Surrounding the once great Tule Lake, exists diverse human history. Today we learned of a people who were forced to leave and another who were forced to stay.

One reason Lava Beds is such a special place to contemplate cultural history is that it contains two types of rock art, or rock imagery— carved petroglyphs and painted pictographs.
All of the monument’s rock imagery is located in the traditional territory of the Modoc people and their ancestors or predecessors. Since Petroglyph Point was an island in Tule Lake before it was drained for agricultural use in the 20th
century, it could only be reached by boat making this extensive area that much more amazing.
It is hard to determine the age of rock art. This is especially true of petroglyphs, since material was removed in their creation, not added. It is possible that some of these images at Lava Beds were made more that 6,000 years ago.

With over 5,000 individual carvings, this site is one of the most extensive representations of American Indian rock art in California—it is possible that dozens or even hundreds of generations of artists paddled out in canoes, sharp sticks or stones in hand, to leave their mark here in the soft volcanic tuff.
Most of the pictographs at Lava Beds are found around cave entrances. They are painted in black, produced from a charcoal base mixed with animal fat, and white, made with a clay base.


Tule Lake was the largest and most conflict-ridden of the ten War Relocation Authority WRA camps used to carry out the government’s system of exclusion and detention of persons of Japanese descent, mandated by Executive Order 9066. The Order was issued February 19, 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.


Tule Lake opened May 26, 1942, detaining persons of Japanese descent removed from western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. With a peak population of 18,700, Tule Lake was the largest of the camps - the only one converted into a maximum-security segregation center, ruled under martial law and occupied by the Army.  Due to turmoil and strife, Tule Lake was the last to close, on March 28, 1946.
History often is a difficult lesson to learn but one that should be taught. How interesting that these histories are here, so close to one another.