Talk:Rancho Las Camaritas
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Inadequate sourcing in Geography section
[edit]The assertions given in one of the paragraphs in the Geography section are not well supported by the four reference sources cited. In fact, they are irrelevant to the statement given and cannot be reasonably used as citations for it.
The paragraph, quoted below, is a pet position advanced by one particular local researcher. The central tenets of it have been repeatedly disproved. The research of the late Christopher Richard, a curator at the Oakland Museum of California, has shown by both soil sampling and historical documentation that the existence of a "now vanished freshwater lake" near which the Mission Dolores was founded is a misreading of the evidence and that the only freshwater area that was known by the name "Laguna Dolores" was a small freshwater willow marsh where the creek at 18th Street entered the larger salt marsh of Mission Creek Estuary. The area was, for a time in the 1850s and 1860s, called "The Willows."
Richard's evidence shows that the main body of water, the tidal lagoon (a salt marsh slough, not freshwater) itself was the body called Laguna Dolores. It also shows that the error was created when Zoeth Skinner Eldredge and others mistook the location of the "Laguna Manantial" (sometimes translated as freshwater lake), which Juan Bautista de Anza noted in the area known today as the Marina District on the same day he trekked across the dune region and chose a site for the Mission, very near Las Camaritas but predating Las Camaritas—nowhere near the freshwater lake referenced. During the early Mission days, the name "Laguna Dolores" was used by convention for the tidal inlet in the Mission District.
The State Landmark cited was, itself, similarly lacking in proper sources, yet even that landmark plaque does not support the relevant contentions of this paragraph. Whether that plaque is correct or not, it is not related to these claims and should not be used as a citation to support these statements to which it does not apply or refer.
It is hardly acceptable to assert on Wikipedia that something "was very likely," especially without adequate support for that statement. Droughts are not evidence of the hypothesis advanced, other than the reality that droughts can diminish lakes' sizes. This is not relevant nor does it support the assertions.
This paragraph should be removed entirely:
The lagoon located along its west side known as Lake Dolores[11][12] was very likely the same body of water that the original Mission was founded next to back in 1776. In this case, much reduced in size due to the large cattle operations that the church operated combined with many years of droughts.[13][14] The evidence of the lagoon's existence can be seen with its very high water table and the problems BART had constructing its underground line back in the 1960s.