Walter H. Morgan

Walter H. Morgan is one of the quiet architects of today’s Coachella Valley story — the oyster heir from San Francisco who looked at empty desert and saw La Quinta Resort.

From Oyster Fortune to Desert Visionary

Morgan was the youngest son of John S. Morgan, owner of the hugely successful Morgan Oyster Company in San Francisco. With money, but struggling health, he came to the east end of the Coachella Valley around 1921 looking for a dry, warm climate. 

He studied the land like an engineer. Reports from the time say he and associate Fred Ickes spent a year driving the valley, looking for four things: shallow groundwater for irrigation, minimal wind, the warmest winter climate, and lots of clear blue sky. They found it in the La Quinta Cove on land the local Cahuilla people knew as “Happy Hollow.” Morgan then bought roughly 1,400 acres under the Desert Development Company.

Behind the future hotel, he planted dates and alfalfa and helped set up Rancho La Quinta, one of the valley’s successful early ranches. So before La Quinta was a resort town, Morgan was already using water and soil to prove this corner of the desert could sustain both agriculture and people.

Creating La Quinta Resort — the Original Desert Oasis

Morgan didn’t just want a ranch. He wanted a secluded retreat for friends, Hollywood insiders, and winter travelers who were discovering the Coachella Valley. He hired architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to design a Spanish Colonial Revival compound at the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains — white adobe-style walls, red tile roofs, courtyards, and shaded walkways that felt like an old California hacienda. 

The La Quinta Hotel (today La Quinta Resort & Club) held a soft opening on December 29, 1926, with 20 guest casitas, an open‑air glassed dining room, and landscaped courtyards spread across about 40 acres at the heart of his 1,400‑acre property. Public opening followed in early 1927. Construction cost was estimated at $150,000 — a huge bet on an undeveloped stretch of desert east of Indio. 

Then he did something that changed the valley forever: he brought golf. Morgan added the Coachella Valley’s first golf course, a nine‑hole layout on the hotel grounds, open to the public for $1 a day. That single move helped set the stage for the golf‑driven identity the east valley is known for today. 

Word spread fast. La Quinta became a hideaway for Hollywood names like Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and director Frank Capra, who came to the resort to write. The hotel’s low‑rise casitas, date gardens, and mountain backdrop sold a new image of the Coachella Valley: not just farmland, but a desert sanctuary. 

How Morgan Shaped the Modern Coachella Valley

Morgan died in 1931, only five seasons after the hotel opened, but the template he set has basically guided the valley ever since:

• Resort as anchor: La Quinta Hotel became the nucleus for later residential neighborhoods, country clubs, and PGA West. When the city finally incorporated in 1982, it took its name from Morgan’s resort. 

• Golf as identity: His first nine‑hole course evolved into the dense cluster of golf resorts that now define La Quinta and much of the Coachella Valley’s tourism economy. 

• Agriculture + leisure mix: By drilling wells and planting dates and other crops around the property, he showed how water, farming, and hospitality could coexist in this part of the desert — a pattern still visible in the surrounding valley. 

Nearly a century later, La Quinta Resort & Club is a 45‑acre, 700‑plus‑room property with casitas, villas, 40‑plus pools, championship golf, tennis, and a restaurant named “Morgan’s in the Desert” in his honor. Yet the core experience is still very close to his original idea: low‑slung white buildings, citrus and bougainvillea, and those Santa Rosa Mountains rising straight up behind it all. 

For anyone exploring the Coachella Valley today, Walter H. Morgan is the reason La Quinta feels like a true “desert oasis” rather than just another stop along Highway 111. His decision to trust this land — its light, its heat, its hidden water — turned a quiet cove into one of the valley’s defining places.