Cabot Yerxa, Miracle Hill and the Making of Desert Hot Springs

Cabot’s Pueblo Museum is the sort of building that makes you slow down before you know its story. Rooflines shift, rooms accumulate and reused materials suggest that a straight line was never the only way forward. The place asks to be read, not merely photographed.

Its history begins before the pueblo, with a homesteader trying to find water. It continues after its builder’s death, with the people who kept his work from disappearing. Between those chapters lies part of the making of Desert Hot Springs.

A hill before there was a city

Cabot Yerxa arrived in 1913 and homesteaded 160 acres. Desert Hot Springs was not yet an incorporated city, and the resort identity familiar today still lay ahead. Finding water was an immediate practical problem, long before it could become a selling point.⁹

That beginning belongs within a much longer history. The Coachella Valley was already a Cahuilla homeland. A settler’s account of finding water is not the beginning of human knowledge of the desert. Reading both stories makes the later development easier to understand.

The most useful way to follow Cabot is to keep three places in mind: the homestead where he needed to survive, the wells that changed what seemed possible, and the pueblo where he turned experience into a place people could visit. They are parts of one life, but they did not all appear at once.

Why the water mattered

The Desert Hot Springs Historical Society’s published history dates Yerxa’s discovery of natural hot and cold water to 1914. Today’s museum describes two wells, with the cold-water source roughly 600 yards from his home. Their contrast gave the homestead its name: Miracle Hill.²¹

Hot and cold water solved different problems. Cold water mattered to everyday settlement. Hot mineral water offered the possibility of bathing and a visitor economy. That duality helps explain why a story that begins with a person digging for water eventually becomes a story about a city.

The name “Miracle Hill” is evocative, but it should not take the place of an explanation. The waters are part of a real groundwater setting, not an unlimited resource. A historical account of a well also does not establish the yield, temperature or development potential of another property nearby.

Follow the homestead, wells and pueblo

Select a place or move through the years to see how a survival story became a building project and then a preservation effort. The drawing shows relationships in the story; it does not locate the wells on a surveyed map.

Cabot’s discovery was one chapter in making a town

A discovery does not lay out streets, deliver water to homes or create a functioning town by itself. Mission Springs Water District dates the first subdivisions to 1940 and associates that development with L. W. Coffee. The Historical Society identifies Coffee’s 1941 bathhouse as an important step in the spa economy.³⁴

This is why it is more accurate to describe Cabot as a formative figure than as the sole maker of Desert Hot Springs. Homesteaders, promoters, residents and later public institutions each had work to do. The town’s promise rested on water; realizing that promise required organization.

The public water district was established in 1953, following dissatisfaction with earlier water arrangements. Incorporation came in 1963. Those milestones belong beside the memorable story of the wells because they explain how individual settlement became a community.³⁴

A building made from other buildings

The Foundation dates the start of Cabot’s pueblo to 1941. He reused lumber from his original homestead and materials from dismantled cabins, even straightening used nails. The result grew into a four-story building with 35 rooms.⁸

Salvage is more than a picturesque detail. A new building normally conceals where its materials came from. Here, looking at an old board or an unusual opening can lead you backward into another structure’s life. The irregularity records decisions made with what was available.

The National Register’s account describes the pueblo and nearby Nellie’s House as a personal architectural undertaking without formal architectural drawings. It also places Portia Graham, whom Cabot married in 1945, within the site’s years as a home and gathering place.⁵

The Foundation calls the architecture Hopi-inspired. That matters: this is a twentieth-century building created by Yerxa, not an ancient pueblo or a traditional Cahuilla village. Its collections and interpretation invite questions about the cultures represented and the person doing the collecting. Our Cahuilla history guide provides a separate starting point for the region’s Indigenous story.

A home, a collection and a public attraction

The pueblo resisted a single-purpose label. It could hold domestic life, artwork, collected objects and visitors’ curiosity at the same time. A person arriving there encountered a building, but also an account of a life.

Dates need care. The Foundation gives 1950 as the official public opening; the National Register’s brief account describes trading-post and museum use in the 1940s. Those descriptions suggest a place developing over time, not a conventional museum that sprang into existence on one tidy opening day.¹⁵

Cabot’s own art and collected material added another layer. The museum’s value lies partly in that combination: the structure is an object of interest before a visitor even considers what is displayed inside. Architecture and biography are difficult to separate here.

The second story: saving what Cabot left

Cabot died in 1965. The property then stood vacant before Cole Eyraud acquired it and took up its preservation. Southern California Edison’s later reporting describes the pueblo as having come close to demolition before it was saved.⁵⁸

This second story deserves its own place. An unusual private creation does not automatically become public heritage. It needs someone to recognize its value, maintain it and argue for its future. Without that effort, a biography may survive while the place that gives it texture disappears.

The Foundation’s account records the transfer by Eyraud’s heirs to the City of Desert Hot Springs in 1998, reopening in 2001 and National Register recognition in 2012. The city owns the property, while the Foundation operates the museum. The legacy now depends on continuing institutional work as well as affection for its original builder.⁶¹

What to look for when you visit

Start with the materials: old wood, changes in level and the relationship between rooms. Ask how the building expanded and which parts served daily life. Then look at the collections with the same curiosity: who made an object, how did it arrive, and what does its interpretation tell you?

The museum offers different ways to visit, including interior tours and grounds access with gallery spaces. Check the official visitor information and ticket calendar for the option you want. An exterior visit and an interior tour are different experiences.⁷

For a wider sense of the north valley, explore our guides to the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Whitewater Preserve and Thousand Palms Oasis Preserve. These are separate destinations, not stops on a Cabot walking route.

Cabot’s lasting contribution is not confined to the discovery of water or the eccentricity of a building. His story makes it possible to see several kinds of desert ambition together: making a home, imagining a town, creating a place to share and persuading others that it is worth keeping.

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