Buena Vista Slough was the joint outlet of an overflowing

Buena Vista Lake Buena Vista Lake was a fresh-water lake in Kern County, California, in the Tulare Lake Basin in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California. Buena Vista Lake was the second largest of several similar lakes in the Tulare Lake basin, and was fed ...

and a distributary of the

Kern River The Kern River, previously Rio de San Felipe, later La Porciuncula, is an Endangered, Wild and Scenic river in the U.S. state of California, approximately long. It drains an area of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains northeast of Bakersfield ...

into

Tulare Lake Tulare Lake () ( Spanish: ''Laguna de Tache'', Yokuts: ''Pah-áh-su'') is a freshwater dry lake with residual wetlands and marshes in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California, United States. After Lake Cahuilla disappeared in the 17th century ...

. It is now diverted into a system of canals by the Outlet Canal of the

Central Valley Project The Central Valley Project (CVP) is a federal power and water management project in the U.S. state of California under the supervision of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). It was devised in 1933 in order to provide irrigation an ...

History

In times when Buena Vista Lake overflowed it first backed up into Kern Lake making one large lake. When this larger lake overflowed it flowed out through the Buena Vista Slough that began southeast of what is now Tupman where it met the Kern River distributary channel to the

San Joaquin River The San Joaquin River (; es, Río San Joaquín) is the longest river of Central California. The long river starts in the high Sierra Nevada, and flows through the rich agricultural region of the northern San Joaquin Valley before reaching Suis ...

. It then ran northwest from there through tule marshland and Goose Lake, into Tulare Lake west of the Sand Ridge. During the late 19th century a system of canals was built to divert this water for agriculture. That diversion of water lead to a lawsuit by downstream property owners in '' Lux v. Haggin''.

References

Kern River Rivers of Kern County, California Tulare Basin watershed Geography of the San Joaquin Valley History of the San Joaquin Valley Natural history of the Central Valley (California) Rivers of Southern California {{California-river-stub