For some 400-500 years, the Indian Wells area was home to a series of Indian villages, best known among them the Cahuilla village of Kavanish, located north of the Whitewater River and northwest of where the Miles Avenue bridge is today, within what is now Indian Wells Golf Resort. The village supported two Cahuilla clans, the Mountain Cahuilla Ateiteem clan of Coyote Moiety and the Desert Cahuilla Nonkaiam clan of Wildcat Moiety. In 1852, Theodoro of the Ateiteem clan signed the Treaty of Temecula for the Kavinish people as alcalde to Juan Antonio, making the village primarily part of the Mountain Cahuilla clan. By 1863 the village was mostly abandoned, possibly because of a smallpox epidemic during 1862, with members of the Ateiteem clan moving west to Agua Caliente and the Nonkaiam clan moving east to La Mesa near Coachella, while relics of the village remained buried beneath the site. Water near Point Happy was one of the best features in the California desert, including an Indian well dug into the Whitewater River bed near the Miles Avenue bridge in a mesquite grove at the base of a high sand dune. About 25 feet deep, funnel shaped, and entered by steps of sun-hardened clay, the well had to be deepened by hand as the water table dropped; Chief Francisco Patencio said it had once been a spring. Known as Palma Seca and Pozo Hondo, it supplied water first to the Kavinish people and later to travelers on Bradshaw’s Road, and it gave the present city its name. In 1862, after gold was discovered in La Paz, Arizona, William Bill Bradshaw sought a shorter route from Los Angeles, and local Indians showed him a more direct road through the Orocopia and Chuckawalla Mountains to the Colorado River, from which La Paz was four miles upstream. The route became known as Bradshaw’s Road, or the Road to La Paz, but use declined because of the Civil War and the fading gold rush, and the railroad in the late 1870’s nearly ended it, though enough travelers remained that California and San Bernardino County dug a new well for continued use. In the 1900’s, as the Coachella Valley developed, Indian Wells village emerged with a date shop, market, trailer park, cabins, post office, bar and grill, the Snake Pit tourist attraction, the House of Purple Glass, and by the late 1940’s and early 50’s two gas stations at Highway 111 and Miles Avenue. The Carl Bray home and gallery were the last structures built there and the last to disappear. The landscape around Point Happy, where water, shelter, and beauty met near the Whitewater River, drew artists including John Hilton, Paul Grimm, Jimmy Swinnerton, Carl Eytel, Bill Bender, Fred Chisnall, and Carl Bray. An Oklahoma-born artist and Southern Pacific Railroad brakeman, Bray came from the Los Angeles area to paint the desert, then with his wife Luella made it their home. He built a house and studio from railroad ties, steel bars, canyon boulders, and rocks collected by his children, and by 1953 his family was living there. His gallery became a gathering place for artists later called the Smoke Tree School. As development spread, the Brays eventually sold the property, preservation efforts failed, and the home and gallery were torn down in 2010. Carl Bray, remembered for paintings of lonely freight trains and glowing smoke trees, died in Banning, California, on July 23, 2011, at age 94.