Alamo Mocho (Kern County)

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Alamo Mocho
Relief map of California.png
Red pog.svg
Location of Alamo Mocho waterhole in Kern County, California
Name origin Spanish
Location Kern County, California, United States
Coordinates 35°50′05″N119°55′48″W / 35.83460°N 119.92989°W / 35.83460; -119.92989 Coordinates: 35°50′05″N119°55′48″W / 35.83460°N 119.92989°W / 35.83460; -119.92989 [1]
Elevation 548 m (1,798 ft)
Type watering place

Alamo Mocho, (Trimmed Cottonwood) was a watering place on the eastern route of the El Camino Viejo, seven miles northeast of Alamo Solo Spring within the Avenal Gap on the south end of the Kettleman Hills of Kern County, California.

El Camino Viejo a Los Ángeles, also known as El Camino Viejo and the Old Los Angeles Trail, was the oldest north-south trail in the interior of Spanish colonial Las Californias (1769–1822) and Mexican Alta California (1822–1848), present day California. It became a well established inland route, and an alternative to the coastal El Camino Real trail used since the 1770s in the period.

Alamo Solo Spring

Alamo Solo Spring, a spring directly east of the Dagany Gap in the Pyramid Hills of Kern County, California. Its location appears on a 1914 USGS Topographic map of Lost Hills.

Kettleman Hills

The Kettleman Hills is a low mountain range of the interior California Coast Ranges, in western Kings County, California. It is a northwest-southeast trending line of hills about 30 miles long which parallels the San Andreas Fault to the west.

History

The name of this watering place on the eastern route of El Camino Viejo comes from the lone Cottonwood tree at that arid site that had its lower branches cut off to feed draft animals or provide wood for fires, sometime before the Americans came to California. Alamo Mocho was the first watering place beyond Alamo Solo Spring on the eastern route that then passed to the east and followed the shore of Tulare Lake, proceeding northward across the Kings River to settlements on the Fresno Slough and San Joaquin River before it turned back to rejoin the main route at Arroyo de Panoche Grande. [2]

Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake, Laguna de Tache in Spanish, 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, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States, based upon surface area. A remnant of Pleistocene-era Lake Corcoran, Tulare Lake dried up after its tributary rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses.

Kings River (California) river in California, USA

The Kings River is a 132.9-mile (213.9 km) 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.

Fresno Slough is a distributary of the Kings River that connects the North Fork Kings River (distributary) to the San Joaquin River in the San Joaquin Valley, in Kings County, California.

When Frank F. Latta visited the site the early 1930s the cottonwood that had stood at the location was gone, the waterhole that was within 100 yards of the Hanford - Paso Robles Road was dried up, and a ranch had been established close by. [3] Its location appears on a 1914 USGS Topographic map of Lost Hills where the site of the ranch house is indicated near the old highway within the Avenal Gap. [4]

Today the ranch is gone and the California Aqueduct passes just south of the old site of Alamo Mocho.

California Aqueduct

The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and valleys of Northern and Central California to Southern California. Named after California Governor Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown Sr., the over 400-mile (640 km) aqueduct is the principal feature of the California State Water Project.

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Canoas Creek (Fresno County, California) river in the United States of America

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Salt Spring

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San Emigdio Creek river in the United States of America

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References

  1. USGS map: Avenal Gap
  2. Mildred Brooke Hoover, Historic spots in California, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, p.124
  3. Frank F. Latta, "EL CAMINO VIEJO á LOS ANGELES" - The Oldest Road of the San Joaquin Valley; Bear State Books, Exeter, 2006. p.12
  4. USGS Topo: Lost Hills, Edition Date: 1914, Scale 1: 125000; from California Historic Topographic Map Collection -Meriam Library, California State College, Chico, accessed December 6, 2011