Before any road was built, before any stage line operated, before the first Anglo-American prospectors moved through the Colorado Desert, Dos Palmas Spring was a node in a trail network used by Native Americans for centuries. The trail connected the Colorado River to the east with the settled communities of Southern California to the west, crossing the Salton Sink and its desert extensions along a route that required reliable water at intervals the human body can endure. Dos Palmas was one of those intervals — a place to rest, drink, fill containers, and continue. The spring fed not just the travelers but the animals they brought and the broader ecology of the oasis: dozens of desert fan palms, pools of clear water, birds that congregated wherever permanence existed in the surrounding impermanence.

The discovery of gold in Arizona in the early 1860s transformed the Bradshaw Trail from a Native American trade route into a commercial corridor. Beginning in 1862, the trail carried gold seekers, supply wagons, and eventually stage coaches between San Bernardino and the boomtown of La Paz, Arizona on the Colorado River. Dos Palmas Spring became a formal stage stop — a place with a name, a structure, and presumably some minimal services for travelers making the brutal desert crossing. The trail was the main route between Southern California and the Arizona goldfields, and Dos Palmas was one of its essential nodes. In May and June of 1877, the stop briefly hosted a post office, a detail that suggests a level of activity sufficient to justify federal postal service.

On October 9, 1866, Herman Ehrenberg was killed at Dos Palmas Spring. The circumstances of the murder — a robbery gone wrong, an ambush by unknown assailants — are somewhat unclear in the historical record, but the victim's significance was not. Ehrenberg was a German-born engineer, surveyor, and adventurer who had been involved in the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the early development of Arizona. He had mapped parts of the territory, fought in multiple conflicts, and helped establish the town on the Colorado River that would be named after him: Ehrenberg, Arizona. He died at a desert spring in the middle of nowhere, far from any of the places he had helped shape, en route from one end of the West to another.

Dos Palmas Spring is now the centerpiece of the Dos Palmas Preserve, a 14,000-acre protected area managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The preserve protects the oasis and the species that depend on it, including the endangered Yuma Rail — a subspecies of Ridgway's Rail that requires dense bulrush and cattail marshes — the Desert Pupfish, which survives in the hypersaline and thermal conditions that would kill most fish, and the Orocopia Sage, a plant found only in a few locations in the Sonoran Desert. The hundreds of desert fan palms that cluster around the spring's pools create a canopy that provides temperature relief and nesting habitat. Seepage from the nearby Coachella Canal supplements the spring's natural flow, feeding the wetland that sustains this unexpected abundance.