Standing at the locked wooden door in the adobe wall encircling Hacienda Inn in Desert Hot Springs, I listened to the sound of water trickling. It's an easy two-and-a-half-hour drive from San Diego. Today, there are 20 boutique-style spa hotels in the town of less than twenty thousand residents – a quarter of the number in operation during its boomtown heyday, just a few decades earlier. By the 1950s, the town just north of Palm Springs with award-winning drinking water and non-sulfuric therapeutic springs had become a hot spot for celebs and city escapees. Recognizing the potential of the springs, which percolated at temperatures up to 180 degrees, Yerxa spent the last twenty years of his life singlehandedly constructing the four-story, 35-room pueblo-style building on his property on “Miracle Hill” to accommodate the tourists he knew would come.Īnd they did. It spurted hot mineral water from one side and cold water from the other. He invested everything into his father’s California citrus orchard – only to lose it all in the 1913 freeze that decimated groves across the state.Ī year later, he stumbled upon a hill north of Palm Springs that was sliced by the San Andreas Fault. He even compiled a 320-word vocabulary of the Inuit language, which was promptly purchased by the Smithsonian Institute.Īn enterprising entrepreneur, Yerxa made fortunes on a number of ventures, including a mobile grocery, tract housing and cigar manufacturing. He was also a newspaper columnist and an adept linguist who spoke many Native American dialects.
He painted impressionistic Southwest scenes using his own pigment recipes, which he sold on postcards to passengers at the Garnet train depot outside Palm Springs. He traveled the world, landing in Paris, where he enrolled at the Academie Julien. Rumored to be a descendant of Newfoundland’s founder John Cabot, as a fearless adventurer Yerxa dared the wilds of Alaska during the gold rush when he was 16 and political unrest in Cuba when he was 19. Not only was he dreamy handsome (imagine a blend of Robert Redford, Alex Pettyfer and Paul Bettany), but there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. Honestly, if there ever was a Man of Men to pine for, it would be Cabot Yerxa, who died three years after I was born. Please read our FAQ page before contacting us to see if the answer you need is there.A bit of a 20th-century Renaissance man, Cabot Yerxa made and laid every brick in his Desert Hot Springs pueblo himself. We do receive a high volume of e-mails and so cannot guarantee an individual response to all communications. We consider all comments to review and improve our levels of service and facilities. We are interested in your comments and read every e-mail. National Amusements is the parent company of ViacomCBS.Ĭustomer Services can be contacted by completing the form found here. Based in Massachusetts, National Amusements is a closely held company operating under the third generation of leadership by the Redstone family.
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