lake. So he sold her to the McCoy brothers for some cows, and started a dairy ranch. Still, he could not get enough to eat. So he ended this long enterprise by killing the cows and eating them, having enough beef for once. The McCoys used the boat for two seasons successfully in terrapin fishing and excursions, sending to San Francisco as many as 300 dozen in one season, until a severe squall capsized and wrecked her, at a point about three miles southeast of the mouth of King's River. She was rigged at that time as a sloop with a single large foresail, which made her top-heavy, and a jibsail. In this condition she was bought by her present owner, Capt. T. J. Conley. He remodeled her hull, decked her-the deck for about one-third aft being a foot lower than forward-rigged her as a fore-and-aft schooner, with wire standing rigging, and made her a very safe and dry craft. Her mainnast is eighteen feet high, her foresail twelve feet, her jib five feet, and, with mainsail, foresail, and jibsail, she carries between forty and fifty square yards of canvas.
DEPTH OF THE LAKE.
The expedition made many measurements of the depth of water. At some miles from the shore they got soundings of 6, 7, 8, and 9 feet, the latter about half a mile from shore. In the next half mile they reached 11 feet, and an hour after the sounding, two miles from the western shore was 15 feet. The barometer was 29.00, temperature of the air 61º, and of the water 74°, about 10 miles from the western shore, and lake Gordon's Point was barely visible nearly south; they got for some distance the deepest sounding 21 feet.
At 2:10 P. M. barometer was 29.85, air 69º, water 66°, sound- ing 21 feet. They then tacked ship and sailed due south. The soundings of 21 feet continued until at 2:45 P. M. sounded 20 feet, at 3 P. M., 18 feet; and 3:40 P. M. 15 feet. They found all the changes in the bottom very regular and uniform, and all brought up from the bottom, at many points, with sounding lead prepared
153
EXPLORATIONS ON TULARE LAKE.
for the purpose, a very fine bluish-gray mud. They had no doubt found the deepest water of Tulare Lake, which lics toward its north and west shores rather than at the center. All the southern part of the lake is very shallow, as was found by many subsequent soundings. These soundings correspond well with those made by the engineers un ler Mr. Brereton, when the capacity of the lake, as a reservoir, was carefully taken when the now exploded plan of a west side canal was at its height. The deepest sounding obtained then with very careful work was 31 feet over the same ground, where this party obtained 21 feet. This shows a fall in perpendicular height of 10 feet in the lake water since the fall of 1873, or 10 years ago.
Soundings across all the southern portion of the lake showed 3, 33, 4, 5, and 6 feet, and then gradually diminished to 53, 5, 4, and 3.
BUENA VISTA SLOUGH.
This slough formerly emptied into the lake connecting it with Kern and Buena Vista Lakes to southward. But no water whatever flows there now, and not a particle of water in sight south of it, though eight years ago the Mose Andross and other boats could pass through Buena Vista Slough, and through narrow straits between Skull and Atwell's Islands, and sail for miles to southward in water from ten to fifteen feet deep. Looking northward a depression between Gordon's Point and the main-land is also perceptible. The water ran through here four or five years ago, and made an island of what is now Gordon's Point.
SKULL ISLAND.
This island extends between five and six miles from west to east; is but little more than half a mile wide, though now, like Atwell's Island, it is but a succession of rough sandy ridges or dunes. These are now covered with a thin growth of salt grass, their highest parts being about twenty feet above the lake surface. Yet, when Atwell's Island, where two old houses still stand, was surrounded with water, it was seven or eight miles long east and west and one to two miles wide, and was covered with good feed, such as wire-grass, or tule-grass, " cat-tails," or flags, alfilerilla. and the wild chufa, or grass-nut, the same, perhaps, as the one growing in Owen's Valley, and called taboose by the Piute Indians of Inyo and Mono Coun- ties. From 1875 to 1877, large numbers of hogs and cattle were carried there from the main-land on the Mose Andross- which was first a schooner, 50x15 feet about, and then a side- wheel steamboat.
QUANTITIES OF HUMAN BONES.
The explorer goes but a few steps south from the beach on this Skull Island, of which so many doleful tales have been told about circles of human skulls, and myriads of human bones being found there, before he is convinced, by countless fragments of human skulls and bones on the surface, mixed with fragments of the hardest rocks from our loftiest mount-
ains, that he is, indeed, on one of the most extensive and old_ est burying grounds of the aboriginecs of our Pacific Coast, a place that is fittingly marked to-day by the gloomy name it bears. So soon as this party had reached a point 100 yards inland, they found a bleached human skull entirely exposed on the sand, and around it a number of bleached bones that were probably killed and buried there by the Indians fifty or sixty years ago in a battle of which Indian tradition tells us, and mentioned elsewhere.
RARE COLLECTION OF CURIOSITIES.
Captain Wright had the good fortune in digging at another point to exhume with a skeleton a perfect and handsome arrowhead of obsidian, or volcanic glass, jet black, well shaped, 4} inches long and 1} wide. The most curious point about this was that it seemed to rest in the body, as if it had been shot there and was the cause of death.
Broken arrow and spear-heads, and fragments of chert, slate, quartz, flint, and other hard rocks are found scattered broad- cast over and in the grass as a token, perhaps, of ruin and desolation, but you seldom find a complete stone implement. Many of the most curious of these fragments are pieces of pottery, stone breast-plates, etc.
Mr. Wright showed a number of handsome fossil shells that are found in large quantities in the foot-hills near a point of the lake. These were chiefly what are known among geologists as iniocene shells, and were species of what are called (1) the cardium (2) the pecten (3) the venus. There were, also, some periwinkles.
DREARY SURROUNDINGS.
An adobe wall once the home of a Mexican called Pasqual, and a frame shanty west of the mouth of King's River, and called " The Deserted Castle"-all near the lake-shore-are the only signs of human habitations for a distance of between thirty and forty miles along the barren, desolate, repulsive waste on the western shore of this great inland lake. Not another building is there, until you see the two unoccupied houses on what was once Root or Atwell's Island, now part of the main-land at the extreme southeastern end of the lake.
The foot-hills of the Coast Range Mountains approach near to the lake, some only about a mile distant in a straight line. But none are so near as to make anything like an abrupt bluff on the lake-shore. Indeed, nowhere around the lake is there any evidence that any such bluff has ever existed. The banks rise gradually, but more rapidly at this point than anywhere around Tulare Lake, and some half dozen successive terraces mark within 600 yards of the water's edge the various heights of the lake since its highest during the floods of January, '62 and '68, when its surface was cighteen or twenty feet higher in perpendicular than at present. Its depth, also, increases more rapidly on this shore, the deepest soundings found that day being ten feet only, a mile or two from shore.
154
EXPLORATIONS ON TULARE LAKE.
Not a sign of a tree exists on all that shore, and it is full twenty-five miles to any timber in the coast mountains. The largest growth is what is called the "greaseweed," which proved to be identical with the " sagebrush" of southern Kern, and of Inyo and Mono Counties. It is used for fuel, and quite a long brush fence has been built of it, inclosing about eighty acres of land. The shore north and west is low, and the very picture of desolation, with scattered bands of cattle and hogs along the water's edge.
PELICAN ISLAND.
This is a low, narrow strip of land in Tulare Lake, totally bare of vegetation as yet, and is a bar formed by the deposits of King's River as an extension of the east bank of its east channel. It is a mile long, or more, from ten to sixty feet wide, and not more than a foot or eighteen inches at any point above the present lake surface. On this long, narrow, bare island thousands of our common white pelicans, and, associated with them on the best of terms, and also nesting, were hun- dreds of that one of two species of Pacific Coast cormorants, known as Brandt's cormorant.
GULL ISLAND.
This island extends westward into the lake from the south bank of Tule River. It is a narrow bar now formning a small island like Pelican Island at the mouth of King's River. As the lake surface falls, this bar is forming quite an island, though it is yet low, muddy, and without vegetation. On it may be seen many pelicans and large numbers of gulls, and from the latter, gave it the name of " Gull Island."
It should be remembered that this and " Pelican Island" are now the only genuine islands on all the broad surface of Tulare Lake, and they are so narrow and flat as scarcely to deserve the name.
STORMS ON THE LAKE.
The lake is noted for its sudden and rough storms. The following account given us by J. W. A. Wright will give some idea of them :--
" The Captain of the Water Witch, knowing that all hands were tired, and would sleep soundly, requested me, if I awoke in the night and found a heavy wind from the northward, to call him, as it might be best to sail from that dangerous coast by night. Soon after 10 P. M. the heavy rolling of the schooner awakened me. The waves from the north were get- ting heavy, and a strong wind was whistling from the north- west. I called Captain Conley a half hour later, for matters were getting worse and worse. He said we must sail at once and try to get around Gordon's Point, where we could be pro- tected in Terrapin Bay from the fury of an approaching storm. So furious was the wind that only the mainsail and jibsail were set.
" In ten minutes' time the anchor was up, and away we dashed, with a spanking breeze, in a high sea for Tulare Lake,
sailing southward. The stars were bright and beautiful, though occasionally clouds obscured them, and with the sound- ings were our only guides. We sailed first south toward Scorpio till our sounding was seven feet. Then we turned south of east, our soundings varying to six, seven, eight, seven, six, five and one-half feet, heading towards the star Altair in "The Eagle," and sometimes to " The Dolphin." Captain Conley was at the helm, Lewis Atwell looking after the sails, and your corres- pondent was to the leeward casting the load every five minutes or less. From our anchorage to Gordon's Point, about nine miles, is one of the very roughest parts of the whole lake. Hence our anxiety to get away from it, even by a risky sail at midnight.
"Gordon's Point is a low, sandy beach, extending out from the southwest shore of the lake, at a point less than three- fourths of the distance from the mouth of King's River to the Willows, on Skull Island. Several sandy spurs jut out from it to eastward into the lake, marking shoal water at several points. Its name is said to be from a man who was murdered near it for his money. This Gordon's Point, extending out a full half mile from the main-land, forms just south of it a cove that forms a very safe harbor from the northern winds and waves.
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