The Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians were established by President Ulysses S. Grant on May 15, 1876.
The tribe's lands cover almost 40 square miles of checker-boarded parcels from La Quinta to Salton City, along State Highway 86.
Approximately 11,000 acres of the reservation are submerged under the Salton Sea, which formed after an irrigation canal bringing water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley breached in 1905. Water flowed for two years into an area below sea level before it could be dammed.
In 2001, a bill authored by Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs, provided for $6 million in federal funds to be paid to the tribe in compensation for its submerged lands, with another $4 million to come from the federal government later and $4 million to come from the Coachella Valley Water District and Imperial Irrigation District.
The agreement settled the longest-ever ongoing litigation in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The tribe opened its Red Earth Casino and travel center off state Highway 86 in April 2007.
“Duroville,” a dilapidated trailer park housing migrant workers on Torres-Martinez reservation land, gained notoriety after federal officials for years sought its closure due to squalid living conditions.
Worried about leaving thousands of poor families homeless, a federal judge last spring ruled Duroville could remain open but placed restrictions on how many people could live there and under what conditions. A court receiver now monitors the ongoing cleanup and operation of the trailer park.
The Torres-Martinez tribe had 214 members at the time of the 2000 U.S. Census. The tribe currently has approximately 445 members, according to its most recent audit.
