Time Immemorial

The water, and what kind of water

Every acre this District irrigates was once under water. Ancient Lake Modoc covered the Basin — seventy-five miles from the Fort Klamath end to south of Tule Lake, four hundred miles of shoreline at a nearly uniform 4,240 feet, roughly the area of Maryland. As the climate dried and the basalt reef near Keno wore down, the lake broke into the pieces we know now: Upper Klamath, Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes, and the valleys — Spring Lake, Poe, Swan Lake, Yonna, Langell. Emigrant families arriving in the 1870s found so many standing bodies of water that they named the place Lake County. Much of the ground now farmed lay under water ten months of the year.

What the shrinking left behind was still enormous. Lower Klamath Lake alone held some eighty-eight thousand acres of marsh and open water. Tule Lake — a closed basin with no surface outlet, where the Lost River ended — ran to a hundred thousand acres in wet years and thirty feet deep in places. Across the Basin, something over 350,000 acres stood as shallow lake, marsh and tule, held back by a chain of natural lava reefs: at the head of Link River, at Lake Ewauna, at Snow Goose, and at Keno. It has long been called the Everglades of the West, and it earned the name.

In May 1846, camped on Upper Klamath Lake days before war broke out with Mexico, John C. Frémont would not let his horses drink from it. At Rattlesnake Point, on the west shore, the water was not fit for them. He was not alone in noticing. In October 1851 George Gibbs found the Klamath so bad in autumn that a traveller should seek out creeks instead, the river water being tepid and unfit for use. In August 1855 Lieutenant Henry Abbot, surveying a railroad line, camped near Cove Point and recorded the dark color and disagreeable taste of the lake, his men searching in vain for a spring. Local memory says the same thing from the other end. “Dick” Breitenstein, born in 1878, recalled that as a boy he worked on the Ankeny ditch shoveling muck — muck that had come down out of the lake and settled in the canal. The men who dug these ditches knew exactly what they were carrying.

Read the dates together and a pattern appears that none of these men could have seen on his own. Gibbs was writing in October. Abbot in August. Judge U. E. Reeder, hauling freight through the Straits between 1895 and 1905, describes the same shallow, heated, evaporating water moving north out of the Lower Lake in the fall. Sweet and McBeth in 1908 describe it in the long dry summers. And Link River itself blew dry in late July and August until 1919. Six observers, sixty years apart, describing the same season — low water, warm water, an algal bloom at its height, and the fish and the tule rotting in it.

The tree rings agree, and they date it. The Klamath at Keno flow reconstruction, built from tree-ring chronologies going back to 1507, records a run of four consecutive years below the median, 1843 through 1846 — and a second run of five years from 1848 to 1852. Frémont saw both ends of that first run. He came into the Basin in 1843, its opening year, and called the country picturesque and beautiful, the land fertile, the forests full of game. He came back in 1846, its closing year, and would not water his horses. Same man, same basin, four years apart. The same 1843–1846 run shows up in the Sacramento and San Joaquin reconstructions, so it was regional, and the study notes that the 1840s drought struck the northern end of that transect harder than the southern. He was not seeing an anomaly. He was seeing a dry Basin behaving the way this Basin behaves, and the reconstruction shows it doing so again and again — twenty-one straight years below median in the mid-1600s, twelve from 1924 to 1935, six from 1987 to 1992.

What every one of those men was describing is a lake that will not sustain an animal drinking from it. That is the correct reading, and it is not the same as calling the water bad. Upper Klamath Lake is nutrient rich: naturally heavy in phosphorus, nitrogen and algae. Water like that is poorly suited to drinking and superbly suited to growing plants. Applied to ground it carries its own fertilizer, and the crops raised on it need less of anything else.

The Reclamation Service saw it plainly in 1908, when A. T. Sweet and I. G. McBeth surveyed the Basin's soils and water. They described a shallow lake underlain by a deep deposit of floating sludge and black muck, piled into drifts by wind and water until it obstructed navigation. They were not paying the lake a compliment. But that same sludge is the reason the lakebed soils are what they are, and it is why the survey's summary judgment on the Basin was not a warning but an invitation: the water supply is abundant.

The decisive point is that none of this was caused by farming. Studies of natural background phosphorus in this Basin have found that the springs and artesian wells feeding Upper Klamath Lake carry a nutrient load high enough on their own account — that major springs feeding the lake's tributaries contain sufficient phosphorus to support algal blooms with no human contribution at all, and that the lake was already in this condition before emigrants arrived. The travellers' journals are the proof of it. Frémont in 1843, Gibbs in 1851 and Abbot in 1855 were describing a eutrophic lake decades before the first ditch, sixty years before the Project, and a century and a half before anyone thought to blame a farmer for it.

Not poor water. Water for plants rather than animals — and it was that way before anyone here grew anything.

Where this comes from

Every date and figure on this page is drawn from a primary or published source, not from recollection.

• Spindor, Trumpeter No. 45 — pre-Project ditch history, 1868 through 1888.
• Samuel and Emily Dicken, The Legacy of Ancient Lake Modoc, and Dicken in Oregon Geology Vol. 42 No. 11 (1980) — the pre-human geography.
• Meko, Woodhouse and Touchan, Klamath/San Joaquin/Sacramento Hydroclimatic Reconstructions from Tree Rings, final report to the California Department of Water Resources (2014) — Table 6, runs of consecutive years below median flow in the Klamath at Keno reconstruction, 1507–2003. California Natural Resources Agency Open Data.
• Sweet and McBeth, U.S. Reclamation Service soil and water survey of the Klamath Basin (1908) — the sludge and muck of the lake bottom, and the finding that the water supply is abundant.
• Rykbost et al. (1999) and Rykbost and Charlton (2000, 2001) — natural background phosphorus in the Upper Klamath Basin, and the eutrophic condition of Upper Klamath Lake predating emigration.
• Klamath Echoes Vol. 1 — “Dick” Breitenstein on shoveling muck from the Ankeny ditch, and the settlement of Klamath County.
• Klamath Echoes and other numbers of The Trumpeter, Klamath County Historical Society — emigration, the Applegate Trail, and the early ditches.

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