The Checkerboard Nation

The canyon you are entering is Agua Caliente land. It has been Agua Caliente land for a very long time, and the story of how that fact survived the nineteenth century involves one of the stranger instruments of federal land policy ever devised.

In eighteen seventy-six, the federal government established the Agua Caliente Cahuilla reservation in the Coachella Valley. It did this by a method called alternating sections: a checkerboard of one-mile squares in which every other square went to the Agua Caliente Band and the intervening squares went to the Southern Pacific Railroad as payment for building through the region. The logic was that railroad access and Indian land would develop together. The checkerboard produced instead a legal puzzle that would take more than a century to resolve.

In eighteen seventy-six, the squares were desert. By nineteen fifty, when Palm Springs had become the playground of Hollywood's elite, the alternating squares at the literal center of the city were among the most valuable real estate in California. There were hotels and shops and private estates sitting on land whose ownership had never, in the eyes of the courts, been transferred from the Agua Caliente Band.

The Band spent decades in litigation establishing what had always been legally true: the reservation squares beneath the most profitable city in the desert were theirs. Federal courts affirmed tribal ownership in a series of decisions in the nineteen-eighties and beyond. The Band now controls more than thirty-two thousand acres in the Coachella Valley, administers casinos, and negotiates ground leases with developers who build on tribal land. They collect rent from some of the most expensive commercial property in the American West.

The checkerboard that was designed to fragment and diminish tribal ownership concentrated it instead. The alternating squares in the heart of Palm Springs are the most direct rebuttal in American property law to the idea that dispossession is permanent.

The canyons here, the springs in the rock walls above you, the palm groves at the water's edge, they have been tended for two thousand years. The law took until the nineteen-eighties to catch up with that fact.