The Coachella Valley is a trough formed by the upthrust of mountains during seismic upheavals. The famed San Andreas Fault runs through the valley, going southeast to northwest just north of Interstate 10.
Northwest, several streams tumble down rocky canyons off the eastern escarpment of Mount San Jacinto, forming palm-lined pools before disappearing into sand and gravel. Tahquitz, Andreas, Murray and Palm Canyons provided for the Cahuilla Indians—and the settlers and visitors who followed.
In addition to the canyons, hot springs well out of the ground, nurturing broad areas with fan palms, palo verdes, mesquite trees, and smoke trees.
The indigenous and ubiquitous “palm” of Palm Springs is the Washingtonia fan palm (Washingtonia filifera). Found in California’s canyons and in isolated desert oases, the native Washingtonia, with its bright green fan fronds, thrives in the sun with its roots in ground water.
The most notable hot springs became the future site of downtown Palm Springs, right where the under-construction Aqua Caliente Cultural Plaza is today, at the corner of Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way.
The large, tree-shaded hot mineral springs was home to a band of Cahuilla Indians. The hot springs were called Sec he (sometimes spelled Se khi or Sechi, meaning boiling water) by the Native Americans, and Agua Caliente (hot water) to the Spaniards who later stumbled upon them. The Cahuilla Indians drank from the springs and found sustenance nearby.
George Wharton James described these Cahuilla Indians in his 1914 book California, Romantic and Beautiful: “A brave, hardy, rugged lot of aborigines used the wonderful … spring of hot water at Palm Springs as their health resort, gathering their big-pitted native dates from the palms of Palm Canyon, collecting their acorns from the mountain slopes and making their mush, flour, bread, tortillas, drink and candy from the beans found on the mesquite trees which dotted the desert’s face on every side.”
The Agua Caliente tribe actually dreaded the winter cold more than the blistering days of summer. For this reason, they considered their hot springs to be important, as it was the place where they gathered for social interaction.
Captain Juan Bautista de Anza missed visiting the site of Palm Springs in 1774 and 1776 by taking a more southern route through Anza. So, too, did Capt. Pedro Fages in his 1772 and 1782 explorations of what would become Southern California. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the Palm Springs area was visited by white outsiders.
The first recorded event of a white man in the Palm Springs area was the 1823-24 expedition of Brevet Capt. José Romero, sent by the Mexican government to find an overland route from Sonora to Alta California.
Romero’s diary, written by his assistant, Commander Lt. José Maria Estudillo, noted on the day before they reached the hot springs, Dec. 28, 1823, that there would be no water or pasture for the horses until “Agua Caliente” was reached. While it was the first recorded evidence of the springs and the Spanish name for “hot water,” it implies that they somehow had knowledge of the existence of the hot springs beforehand. In 1826, it was reported that Spanish padres visited the desert Cahuillas at Agua Caliente.
Over the next 20 years, numerous white men crossed the desert, but no known records mention of the hot springs. In 1845, there is a record of a B.D. Wilson and his party of 60 men meeting Chief Cabezon at Agua Caliente. Wilson and his posse were sent by Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, into the area to pursue a couple of renegade Indians. Chief Cabezon turned them over to Wilson at the hot springs.
In 1853, young Lt. R. S. Williamson and the Smithsonian Institution geologist William P. Blake led a government survey to find a railroad route to the Pacific Ocean and the 3-year-old state of California. Both wrote about their arrival at the oasis of “Palm Springs.”
Lt. Williamson, of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, wrote: “December 15, 1853. The greater part of the valley is entirely dry and sandy and almost as forbidding as the desert. The monotony is broken by a clump of palm trees on the north of the trail and a green bank from which springs issue known as ‘Palm Springs.’
In 1887, Dr. Welwood Murray located the first Palm Springs hotel as close as possible to the springs, which he leased from the Indians for $100 a year.
“The water was sulphurous and gave off a slight quantity of sulpherated hydrogen gas. A slight efflorescence quantity of nitro was seen on the surface of the ground around the pools. The water, however, was not so strangely charged with these ingredients as to be unpleasant to drink, especially after having used the stagnant and muddy water of the desert. I found its temperature, under the shade of a palm tree to be 80; air 70 … .”
Blake’s description was more social than scientific: “This place was evidently a favorite camping ground for the Indians. When we arrived, many Indian boys and girls were bathing in the warm spring … .”
While a few pioneers began to settle in the San Gorgonio Pass, Palm Springs and the lower desert area remained occupied only by Native Americans. They would occasionally put out the welcome mat to share their oasis with the infrequent white men who stumbled upon their land.
Later, the therapeutic value of the springs gave rise to the growth of the area. In the 1920 book Our Araby, J. Smeaton Chase had this to say about the natural oasis: “The Hot Spring … itself is as natural, no doubt, as any time this five or ten thousand years; and you may get as weird sensation in taking your bath, and as healthful a result afterwards, as bygone generations of Cahuillas have enjoyed. The water, which is just comfortably hot and contains mineral elements which render it remarkably curative, comes up mingled with quantities of very fine sand … and you will come forth with a sense of fitness and fineness all over to which only a patent medicine advertisement writer of high attainments could possible do justice.”
In 1887, Dr. Welwood Murray located the first Palm Springs hotel as close as possible to the springs, which he leased from the Indians for $100 a year. A small rickety two-room bathhouse was built and used until 1916, when it was razed it to build a newer structure. The city of Palm Springs literally grew up around the springs.
Decades later, in 1959, the Agua Caliente began construction on Spa Hotel on the site around the springs. It was demolished in 2014 to make way for the soon-to-open Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza and Spa.
Sources for this article include: California, Romantic and Beautiful by George Wharton James (Page Company Publishers, Boston, 1914); The Cahuilla Indians by Harry C, James (Westernlore Press, 1960) and Our Araby, Palm Springs by J. Smeaton Chase (Pasadena Star News Publishing, 1920).
