The Checkerboard

Here's a strange and true thing about the land all around you, one that still shapes the whole city of Palm Springs today — it's built on a checkerboard. A literal checkerboard of square miles, owned in alternating squares by the tribe and by everybody else. And how that came to be is a tale of a raw deal turned, over a long time, into strength. Let me tell it.

Go back to the eighteen-seventies. The railroads were being pushed across the West, and to bribe the railroad companies to lay track through empty country, the government handed them enormous grants of land — but in a peculiar pattern. They surveyed the whole desert into a grid of one-mile squares, like a giant checkerboard, and they gave the railroad every OTHER square — the odd-numbered ones. And then, when they set up the reservation for the Agua Caliente Cahuilla, right in the middle of all this, the tribe got the squares that were left — the even-numbered ones. So instead of one solid block of homeland, the tribe's reservation came out as a scattered checkerboard, every other square mile theirs, the squares in between belonging to the railroad and, later, to the growing town. Their land and the city's land, interlocked like a chessboard, one square tribal, the next not, all across the valley.

Now, at the time, that was a lousy hand to be dealt — your nation chopped into a checkerboard, hard to hold together, hard to control. But here's the turn, and it's a good one. As sleepy Palm Springs grew into a famous resort city, some of those tribal squares turned out to be smack in the middle of downtown, worth a fortune. And the Agua Caliente — a small tribe, remember, just a few hundred people — held on to their squares, and fought long legal battles for the right to control and lease and manage them, and slowly turned that scattered checkerboard into real, lasting power and prosperity. Today the Agua Caliente are one of the most consequential landowners and forces in the whole Palm Springs region, their checkerboard squares a foundation of their sovereignty and strength. So the very land under this city still remembers the deal — one square theirs, the next not — and the tribe took that broken checkerboard and made it a chessboard they learned to win on. Something to think about, standing here on one of their squares. Roll on.