Lake Cahuilla

Lake Cahuilla

Old Shoreline of Lake Cahuilla, Santa Rosa Mountains near the Salton Sea
Type Flat
Primary inflows Colorado River
Basin countries United States, Mexico
Max. length 180 km (110 mi)
Max. width 50 km (31 mi)
Surface area 5,500 km2 (2,100 sq mi)
Max. depth 90 m (300 ft)
Shore length1 400 km (250 mi)
Surface elevation 12 m (39 ft)
1 Shore length is not a well-defined measure.

Prehistoric Lake Cahuilla (also known as Lake LeConte and Blake Sea) was an extensive freshwater lake that filled the Coachella, Imperial, and Mexicali valleys of southeastern California and northeastern Baja California during the centuries prior to Spanish entry into the region. The Salton Sea, now about 55-kilometre (34 mi) long, 25-kilometre (16 mi) wide, and at an elevation of 69 m (226 ft) below sea level), which was accidentally created in 1905, is a much smaller analog of its prehistoric predecessor Lake Cahuilla, that was about 180-kilometre (110 mi) long, 50-kilometre (31 mi) wide, and rising to 12-metre (39 ft) above sea level, drowning the present sites of the cities of Mexicali, El Centro, and Indio.

Lake Cahuilla was created when the lower Colorado River shifted its course within its delta. Instead of flowing directly south to the head of the Gulf of California, the river's waters were diverted northwest into the Salton Basin, the base of which lay about 80-metre (260 ft) below sea level. Under climatic conditions similar to those of the early twentieth century, it would have taken about two decades of uninterrupted river flow to fill the basin to 12-metre (39 ft) above sea level (D. Weide 1976; Wilke 1978; Waters 1983; Laylander 1997). At that point, the lake would have overflowed to the south, feeding half of its waters through the Rio Hardy to the Gulf but losing the other half through evaporation. When the river shifted its course back to the south, the isolated basin would have taken more than five decades to completely dry out again.

The former large lake in the Salton Basin was remembered by the region's historic-period native inhabitants, the Cahuilla and the Kumeyaay (Wilke 1978; Laylander 2004). By the mid-nineteenth century, Euro-American visitors, including the geologist William Phipps Blake (1858), had recognized the lake's traces, including tufa deposits along the maximum shoreline, beaches, and deposits of freshwater mollusk shells.

Malcolm J. Rogers (1945), a pioneering archaeologist in the region, examined aboriginal pottery left on shoreline sites and concluded that the lake had been present between about 1000 and 1500. Subsequent studies have established that there were not one but several high stands of the lake, before 1000 and after 1500, including a stand in the seventeenth century, when Spanish explorers had already reached the lower Colorado River although not entering the Salton Basin (Wilke 1978; Waters 1983; Laylander 1997; Love and Dahdul 2002).

Native peoples harvested a range of resources associated with Lake Cahuilla in the otherwise-parched Colorado Desert. Prominent were freshwater fish (primarily bonytail, Gila elegans, and razorback sucker, Xyrauchen texanus), freshwater mussels (Anodonta dejecta), water birds (particularly American coot (Fulica americana), and marsh plants (cattail, Typha, tule, Scirpus, and reed, Phragmites). Researchers have disagreed as to how important the role of Lake Cahuilla resources was within native subsistence strategies, and consequently how dramatically the lake's rises and falls shaped the region's late prehistory. Some have envisioned many permanent or semi-permanent settlements on the shores, producing severe regional upheavals when their supporting resources disappeared, while other researchers have seen the lake as only a marginal area within stable regional subsistence patterns (e.g., Aschmann 1959; M. Weide 1976; Wilke 1978; Schaefer 1994; Laylander 2006).

The modern Lake Cahuilla in La Quinta was constructed as a reservoir in 1969. (See: Lech, Steve (2011). More Than a Place To Pitch a Rent: The Stories Behind Riverside County's Regional Parks. Riverside, CA: Steve Lech. p. 150. ISBN 978-0-9837500-0-0. OCLC 768249467. and Riverside County Parks: Lake Cahuilla.)

References

    Coordinates: 33°37′59″N 116°16′30″W / 33.633°N 116.275°W