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This story originally appeared in the June 17, 2007 edition of The Kansas City Star
Brown. I’m headed south along Park Boulevard, just outside the town of Twentynine Palms, and everywhere I look it’s the same: unrelentingly brown, brown, brown.
In town the dusty front yards of middle-class neighborhoods are nearly all without grass or landscaping. Along the highway the dirt is peppered by scrubby, drab bushes. The flat land gives way eventually to monochromatic mountains -- crumbling dirt and rocks with few, if any, trees. When the wind picks up it creates a brown haze over the whole place.
Green does not seem be on the palette here. But you take what you can get in the desert. So after three days, why is it that I just can’t get enough of Joshua Tree National Park?
A bit of the Old West
Imagine the day in 1918 when Bill Keys first brought his bride, Frances, out here from Los Angeles. Keys had been in the area, working as a foreman of the Desert Queen Ranch, since about 1910. But to Frances, a department store saleswoman, it must have seemed like a prison sentence.
There were rattlesnakes and bobcats, bighorn sheep and who knows what else. But not a lot of company. The nearest town, Joshua Tree, was 18 miles away; Twentynine Palms was even farther. A trip to the market took six days round-trip by freight wagon. They didn’t make the trip often.
Still, Frances and Bill thrived. They raised seven children, including three daughters who still live in the area. Their homestead, now known as the Keys Ranch, is the park’s most popular ranger-led attraction. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
"When Bill Keys came out here, it was still the Old West," Ranger Pam Tripp tells a group of visitors, painting a vivid picture of life in the early 20th century. "It still was, even up till the 1940s and ’50s."
For nearly 60 years in the desert, Keys did whatever he could to get by. He was a lawman, a cattleman, a miner, even an actor in his old age, appearing in some Walt Disney TV movies, including "Wild Burro of the West."
"They dubbed his voice," Tripp says. "They didn’t think he sounded enough like a prospector."
The Keyses built roads and planted a large garden. They had an orchard with peaches, plums, pears and other fruit. They dug wells. They built dams.
When their children were very young they were homeschooled, but the couple later built a small schoolhouse. Children attended from homesteads all over the area. It’s still there, along with the Keys home and a handful of outbuildings.
Water was always an issue, and Keys was protective of his water sources, Tripp says.
"He once filed a claim on Cow Camp Dam, which belonged to another cattle company," she says. "So he made enemies."
One was a neighbor named Worth Bagley. His feud with Keys ended when Bagley was shot and killed. Keys "said it was self-defense, which it probably was," Tripp says. Still, he served five years in San Quentin. Years later the California governor pardoned him.
Keys had an entrepreneurial spirit. Or maybe he was just a pack rat. "If people needed a piece of equipment, they could come to Mr. Keys and purchase it," Tripp says. "Farm equipment, fencing, beds -- they had lots of beds." Rusty metal bed frames still dot the property.
In the 1950s the couple opened a small store selling canned goods. Frances sold women’s bonnets, too. After the area became a national monument they even leased cabins to tourists.
Frances Keys died in 1963, her husband in 1969. The federal government owns all of the land now, except one-tenth of an acre. It’s the family cemetery.
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