[2] In 1874–1875 a single breeding pair was discovered in the tule marshes of Buena Vista Lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

[5] Tule elk can reliably be found in Carrizo Plain National Monument, Point Reyes National Seashore, portions of the Owens Valley from Lone Pine to Bishop, on Coyote Ridge in Santa Clara Valley, San Jose, California and in Pacheco State Park and areas surrounding San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos, California.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife records show recent tule elk bulls on Grizzly Island in Suisun Bay weigh up to 900 pounds (410 kg).

"[10] General John Bidwell of the 1841 Bartleson–Bidwell Party wrote: "In some of the fertile valleys, such as Napa and Santa Clara, there were elk literally by the thousand".

[12][13] A 2007 nuclear DNA microsatellite study found single alleles at many loci, with a maximum of five alleles at one locus, indicating that there has either been a mutation at this locus subsequent to the single breeding pair reported by Henry Miller and nineteenth century game warden A. C. Tibbet, or there were three surviving tule elk at the 1800s genetic bottleneck.

[13] Another microsatellite study in 2016 found no more than four alleles at any locus, consistent with tule elk having been reduced to a single breeding pair.

[14] The first European explorer to see tule elk was likely Sir Francis Drake who landed in July 1579 probably in today's Drake's Bay, Marin County, California: "The inland we found to be far different from the shoare, a goodly country and fruitful soil, stored with many blessings fit for the use of man: infinite was the company of very large and fat deer, which there we saw by thousands as we supposed in a herd..."[8] A more definitive second encounter 16 years later was described by Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño, who was shipwrecked in December 1595, and in Drake's Bay with certainty.

"[15] Cermeno and his crew made a small boat from their wrecked Manila galleon and sailed back to Acapulco, Mexico, with but a single trophy of their voyage to the Philippines, the set of large elk antlers.

"[17] When Richard Henry Dana Jr. visited San Francisco Bay in 1835, he wrote about vast elk herds near the Golden Gate on December 27: "...we came to anchor near the mouth of the bay, under a high and beautifully sloping hill, upon which herds of hundreds and hundreds of red deer [note: "red deer" is the European term for "elk"], and the stag, with his high branching antlers, were bounding about...", although it is not clear whether this was the Marin side or the San Francisco side.

[18] The arrival of the Spanish in the late 18th century introduced cattle and horses to the grasslands of the Central Valley, competing with the native elk.

[20] In 1933, rancher Walter Dow took a small group of penned elk from Yosemite to his ranch in Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada.

[8][21] A private citizen from Los Angeles, Beula Edmiston, formed a group to attempt a preservation program for the elk.

[22] An Interagency Task Force[23] of representatives from the National Park Service, US Forest Service, the Armed Forces, Bureau of Land Management, California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the California Department of Fish and Game[24] selected sites for the reintroduction of tule elk within the state.

A herd was established at the San Luis Wildlife Refuge in 1974, and elk were released at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in 1977.