Rebuttal Letter You would think that with that many errors, the editor of Palm Springs Life, Steven Biller, would want to correct them – WRONG AGAIN! Dear Mr. Biller, It was with great interest that I read Love Letters (and Numbers) by Ann Japenga in the March issue of your magazine. Cabot Yerxa is indeed a fascinating, if often overlooked, local hero. Our community owes a huge debt of gratitude to John Hunt for rescuing and returning original source materials to Cabot’s Indian Pueblo Museum and for saving Cabot’s grave after years of neglect. For anyone who has not visited the museum, it is a wonderful slice of local history and desert lore. Unfortunately, errors and mistakes frequently mar the story of Cabot and Portia Yerxa, which has a rather convoluted history at its base regardless of who is telling the story. Japenga’s article repeated several of those errors, compounding the problem. In short: Cabot Yerxa did move to the area that would one day be known as Desert Hot Springs in 1913 as a homesteader. He did discover both hot and cold (relatively) water wells on his property, which he dubbed “Miracle Hill.” Then, in 1918 he sold off some or all of his property and moved to Seattle where his wife and son lived. He was drafted into the tank corps in WWI. He did not return to the desert to live until the late 1930s, 20 years later, when he started building his Hopi-inspired pueblo. He substantively finished the pueblo in the 1950s, but kept working on it until his death in 1965 at the age of 81. In 1945, Cabot was 62 and Portia was 61. He worked at Torney General Hospital during the week and on the weekends returned to his Desert Hot Springs property, which was substantively, if not by legal definition, a homestead. His black burro, Merry Christmas, had died many years before, probably in 1918. He had a truck, which he used to comb the desert for construction materials for his fabulous pueblo. If Portia’s mother, Nanny Beatrice Rogers Fearis, was still alive in 1945, she would have been about 84 years old. Barbara Whitelaw was not Portia’s mother, nor was she her sister. It is likely they were friends and roommates. Whatever the situation, Cabot’s letters (and more likely his winning ways) did the trick. Cabot and Portia spent the next 19 years of their lives together sharing a wonderful love that sustained them through their later years. One of the most inspiring aspects to the Yerxa’s relationship is that they never thought they were too old to start building a dream house, or that it was too late to fall in love.
Steven Biller thanked me for my letter and never ran it, neither in print or online. The article still exists in cyberspace, misinforming curious readers on an ongoing basis.
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