Rancho Mirage, California

Based on Wikipedia: Rancho Mirage, California

Where Presidents Go to Disappear

On the day Richard Nixon received his pardon from Gerald Ford, he signed a guest book. Not at the White House, not at some government facility, but at a private estate in a small desert city most Americans had never heard of. The city was Rancho Mirage, California, and that guest book belonged to Walter Annenberg, a billionaire publisher whose home had become, improbably, the western White House.

Nixon had fled there a month before announcing his resignation. He would return to sign that guest book on what must have been one of the strangest days of his life. And he was far from the last president to seek refuge in this peculiar patch of the Sonoran Desert.

Rancho Mirage calls itself the "Playground of the Presidents," which sounds like tourism board hyperbole until you start counting. Eight sitting or former presidents have passed through the Annenberg estate alone. Gerald Ford lived his final thirty years there. Ronald Reagan spent eighteen consecutive New Year's Eves in the city. Barack Obama hosted three international summits there. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the leader of China, the King of Jordan—all came to conduct business in a town of seventeen thousand people wedged between Palm Springs and a mountain range.

How did a stretch of California desert, a place that was literally marketed via camel in the 1920s, become the preferred retreat of American power?

Two Thousand Years of Passing Through

The story begins long before presidents, before country clubs, before the very concept of California as a state. The Cahuilla people arrived in this valley roughly two thousand years ago, part of a network of indigenous communities that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to central Arizona.

They came for the water.

This sounds counterintuitive. The Coachella Valley sits within the Colorado Desert, itself part of the larger Sonoran Desert ecosystem. Annual rainfall measures in single digits. Summer temperatures routinely exceed one hundred ten degrees. Yet the Cahuilla found something the casual observer might miss: springs.

Along the San Andreas Fault—that infamous crack in the earth that will someday rearrange California's geography—water pushes up from underground aquifers. The Cahuilla knew where to find it. Magnesia Spring, tucked into a canyon in the Santa Rosa Mountains, provided reliable water just a mile and a half from the Whitewater River. These water sources sustained not just the local tribe but an entire trade network.

The Halchidhoma trade route followed these springs and water holes along the mountain foothills. For centuries, indigenous peoples used it for commerce, for food gathering, for religious pilgrimages. A segment of that ancient path is now California State Route 111, the main highway through Rancho Mirage. When you drive down what locals call "Restaurant Row," past the thirty-some eateries between Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Drive, you're tracing a route that predates European contact by a millennium.

Around a thousand years ago, the Cahuilla acquired pottery techniques from tribes near the Colorado River, evidence of the sophisticated exchange networks that crisscrossed the desert. When the Spanish arrived in the 1820s, they recognized the value of these routes too, using Cahuilla runners to carry letters along what they called the Coco-Mariposa Trail to the mission in Tucson.

Then came smallpox.

In 1862 and 1863, the disease swept through the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, nearly destroying them entirely. The survivors persisted, maintaining their connection to the land even as waves of newcomers arrived with increasingly grandiose plans for the desert.

Camels, Crashes, and a Wind-Free Zone

The 1920s brought developers with more ambition than sense. The Southland Land and Realty Company purchased one hundred sixty acres in 1928 and hatched an extraordinary scheme: they would transport potential buyers by camel along roads named for North African cities. Tunis Road. Tangier Road. Sahara Road.

The names stuck. The camels did not.

The stock market crash of 1929 ended the exotic marketing campaign before it really began. The Southland company's dreams evaporated into the desert air, leaving behind only those peculiar street names as evidence of what might have been.

A Los Angeles realtor named Lawrence Macomber picked up the pieces a few years later, buying hundreds of acres and partnering with Don Cameron to sell the land with a simpler pitch: "Fifteen minutes from Palm Springs." This was clever positioning. Palm Springs had already established itself as a retreat for Hollywood celebrities escaping Los Angeles. Macomber was selling proximity to glamour at a discount.

He attracted Frank Morgan—best known as the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz"—among other early buyers. But then came World War II, and development stalled again.

The decisive moment arrived in 1944 when Major A. Ronald Button purchased hundreds of acres based on a single observation. He called it "the most wind-free area I could find in the desert."

This mattered more than you might think. The Coachella Valley is notorious for wind. Palm Springs, just a few miles west, sits at the mouth of a pass through the mountains that funnels Pacific air into the desert like a natural wind tunnel. Rancho Mirage, sheltered by the Santa Rosa Mountains to the south, offered relative calm.

Two years later, Henry L. Gogerty built an airstrip and launched the Desert Air Hotel and Airpark. The wealthy could now fly their private planes directly to their desert retreats. The infrastructure for an exclusive community was falling into place.

The Invention of the Golf Cart (Maybe)

Thunderbird Ranch opened in 1946, purchased by a man named Johnny Dawson who established the Coachella Valley's first eighteen-hole golf course. What happened next became the stuff of local legend.

According to Rancho Mirage lore, the electric golf cart was invented at Thunderbird Country Club.

This claim is difficult to verify—golf carts have a murky origin story involving multiple inventors and competing patents—but Thunderbird certainly helped popularize them. The club's influence extended beyond transportation innovation: Ford Motor Company named their iconic Thunderbird car after the country club, a testament to the cultural cachet the desert resort had acquired.

Tamarisk Country Club followed in the 1950s. President Harry Truman became a regular visitor. Then came an avalanche of development: Desert Island Golf and Country Club in 1971, Sunrise Country Club in 1974, Mission Hills Country Club in 1979, and half a dozen more through the 1980s.

By the time Rancho Mirage incorporated as a city in 1973, it had transformed from open desert dotted with date and grape ranches into a landscape dominated by manicured fairways and artificial lakes. The incorporation merged five unincorporated communities known as the "Cove communities"—Rancho Mirage, Desert, Palmas, Tamarisk, and Thunderbird—into a single municipality of three thousand permanent residents.

The city earned a second nickname: "Golf Capital of the World."

Sunnylands: The House That Changed History

Among the estates that proliferated in mid-century Rancho Mirage, one stood apart. Sunnylands, built by Walter and Leonore Annenberg, became at the time of its completion the largest single-family home in Riverside County.

Walter Annenberg had made his fortune in publishing, owning TV Guide and the Philadelphia Inquirer among other properties. He and his wife used their wealth to create not just a home but a destination—a place where the powerful felt comfortable conducting the business of power.

Frank Sinatra visited. Bob Hope. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Patrick Macnee, famous as the suave spy John Steed in "The Avengers." Zeppo Marx, the fourth Marx Brother, the one everyone forgets. Mary Martin, who originated the role of Peter Pan on Broadway. The guest list read like a who's who of mid-twentieth-century American celebrity.

But the truly remarkable guests were the presidents.

Richard Nixon made Sunnylands his western White House, writing his final State of the Union address there. Dwight Eisenhower stayed as a guest. Ronald Reagan attended New Year's Eve celebrations throughout his presidency and beyond. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush—all made the pilgrimage to the Annenbergs' desert compound.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush held an official summit at Sunnylands with Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu. A decade earlier, Queen Elizabeth II had visited. The estate had become a kind of parallel diplomatic venue, a place where world affairs could be discussed away from Washington's fishbowl atmosphere.

Barack Obama continued the tradition, spending two days at Sunnylands in 2013 meeting with Xi Jinping, then the newly installed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. It was a delicate moment in U.S.-China relations, and Obama chose a setting that offered both privacy and prestige. He returned repeatedly, hosting the first-ever U.S. summit with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2016 and meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan.

When Obama visited Thunderbird Country Club on Presidents' Day in 2020, he became merely the latest in a line of commanders-in-chief stretching back to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who had played the course.

Gerald Ford's Final Chapter

No president became more associated with Rancho Mirage than Gerald Ford.

Ford and his wife Betty moved to Thunderbird Country Club after leaving the White House in 1977. For the next three decades—nearly eight times longer than his presidency lasted—Ford made Rancho Mirage his home.

Betty Ford's contributions to the city proved at least as significant as her husband's. In 1982, she co-founded the Betty Ford Center at Eisenhower Medical Center, an addiction rehabilitation facility that would become one of the most famous treatment centers in the world. The former First Lady had publicly acknowledged her own struggles with alcohol and prescription drug addiction, and her willingness to speak openly about what was then a deeply stigmatized subject helped transform public attitudes toward addiction treatment.

Gerald Ford died on December 26, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage. His first funeral service was held in the city before subsequent services in Washington, D.C., and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Betty Ford followed him in death on July 8, 2011, also in Rancho Mirage.

The Fords' legacy is embedded in the city's geography. Gerald Ford Drive runs through town. Dinah Shore Drive commemorates another famous resident. Frank Sinatra Drive replaced the more prosaic Wonder Palms Road. Bob Hope Drive, formerly Rio del Sol, honors the comedian who also made the desert his home.

Bing Crosby established a mobile home park called Blue Skies Village in 1953 and named its streets after his celebrity friends: Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Greer Garson, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck. The street names form a map of mid-century American fame.

The Desert Underneath

Beneath the golf courses and the presidential retreats, the desert persists.

The Whitewater River—"Agua Blanco" in Spanish—flows through the city in a southeasterly direction, one of the few perennial streams in the region, eventually emptying into the Salton Sea. Magnesia Spring Creek runs through its namesake canyon, where a forty-foot waterfall called Magnesia Falls offers evidence of the water sources that first attracted human habitation.

That water can turn dangerous. In 1979, flooding along Magnesia Spring Creek's alluvial fan—the fan-shaped deposit of sediment where a canyon opens onto a plain—killed one person and caused seven million dollars in damage. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers subsequently installed concrete-lined spillways to control future floods.

Earthquakes pose another threat. On July 8, 1986, a temblor destroyed twenty buildings and homes, damaging roads and other structures. The San Andreas Fault, whose underground activity creates the springs that make human life possible here, also makes that life precarious.

The native ecosystem has adapted to extremes that would defeat most life forms. Over a thousand wild plant species inhabit the Coachella Valley. Creosote bush, bur sage, palo verde, desert willow, cat's claw, mesquite, screwbean, brittlebush—these species thrive in conditions of minimal rainfall and maximum heat.

The California fan palm, the only palm native to the region, grows where freshwater reaches the surface. It is the largest palm species in North America, and when you see a cluster of these palms in an otherwise treeless landscape, you can be confident water lies nearby.

Some desert plants are edible. The Cahuilla ate cactus fruits from beaver tail cactus, California barrel cactus, and prickly pear. Yucca flowers and fruits provided food, as did mesquite seed pods and blossoms. Other plants kill. Jimsonweed and locoweed remain poisonous reminders that the desert does not exist for human convenience.

More than twenty mammal species inhabit the area. Gray fox, coyote, ringtail cat, bobcat, and desert kit fox hunt the smaller creatures. Peninsular bighorn sheep navigate the mountain slopes. The Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard—found nowhere else on earth—has evolved unique adaptations for moving through loose sand.

The Sonoran Desert harbors eleven species of rattlesnake, more than anywhere else in the world. Gila monsters, the only venomous lizard native to the United States, live here too. Chuckwallas and horned lizards bask on rocks. Desert tortoises, which can live over fifty years, move slowly through a landscape that demands patience.

Black bears occasionally descend from the surrounding mountains, surprising residents who have forgotten that wilderness still borders their landscaped communities.

The Return of the Agua Caliente

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians—the people nearly exterminated by smallpox in the 1860s—built a casino in 2001.

The Agua Caliente Casino sits at the intersection of Bob Hope Drive and Ramon Road, off Interstate 10. It was only the second casino in the Coachella Valley, but it represented something larger: the economic resurgence of a people who had survived disease, displacement, and the wholesale transformation of their homeland.

In 2008, the tribal board expanded the facility to include a sixteen-story hotel and spa. A theater for major entertainers opened the following year. Though the casino technically sat just outside Rancho Mirage's borders in an unincorporated area, the city reached an agreement with the tribe to include the property within city limits, giving the casino access to police and firefighting services.

It was a practical arrangement with symbolic weight. The people who had lived here for two millennia, who had known where to find water when the land looked barren, who had survived catastrophe after catastrophe, now operated one of the region's most successful businesses.

The Desert's Future

Rancho Mirage continues to reinvent itself.

In March 2021, developers announced that the city would host the first American neighborhood composed entirely of 3D-printed, zero net energy homes. The project, a collaboration between companies called Palari and Mighty Buildings, would comprise fifteen homes manufactured using additive technology—essentially giant 3D printers depositing building materials layer by layer.

In February 2022, The Walt Disney Company announced that Rancho Mirage would host its first "Storyliving by Disney" community. Named Cotino, the development would be created in collaboration with DMB Development of Scottsdale, Arizona. Disney, always attuned to what Americans dream about, had identified Rancho Mirage as the right setting for a new kind of residential fantasy.

The city that began as a mirage—literally, according to local legend, when a woman named Ruth Wheeler looked across Magnesia Falls Canyon in the 1930s and saw a ranch shimmering in the distance—had become a place where the future could be prototyped.

The name itself captures this quality. "Rancho" is Spanish. "Mirage" is French. The combination makes no linguistic sense, a hybrid word for a hybrid place: part desert wilderness, part manufactured paradise, part ancient homeland, part presidential retreat, part experiment in what American life might become next.

Today, approximately seventeen thousand people live in Rancho Mirage year-round, though the population swells past twenty thousand in season when snowbirds arrive to escape northern winters. On a per-capita basis, the city has one restaurant for every two hundred forty residents—the highest ratio in the Coachella Valley—clustered along that stretch of Highway 111 that follows the Halchidhoma trade route.

The people who walk Restaurant Row today are separated by two thousand years from the Cahuilla traders who walked the same path, by a century from the developers who planned to bring visitors by camel, by decades from the presidents who found in this strange desert enclave a place where they could be powerful and private simultaneously.

The springs still flow. The fault line still shifts. The rattlesnakes still hunt. And the mirage, somehow, persists.