Early Palm Springs

Palm Springs is the ancestral home of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who lived in the Coachella Valley for centuries before white people began colonizing the area to grow crops in the late nineteenth century. Floods and drought quashed that experiment.

The area was next promoted as a tubercular sanatorium, but that was not to be Palm Springs’ destiny. Through toil and grit, the early pioneers—mostly sturdy women—forged a Shangri-la out of a failed agricultural colony and middling hospice. The transformation of Palm Springs into a winter playground was astonishingly rapid. By 1925, automobiles from Los Angeles—and the transcontinental railroad from the Midwest and East—filled the village with tourists. Palm Springs also attracted its share of artists, photographers, and sun-baked eccentrics, who chose the desert for inspiration.