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 architecture — the multi-level, organically shaped dwellings of the Southwest — though his version was built from whatever materials he could gather rather than adobe made from local soil. Scrap wood, salvaged metal, discarded items of every description went into the walls and floors and ceilings of a structure that grew over three decades according to its builder's impulses. The result encompasses 5,000 square feet, 35 rooms, 150 windows, 65 doors, and 30 different roof levels. No two rooms relate to each other in quite the way conventional architecture would expect. Yerxa opened the pueblo to visitors in 1950, near the end of his life.

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 the desert. One aquifer produces hot water at 110 degrees Fahrenheit; the other yields water that is cold. The geological explanation lies in how deeply the water circulates before rising: the hot water travels deep through the fault zone, where geothermal heat warms it, while the cold water comes from a shallower system. Yerxa's discovery was the foundation on which Desert Hot Springs built its entire identity as a spa destination — the mineral hot springs that draw visitors to the town trace back to the fault system he first tapped on his own land.

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 in the 1950s and later fell. The statue was carved specifically for this site. Inside the pueblo, Yerxa's collections and the history of his desert life fill the rooms he built — a record of one man's decades-long project of self-sufficiency and creativity in an environment that offered little assistance. Cabot Yerxa died in 1965 at the age of 82, having outlived most of the doubts his building project must have inspired.

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 three-dimensional autobiography. The pueblo sits in Desert Hot Springs — a city that grew partly from the geological discovery Yerxa made on this same property — and it stands as an unlikely monument to what one person with modest means, a great deal of time, and no formal training can build in the desert when given enough years and enough determination.