Qualla: Cabot's Pueblo Museum

Cabot's Pueblo Museum: Introduction

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit own picture Renhau (R. Haupt, Germany), CC BY-SA 3.0. Cabot Yerxa arrived in the desert with little money and a prospector's tolerance for uncertainty. What he built over the next several decades — by hand, from scavenged lumber and salvaged materials, working alone in temperatures that routinely exceeded a hundred degrees — is a four-story, 35-room structure that follows no blueprints because none were ever drawn. It is one of the most unusual buildings in California, and it happened to sit above two aquifers that would eventually make Desert Hot Springs a destination.

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Image: own picture Renhau (R. Haupt, Germany) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cabot's Pueblo Museum: Building Without Plans

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jllm06, CC0. Cabot Yerxa was born in 1883 and arrived in the desert near what is now Desert Hot Springs in the early twentieth century, drawn by the same combination of cheap land and open space that pulled many desert settlers of his era. The pueblo he began constructing was inspired by Hopi...

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Image: Jllm06 | CC0

Cabot's Pueblo Museum: The Fault Beneath the Feet

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jllm06, CC0. Yerxa's most consequential discovery happened underground. While digging on his property, he struck water — not once, but twice. The two aquifers he found are separated by a branch of the Mission Creek Fault, a splay of the larger San Andreas system that runs through this part of...

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Image: Jllm06 | CC0

Cabot's Pueblo Museum: The Giant at the Gate

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jllm06, CC0. Standing outside the pueblo is a 43-foot carved wooden figure called Waokiye, the 27th installation in the Trail of Whispering Giants, a series of large Native American sculptures placed at sites across North America. The wood came from a sequoia tree that was struck by lightning...

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Image: Jllm06 | CC0

Cabot's Pueblo Museum: Museum and Memory

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jllm06, CC0. The structure is now operated as Cabot's Pueblo Museum, preserving both the building and the story of its builder. Tours move through rooms that Yerxa shaped over three decades, past windows he cut and doors he salvaged, through a space that feels less like architecture than like...

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Image: Jllm06 | CC0