In the 1880s Palm Valley was also the site of Palmdale and the Garden of Eden, two developments that failed to achieve the success of neighboring Palm Springs.  Rincon, a nearby Cahuilla village, was also unsuccessful.  Why were these efforts fruitless, given that generations of Cahuilla Indians had endured in Palm Valley for centuries, and Palm Springs became such a success?  The success of Palm Springs is something I intend to pursue further, but I will offer a partial answer for its neighbors’ failure here today.

The history of the Cahuilla encouraged a holistic view of their world and themselves, but the newer one of the Anglo developers divided the world into independent categories.  Reliance on concepts like "nature" slowed Anglo adaptation to the indigenous ecoscape, even as they transformed it into something new.

"Nature" as a concept still shapes our thinking today.  Our dependency on it and similar concepts makes it difficult for us to critique them and to understand other perspectives.  I have two goals today:  first, to explain the processes of ecoscape evolution in Palm Valley and, by implication, in the wider American West; and, second, to challenge our reliance on "nature" as a category of analysis.

The Main Points

Landscape, ecosystem, and ecoscape form a viable and valuable alternative to nature and culture as historiographical framework.

Abstract thinking, and thinking shaped by the categories like nature made the subjects' response to a challenging ecoscape more difficult than did specific, holistic thinking.