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What Desert Hot Springs is known for
Desert Hot Springs is a Coachella Valley spa city of 32,512 people, built on the hot and cold aquifers Cabot Yerxa found with a pick and shovel in 1913. It is also known for the pueblo he raised from salvage by hand. Cabot’s Museum Foundation runs it, drawing about 18,500 visitors a year on guided tours.
The same soak as everyone else
Before the 20th century the only people north of Palm Springs were the Cahuilla, in the village of Seven Palms. Hilda Maude Gray staked the area’s first homestead claim in 1908. In 1913, at age 30, Cabot Yerxa homesteaded 160 acres nearby, dug a well for water, and found far more than water.
Hot mineral water was not scarce in the Coachella Valley; Palm Springs already ran spas nearby. In the 1930s Yerxa showed developer L.W. Coffee the springs, and Coffee’s 1941 bathhouse made Desert Hot Springs one more town selling the same soak, with nothing of its own to show for it.
A pueblo with no blueprint
In 1941 Yerxa began building on Miracle Hill: sun-dried adobe brick, scrap wood and sheet metal, straightened used nails, old telephone poles, buckboard parts, no blueprint. He opened Cabot’s Old Indian Pueblo to the public in 1950, unfinished, and kept building for twenty years: four stories, thirty-five rooms.
What the pueblo earns
Yerxa died in 1965 at 82. The city of Desert Hot Springs now owns the pueblo, and the town has grown to 32,512 residents at the 2020 census, still served by more than twenty mineral spring lodgings on the aquifer he found.
Why it worked
Cabot Yerxa refused to let a hot water discovery become just another bathhouse receipt. Anyone could sink a well into the same aquifer; only one homesteader spent two decades stacking salvaged lumber, sun-dried brick and straightened nails into a four-story pueblo with no blueprint.
Built by one man’s hands rather than a developer’s crew, it stayed personal and strange, impossible to copy. Desert Hot Springs sells the same mineral water as its neighbors. It does not share their landmark.
Questions people ask about Desert Hot Springs
Why is Desert Hot Springs, California famous?
Desert Hot Springs is a Coachella Valley spa city known for its hot and cold aquifers and for Cabot's Old Indian Pueblo. Cabot Yerxa found the aquifers with a pick and shovel in 1913 and raised the pueblo from salvage by hand.
Who built Cabot's Old Indian Pueblo in Desert Hot Springs?
Cabot Yerxa began building on Miracle Hill in 1941 with sun-dried adobe brick, scrap wood, sheet metal and straightened used nails, and no blueprint. The pueblo opened to the public in 1950, unfinished, and grew to four stories and thirty-five rooms.
How many people visit Cabot's pueblo in Desert Hot Springs?
Cabot's Museum Foundation runs the pueblo, which the city of Desert Hot Springs now owns, and it draws about 18,500 visitors a year on guided tours. Yerxa died in 1965 at 82.
Who lived in the Desert Hot Springs area before homesteaders?
Before the 20th century the only people north of Palm Springs were the Cahuilla, in the village of Seven Palms. Hilda Maude Gray staked the area's first homestead claim in 1908, and Cabot Yerxa homesteaded 160 acres in 1913.