This thesis explores the origins of Southern California’s prominent health culture, tracing its beginning to the mid-nineteenth century. At a time when science was beginning to make sense of disease, a wide array of regional promotors championed the healthful benefits of the Southern California climate. They established a litany of marketing campaigns aimed at health-seekers looking for a new lease on life. These promotions not only supported images of wellness but linked ideas of health to racial hierarchy and masculinity in the process. In recoding the Southern California landscape as healthful through wide-reaching marketing efforts, regional boosters established a resort leisure culture in the area – dramatically impacting broader interpretations of Southern California in the process. When national interpretations of health changed in the early twentieth century, so did booster images of the landscape in order to meet and adapt to changes in what constituted illness. Through exclusionary practices, faulty science, and sanitariums, promotors of Southern California marketed the area as an Anglo-American health haven. In doing so, these patrons of the region carved a message upon the landscape that would persist long after the end of the health-seeker movement. What one may think of in regard to wellness at the mention of Southern California today is only the latest iteration of an older history purposefully created by boosters to sell a version of a healthy living.