|
|
Article: Refuges and Reclamation : Conflicts in the Klamath Basin, 1904-1964.
- Article from:
- Oregon Historical Quarterly
- Article date:
- June 22, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Oregon Historical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
The Klamath Basin, which rests in the rain shadow cast by the Cascade Mountains, once held a sprawling mosaic of shallow, tule-choked lakes and vast swamplands fed by runoff water from surrounding mountains and uplands. The basin has an arid climate, yet it once had such an abundance of water that it was called the "land of lakes." The lower basin -- situated in a sere landscape of scab-rock, sagebrush, and scattered juniper -- held two big lakes that reached across the Oregon-California state line, Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake. In the 1870s, Samuel A. Clarke, reporting for the New York Times, described these lakes as "oases in the desert" and wrote that the fertile, ...