Sec-he: The Hot Spring and the Checkerboard
Near Palm Springs, California
Long before there was a resort town here, there was the water. Bubbling up through the desert floor at the foot of the mountains, a hot mineral spring drew the Cahuilla people to this exact spot for thousands of years. In their language they called it Sec-he, the sound of boiling water, and they called themselves the Agua Caliente, the hot water people, after the Spanish name for the spring.
That single warm pool is why Palm Springs exists, and why its name points back to water in the desert. The story of who owns this land is one of the strangest in America. In the nineteenth century, the federal government granted the Southern Pacific Railroad every other square mile of land across a wide belt of the desert, the odd numbered sections, to lure the railroad west.
Then, by executive orders signed by Presidents Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes in eighteen seventy-six and eighteen seventy-seven, the government set aside the leftover even numbered sections as the reservation of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Seen from above, the result is a perfect checkerboard. Downtown Palm Springs sits on a grid where the tribe owns one square mile, a private party owns the next, back and forth across the whole city.
That checkerboard made the Agua Caliente the largest single landowner in Palm Springs, holding roughly six thousand seven hundred acres inside the city limits. For decades the tribe could not fully profit from land it was not allowed to sell, until changes in federal leasing law in nineteen fifty-nine allowed long term leases. Much of the hotel and resort district you see today sits on leased tribal land.
The spring itself never stopped flowing. In recent years the tribe opened the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza downtown, built directly over Sec-he, with a museum, an oasis trail, and a bathhouse where visitors can once again soak in the very water that gave this place its name. After thousands of years, the hot water people welcomed the world back to their spring.
