Palm Springs history: Helen Lukens Gaut saw desert as 'wonderland creation'

“Despite its huge fearsome body the desert possesses a heart mosaic with kindliness. It has for man much that is splendid, and when he has been but a little while within its boundaries, fascination supplants horror and dread —fascination of its greatness, its full-muscled power, and its veiled mysteries.” — Helen Lukens Gaut, 1907

Among the the more intriguing visual artifacts of Palm Springs’ history is a photo of woman dressed in all black, donning her parasol, and contrasted against the desert expanse.

The woman, who could very well be a sketch by Edward Gorey in this 1905 photo, was Helen Lukens Gaut (1872-1955), the daughter of environmentalist Theodore Lukens and a pioneering California spirit in her own right. She was a writer and photographer who documented the state’s architecture, history, and landscape in a variety of publications.

Armed with her camera and a boosterist spirit found only in California, Lukens frequently explored the Coachella Valley region’s mountains, canyons, and wilderness in the first decade of the 20th Century.

She was so charmed by Palm Springs that she purchased land in present-day downtown and wrote of the California desert as the “wonderland creation of a vigorous mood of nature.”

In the late spring of 1905, the year that the striking photo of her was taken, she greeted family friend John Muir and his two daughters on their only visit to Palm Springs.

Muir, writing to the friend who recommended the visit, booster-in-chief Charles Lummis, noted of Palm Springs, “The water is cool and delightful, so are the nights. The days [are] hot enough and dry enough to evaporate every disease and all one’s flesh.”

Lukens sold her Palm Springs property in the 1910s to another character, Jessica Morgenthau, a widow of the prominent Morgenthau family of New York. Morgenthau built a little cabin known as the “Doll House” (predating the famed restaurant by a number of decades), and later hired the architect Rudolph Schindler to expand it.

That project was unbuilt, but just like the above photo, it was yet another testament to the numerous women who came to the desert, loved it, and left behind a fascinating trail of documentation.

Thanks for reading! Tracy Conrad will be on hiatus for the next few weeks and she’s asked her colleague Luke Leuschner at the Historical Society of Palm Desert to amuse you in her absence. You can still write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com .

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Palm Springs history: Helen Lukens Gaut saw desert as 'wonderland creation'