Hidden Histories

Leaving Las Vegas in the afternoon meant that Tess and I didn’t get to Palm Springs until well after nightfall. The sun set while we were cutting through the Mojave National Preserve on an old, sand-blasted road, Joshua Trees thick on either side that were shifted into haunting silhouettes by the gloaming. Once the light failed entirely, the only thing visible was the few yards of asphalt and dust allowed by our headlights. When we made Amboy, Roy’s, the old gas station there, was lit with blinding fluorescents, though the pumps had long since been shut off.

The next morning, when I opened the shades of the guesthouse we were staying in off Bogert Trail, my eyes lit up. The house was a low, modern affair based on plans by Frank Lloyd Wright, all white walls and sliding glass doors. A faded green lawn separated us from the main house, with a blue-tinted pool in the middle and a cushy sofa shaded by a black and white umbrella. Towering over everything was the ridge of the San Bernardinos, snow-capped Tahquitz Peak radiant in the southern shoulder of the ridge. In a sun-drunk trance, we headed to town after stopping to meet the tortoises at the Moorten Botanical Garden, getting lunch at the MidMod Café and wandering through the chic neighborhood that surrounds it. On Cahuilla Road, Tess posed for a picture in front of a wall of pink bougainvillea, a grove of palm trees rising into the cloudless sky behind her. In the evening, we got Dole Whip downtown then walked over to the bars on Arenas Road, where EDM was already pounding through the speakers set up on the patios.

Only much later would I realize that the entire day had been spent zigzagging in and out of Indian country. Though half of the most opulent resort town in the Southwest is built on a reservation, almost all of the land that was designated for the use of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla is effectively invisible. One side of Indian Canyon Drive is buildings owned by private investors, the other side resorts and racquets clubs operating under ninety-nine-year leases from members of the tribe that has occupied the Coachella Valley for centuries.

The unusual integration of Agua Caliente land and the City of Palm Springs dates back to when the band’s reservation was first established. Though the Cahuilla had largely been spared the brutality of the Spanish missions along the Pacific coast, white settlers descended on the region in the late 19^th Century. In the words of a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent who visited in 1873, those aspiring farmers and industrialists seemed not “to have had the slightest regard for Indian claims or possessions. They all act upon the hypothesis that an Indian has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”

In response, Ulysses S. Grant created a number of reservations for the Cahuilla by executive order. But unlike in most other regions of the West, the federal government had already signed over practically every odd numbered section of the Coachella Valley to the Southern Pacific Railroad; the only land it had left to distribute were the intervening, even sections. When the Agua Caliente Band was assigned nine hundred acres at the foot of Mount San Jacinto (soon expanded to 31,000 acres), the tribe’s new reservation took the form of an L-shaped checkerboard of square-mile parcels, with a stagecoach stop called Palm Springs Way Station smack in the middle of it.

As Anglos from Los Angeles began to seek out the valley’s natural hot springs, the Cahuilla granted access to nascent hotel operators for $150 a year. But as development surged in the privately held portion of Palm Springs in the early 20^th Century, the tribe’s ability to work with developers was limited by a federal law that only allowed leases to extend for five years, a term that precluded long-term investment.

In 1954, the Agua Caliente Band elected an all-woman tribal council, led by Vyola Olinger. Rallying the tribe under the slogan, “You can’t eat dirt,” Olinger led a dogged campaign in Washington, D.C., to secure longer leases and succeeded in getting the term limit bumped up to twenty-five years in 1955. Three years later, the tribe signed its first major development lease, eight and a half acres for a spa complex that would cost its developers some $1.7 million to build. Recognizing that the arrangement would mean that tribal members who happened to live near the city would become millionaires while their distant neighbors had nothing, Olinger pushed for a pair of federal laws that were passed in 1959, allowing leases to extend up to ninety-nine years and guaranteeing every member of the Agua Caliente Band 47 acres of land, including rights to property near downtown Palm Springs.

Despite these gains, the Agua Caliente Band was far from being the master of its own destiny. Under the terms of the new laws, guardians were mandated for all tribal children and conservators for any adult members deemed unfit to negotiate. In the late ‘60s, the Department of the Interior conducted a review of the leases that had been brokered after 1959 and found egregious abuses of the system by the Anglo lawyers and businessmen who had been allowed to act as guardians. A full forty-four percent of all lease revenue had been paid not to landowners, but to these administrators — some tribe members ended up so deeply in debt to their conservators that they were forced to sell the land itself, since it constituted their only asset.  In a report to Congress, the acting secretary of the Interior testified that the department’s review found the system “has been intolerably costly to the Indians in both human and economic terms and should be replaced or radically revised.” An amendment to the 1959 law that prevented such abuses was passed a few months later.

At the same time that many tribal members were getting the runaround from their supposed protectors, the city took aim at the Agua Caliente land that was immediately adjacent to downtown Palm Springs, a site called Section Fourteen that extended for a mile east from what’s now Indian Canyon Drive, adjacent to the city’s rarified Movie Colony.  Before the new lease terms were signed into law, the tribe had allowed several hundred low-income people to live on the land, most of whom were Black laborers unable to either afford a house or secure a mortgage elsewhere in the city.

Alvin Taylor, who would later find fame as a drummer for Little Richard, Elton John, and George Harrison, grew up on Section Fourteen. While his mother worked as a housekeeper for Lucille Ball, his father was a carpenter; having been denied a bank loan, he was forced to build the family home by hand. As in other predominantly Black neighborhoods of cities across the Southwest, like the Westside of Las Vegas and South Phoenix, Section Fourteen was dismissed as a slum by city officials because the people who lived there had little ability to provide anything but the most rudimentary shelter for themselves. As the activist Joseph Jackson complained to the city council, “The children of Section Fourteen are attending a $5,000,000 school and living in shacks.”

In January 1965, the city and tribal councils met at the Spa Hotel to discuss what to do about Section Fourteen. Rather than focus on the infrastructure investments that would be necessary for bringing conditions in the neighborhood up to the standards of the surrounding areas, the focus of the session was almost entirely on how to get rid of the residences that were already built, with the mayor, Frank Bogert, exclaiming, “If you think of the value of the land and think of the kind of junk there, it’s just scandalous.”

That fall, what the Desert Sun called “the abatement of Section Fourteen” began, with the Palm Springs Fire Department sweeping through the neighborhood with a demolition crew and then performing a controlled burn on whatever possessions remained. “We were treated like animals,” Alvin Taylor told the Guardian many decades later. “Coming home from school to see neighbors’ homes being burned and bulldozed to the ground … I mean, this was really a terrible and horrifying memory that’s indelibly etched in my mind.” “We came home one day and it was burned down,” Dianne Lee told the Los Angeles Times. “We didn’t have no place to go.” When Black residents confronted the City Manager, Frank Aleshire, after the demolition, asking where they were supposed to live, he responded, “Why is it the government’s problem — why not the man’s problem to find his own house?”

Three years later, the state attorney general released a report on the clearing of Section Fourteen that blasted the city for initiating home demolitions without giving their inhabitants proper warning, as well as for not providing any alternative residences for the more than one thousand people who were displaced. “The City of Palm Springs not only disregarded the residents of Section Fourteen as property owners, taxpayers and voters,” the report stated. “Palm Springs ignored that the residents of Section Fourteen were human beings.” As far as the Agua Caliente were concerned, the attorney general’s office found that “the conservators in many instances executed the eviction notices without making a full disclosure to their Indian wards who were leasing the land.”

Though many individual members of the tribe were misled, the Agua Caliente’s tribal council was fully committed to the city’s action. At that 1965 meeting, the city attorney pointed out that when the city had attempted to “clean up” the area a few years earlier, the “NAACP crawled down our necks.” In response, Agua Caliente’s chairwoman Eileen Miguel responded, “Are you more worried about the NAACP or cleaning up the city?” In protesting the findings of the attorney general, City Manager Frank Aleshire insisted, “The Indians wanted help in clearing their expensive land infested with shacks.”

In the decades since, Section Fourteen has become indistinguishable from the city that surrounds it. Numerous hotels are built there, as well as a pair of “racquet clubs,” the Palm Springs Convention Center, and a casino operated by the Agua Caliente themselves. Homes in the area regularly sell for upwards of two million dollars. All this high-end development has given the Agua Caliente a reputation as the wealthiest tribe in America, particularly after a survey from the 1970s suggested that the annual income of each of its few hundred members was around $350,000. When, in 1973, the tribe sued Palm Springs after the city attempted to make their land subject to municipal zoning laws, the New York Times said the “hostile” tribe was “on the legal warpath,” even as reporter Everett Holles wrote with astonishment that there were, in fact, Cahuilla who “drive air‐conditioned Cadillacs and Jaguars, live in homes costing $100,000 to $200,000 with swimming pools and unlisted telephones, and wear $175 sports jackets.”

Raymond Patencio echoed Vyola Olinger when he pointed out to Holles that less than ten percent of the tribe’s land was actually producing revenue, telling him “You can’t eat dirt, no matter how much land you have.” Since no allotments were made after 1959, younger tribal members could only earn leasing income if they were lucky enough to inherit land. By the 1990s, while some members of the tribe had indeed become quite wealthy, close to half lived in poverty. Today, only 174 people on the Agua Caliente Reservation self-identify solely as Indian, with a few hundred more claiming to be mixed-race. Less than two percent of both groups have an annual income of more than $75,000 — roughly in line with the country as a whole — while almost a quarter make less than $20,000 per year.  

When she began campaigning for the right of the Agua Caliente to work with real estate developers, Vyola Olinger was advocating for her people’s right to not just live in the Southwest but share in its burgeoning prosperity. She succeeded at learning to play the settler’s land game, but in the process too many members of her tribe internalized its zero-sum logic. For the Cahuilla to win, some other group would have to lose, and it was all too expedient to ally with the white majority against a few hundred Black families. In the long run, the Agua Caliente have been stratified in the same, inequitable fashion as the rest of America.

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Since the Paoletter ran long this month, we’ll leave it at that! Thanks, as always, for reading — if you haven’t already, do me a solid and preorder American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. You can find me on my website, or standing on my street corner to admire an electrical transformer exploding under the pressure of the heat dome.

Your pal,
Kyle