Mrs. Hoyt's Desert

Somebody set fire to the largest Joshua tree anyone knew of, and a lady in Pasadena put a hundred dollars on his head. June of nineteen thirty, out east of Lancaster. Eighty feet high, nine feet through, better than a thousand years old by most guesses. Her name was Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, and this was not her first fight. Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation, married to a wealthy New York surgeon, she ran with Pasadena society. She lost a son and, in nineteen eighteen, her husband, and she turned to the desert for peace. "The desert with its elusive beauty," she wrote, "possessed me." She carried it to the cities. New York, Boston, London, whole desert scenes hauled in by rail car and ship, with up to eight airplanes bringing fresh blossoms every day. The crowds went home wanting cactus in the yard, and out by Morongo Pass the Devil's Garden got dug up and carted off by florists and weekend gardeners. Her own shows had helped sell the shovels. A reward wouldn't do it. So she went after more than a million acres. When a smaller state park bill came up in nineteen thirty-three, she went straight to Governor Rolph, and once it passed he sent it back unsigned. Then she took her plan to Harold Ickes and the president. The Park Service sent Roger Toll, who'd already written that he hadn't seen a stand of Joshua trees fit for a monument. She ran him around the desert so hard his minute-by-minute log never mentions lunch. Elizabeth Campbell, a rival out at the oasis, wrote that Hoyt "dragged him off by the elbow," and that folks were calling it "the nerva-hoyt park." Toll came back offering a fraction of it. She turned her scientists and politicians loose on him. Letters came from as far as London asking to name the place for her. She said she preferred Joshua Tree. On August tenth, nineteen thirty-six, Roosevelt signed eight hundred twenty-five thousand acres. Smaller than her plan, and almost six times what Toll had offered. She died in December of nineteen forty-five, still fighting any cut. Five years later Congress took away more than a third of it. That land came back in nineteen ninety-four, and she never saw it. There's a peak in this park, five thousand four hundred and five feet, nameless until August of two thousand twelve. The naming board voted eight to three to call it Mount Minerva Hoyt. Three against. I'd have paid good money to watch her take those three by the elbow.