Cabot's Old Indian Pueblo Museum
Desert Hot Springs, California
Cabot Yerxa, using only a pick and shovel, discovered the hot springs that gave Desert Hot Springs its name. That was in 1914. He discovered a cool spring as well and decided to make the desert his home.
Thirty years later Yerxa was inspired -- some say when he saw a pueblo at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair -- to build an elaborate adobe house in Desert Hot Springs "as a monument to his Indian friends" according to the sign in front of what is now called Cabot's Old Indian Pueblo Museum. He bought abandoned CCC cabins for the wood, and mixed his own Indian-style mud bricks. Year after year he built, aided by a mule named Merry Christmas, until he died, age 81, in 1965.
The house, never finished, has four stories, 35 rooms, 150 windows, 65 doors, and 30 different roof levels. Yerxa's second wife hightailed it out of Desert Hot Springs back to Texas, but the desert air preserved the abandoned house until fans of Yerxa could buy it. They are now restoring it to its 1965 appearance, and give tours just as Yerxa did.