page_title: Kings River (California)
section_title: Settlement of the Kings delta
hierarchical_section_title: Kings River (California) / Settlement of the Kings delta
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Hanford; Kings River Dam at head of Peoples Ditch English: This postcard is from publisher Brück &amp; Sohn in Meißen (www.brueck-und-sohn.de). This postcard has a unique number 06784 and is available in a higher resolution at the publisher. This images was uploaded in a cooperation project between Wikipedians and the publisher. Deutsch: Diese Ansichtskarte stammt vom Kunstverlag Brück &amp; Sohn aus Meißen (www.brueck-und-sohn.de). Die Karte hat die eindeutige Nummer 06784 und ist in höherer Auflösung beim Verlag erhältlich. Sie wurde im Rahmen einer Kooperation zwischen Wikipedianern und dem Kunstverlag für Wikimedia Commons zur Verfügung gestellt.
context_page_description: The Kings River is a 132.9-mile river draining the Sierra Nevada mountain range in central California in the United States. Its headwaters originate along the Sierra Crest in and around Kings Canyon National Park and form the eponymous Kings Canyon, one of the deepest river gorges in North America. The river is impounded in Pine Flat Lake before flowing into the San Joaquin Valley southeast of Fresno. With its upper and middle course in Fresno County, the Kings River diverges into multiple branches in Kings County, with some water flowing south to the old Tulare Lake bed and the rest flowing north to the San Joaquin River. However, most of the water is consumed for irrigation well upstream of either point.
  Inhabited for thousands of years by the Yokuts and other native groups, the Kings River basin once fed a vast network of seasonal wetlands around Tulare Lake that supported millions of waterfowl, fish, and game animals, in turn providing sustenance for indigenous peoples. Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake in the western U.S., at the middle of an endorheic basin also fed by the Kaweah, Tule and Kern Rivers.
context_section_description: The Kings River country was not an attractive site for early settlers, because for most of its lower course the river flows in an incised channel between low bluffs (an area known as the Centerville Bottoms), leaving the surrounding plains high and dry, suitable only for livestock grazing. Further downstream, approaching Tulare Lake, the land was too swampy for farming in addition to being seasonally flooded. For this reason, farmers initially favored the more well-watered Kaweah Delta, the present-day location of Visalia, to the south. Agriculture along the Kings River was limited to the Centerville Bottoms until ditches were extended from further upstream to supply the surrounding lands, the first being the short Byrd Ditch in 1858. The Great Flood of 1862 and another in 1868 destroyed most of the early settlements along the Kings River, and also wiped out the cattle ranching economy of the San Joaquin Valley, precipitating an economic shift to farming.
  Starting in 1870 the settlement of the region began in earnest, and larger and more permanent water supply systems were built. Long canals brought water to the large, semi-arid prairie between the Kings and San Joaquin rivers, enabling the growth of Fresno and attracting many more settlers to the area. Farming cooperatives or "colonies", where large landowners subdivided many small plots for individual farmers, were a popular early pattern of settlement and attracted immigrants from the eastern United States, Europe, and Asia. A few individuals were able to amass huge land holdings by exploiting loopholes in the Homestead Act and Swamp Land Act, the most successful being J.G. Boswell and his nephew James G. Boswell II, who acquired as much as 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) in the lower Kings and the Tulare Lake bed. Despite portions being sold off since the 1980s, the Boswell family farm remains the largest privately owned farm in the world, at 150,000 acres (61,000 ha).
  The Wright Act of 1887 allowed farmers to organize into irrigation districts, enabling them to pool their resources and greatly extend the reach of canal systems. The Alta Irrigation District, established in 1888, was the first; it would be followed by at least eighteen others (some of which have since been consolidated).  However, drought spawned conflict between earlier landowners with riparian rights and their newly arrived counterparts. In the days before Pine Flat Dam, the river often dropped too low by August or September to satisfy all the demands on it, and often disputes escalated to armed conflict over the control of canal gates. In 1897 the first Kings River water agreement was made, establishing irrigation districts' legal priority to water, resolving many lawsuits. However, by 1913 practically all the Kings River's water was being used and farmers demanded a solution. In 1919 state engineer Charles L. Kaupke was assigned as the first Kings River "watermaster" – a role he served until 1956 – to settle issues of rationing and establish a "diversion schedule" to reduce water waste.
  All these actions were still not enough to solve the basic issue of seasonal drought, and in 1925 a local board was convened to discuss the possibility of building a dam at Pine Flat. The Kings River Water Association (KRWA), representing most of the local water districts, was established two years later with Kaupke as its head. However, when the Great Depression hit, the districts could not sell the bonds necessary to build a dam, and the federal government was asked to step in. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wanted to build the dam as part of its Central Valley Project and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build it as a separate flood control project. The KRWA favored the Corps' proposal because the reclamation project would be subject to a 160-acre (65 ha) limitation per farm – a product of the Newlands Reclamation Act – and many farms in the area were larger than that (though none owned nearly as much land as the Boswells, who lobbied heavily for the Corps' project).
  Political conflict raged on for more than
caption: Dam on Kings River at head of Peoples' Ditch, 1905
exif: {"Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Artist": "Brueck & Sohn, Kunstverlag, Meissen", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "Brueck & Sohn, Kunstverlag, Meissen", "Image ExifOffset": "198", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 3, 0, 0]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[36, 19, 49999799/833330]", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[118, 21, 6874979/624998]", "GPS GPSMapDatum": "WGS-84", "Image GPSInfo": "284", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "1905:01:01 00:00:00", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated"}