Well, we are broadcasting from Palm Springs in the California desert tonight.

Now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio.

It is nighttime in the desert, as you can see,

by looking around.

And on this night,

the desert in question is here

in Palm Springs at the Ace Hotel

with the mountains rising up

behind us. And please

silence your phone devices. As we we are recording the best way to silence a phone is to

throw it in that pool thank you for being here on this autumn night palm trees a campfire

rang outside a hint of what it was like here a century ago.

A hundred years ago when the few people who lived here lived in the canyons.

They lived in Palm Canyon. They lived in Chino Canyon.

Where you had shade, where you had fresh water, where you could grow some beans and plants,

hot springs for winter soaking, really a perfect oasis.

For centuries, this has been the home to the Cahila people, the Agua Caliente tribe.

Today the tribe owns 50 square miles of Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley,

all the way down to Rancho Mirage. The land beneath 20,000 homes and businesses here, still tribal

land and you pay a lease to the tribe. Anglo-Americans showed up around the gold rush, as usual, and by the early 1900s there were health resorts.

There were health resorts catering to the lungers.

The lungers who suffered various diseases, tuberculosis, primarily among them, they came to the desert for the dry air for the mineral baths.

...