In this paper I examine the deliberate construction of what I call "the tourist ecoscape"—an understanding of places and cultures that is held by tourists rather than by locals—in Palm Springs, California.

Much of the white history of the region has involved both conscious and unconscious denial of the existing ecoscape and the creation and promotion of appealing facades:  Arabian oases, exotic Indians, mysterious spirits, and the like.  Tourism, itself essentially escapist, was perceived early on as an appropriate and potentially lucrative industry by local businesspeople.

In this paper I argue that in order to capitalize on the region's unique attractions, Palm Springs tourism had to strike a balance between the too-strange and the too-familiar.  The result was that the images of Palm Springs and its past presented to the outside world were a hybrid of specific local features and generic national fantasies of the exotic.  Because of this, Palm Springs can serve as a case study not only of local tourism, but also for understanding how tourism played a role in national acceptance of the distinctive ecoscapes of the American West.