This cultural and environmental history of the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation and Palm Springs, California, considers the formation of a new "ecoscape." (Ecoscape refers to the local ecosystem, inhabitants, beliefs and practices, and the network of relationships connecting them all).

Diverse sources are employed to analyze the evolution of this region's local ecoscape and thereby better understand the formation of the turn-of-the-century American West.  (These sources include travel literature, surveyors' journals, engineering reports, government correspondence, newspapers, photographs and maps.)

The ecoscape concept challenges the historiographical use of the concept "nature"; revealing the complexities of an encounter between a "nature-less" society and a "natured" one with greater clarity.  This framework represents the logical outcome of the current trajectory in the theoretical development of environmental history.

This examination focuses on the on-going encounter between indigenous Cahuilla Indians, white settlers, and agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Cahuilla mastery of the local, pre-contact ecoscape, abetted by a conception of that ecosystem as a unified whole, was challenged when white newcomers began to alter its physical and cultural terrain.  Initially these newcomers failed to recognize the limits of the local ecosystem, perceiving "nature" as something separate from, inferior to, and essentially yielding to human manipulation.  Rather than promoting adaption, this perception encouraged settlers to recreate familiar ecoscapes in an unfamiliar environment, with often disappointing results.  Accommodation was further hampered by complex spatial arrangements resulting from the checkerboard distribution of federal lands in the 1860s and 1870s.  During the early years of settlement, the agents of the federal government played an important role, negotiating between the settlers and Cahuilla and collecting needed data on the evolving ecoscape.  By the 1930s, both Cahuilla and their white neighbors had developed an effective understanding of their shared ecoscape; they no longer needed the guiding hand of the government to navigate it successfully.  BIA officials, at first unwilling to admit to their own growing superfluity, were at last convinced through a series of events in the 1930s that local knowledge, gained through daily experience, was ultimately superior to that of a distant government.