The Gate the Tribe Would Not Give Up

I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and right back there at the entrance, you passed through a gate and paid a fee to the tribe — and I want you to know that's no modern parking booth. That gate is over a hundred years old, and it's a small monument to a people's determination to hold on to what was theirs. Let me tell you.

Roll back to around the turn of the twentieth century. Word was getting out about the wonders of these palm canyons, and tourists were starting to come — carriages and then automobiles rattling up to gawk at the famous oasis. Now, this was Cahuilla land, sacred land, and the tribe faced a choice a lot of Native peoples faced in those years and mostly lost: let the outsiders pour in and trample and take, or find some way to keep control. And the Agua Caliente did something clever and strong. They didn't try to keep everyone out — they put up a tollgate. If you wanted to see the tribe's canyon, you paid the tribe to come in. And it worked. It said, plainly, to every visitor: this is ours, and you enter as our guest, by our leave, on our terms.

And I love this next part. At first they charged by the car — a quarter, twenty-five cents, to bring your automobile up the canyon. But the tour operators got sly, and started jamming as many paying tourists as they could into a single car to beat the fee. So the tribe just as promptly adjusted: fine — a dime a head, then, for every passenger you've packed in there. You couldn't put one over on them. By the nineteen-twenties, tens of thousands of visitors a year were coming through that gate — and every one of them, whether they thought about it or not, was acknowledging with their quarter and their dime that this land had never stopped belonging to the Cahuilla. It never has. That gate you drove through today is the same idea, still standing, still saying the same thing, a hundred years on. Walk this canyon as the honored guest that gate makes you. Roll on.