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The land was occupied for thousands of years by the Yokuts. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Spain established missions to colonize California and convert the American Indians to Christianity. Comandante Pedro Fages, while hunting for deserters in the Central Valley in 1772, discovered a great lake surrounded by marshes and filled with rushes; he named it Los Tules (the tules). It is from this lake that the county derives its name. The root of the name Tulare is found in the Nahuatl word tullin, designating cattail or similar reeds.
In 1805, 1806 and again in 1816, the Spanish out of Mission San Luis Obispo explored Lake Tulare. Bubal was a native village located on the Western side of Lake Tulare. In 1816, Fr. Luis Martinez of Mission San Luis Obispo arrived at Bubal with soldiers and armed Christian Northern Chumash pressuring the people to send their children for baptism at his mission on the coast. Conflict broke out, and Martinez's party burned Bubal to the ground, destroying the cache of food harvested for the winter. Although Bubal's relationship with the Christian Salinans under Fr. Cabot at Mission San Miguel was better, between 1816 and 1834, Bubal was a center of native resistance. The marshes around Lake Tulare were impenetrable by Spanish horses, which gave the Yokuts a military advantage. At one point, the Spanish considered building a presidio with 100 soldiers at Bubal to control the resistance, but that never came to pass. The Spanish called the natives of the area Tulareños, and before 1816 and after 1834, they were incorporated into Mission San Miguel and Mission San Luis Obispo.
After Mexico achieved independence, it continued to rule California. After the Mexican Cession and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the area became part of the United States. Tulare County was soon formed from parts of Mariposa County only four years later in 1852. There were two early attempts to split off a new Buena Vista County in 1855 and Coso County in 1864, but both failed. Parts of the county's territory were given to Fresno County in 1856, to Kern County and Inyo County in 1866 and to Kings County in 1893.
The infectious disease Tularemia caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis is named after Tulare County.
In 1908 Colonel Allen Allensworth and associates founded the town of Allensworth as a black farming community. They intended to develop a place where African Americans could thrive free of white discrimination. It was the only community in California founded, financed and governed by African Americans. While its first years were highly successful, the community encountered environmental problems from dropping water tables which eventually caused it to fail. Today the historic area is preserved as the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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