The early Hollywood era in Palm Canyon — when film crews turned the sacred oasis into a movie 'jungle,' trucked in fake tropical plants, and, by one eyewitness account, set the palm groves ablaze.
This gorgeous oasis, so close to Los Angeles, was bound to catch Hollywood's eye — and it did, in the silent-film days, with results that ranged from silly to shameful. Let me tell you about when the movies came to Palm Canyon.
Back in nineteen eighteen, one of the very first films shot here was a lavish biblical epic called Salomé, starring one of the great vamps of the silent screen, Theda Bara — and they used this palm grove to stand in for the exotic groves of the ancient Holy Land. And it kept on. In nineteen thirty-eight, a jungle-adventure picture called Her Jungle Love came out here, and since a California fan-palm oasis doesn't look quite tropical enough for a jungle movie, the studio simply trucked in loads of fake tropical plants and scattered them among the real palms to dress the place up as a South-Seas jungle. Imagine it — hauling pretend jungle into one of the most authentic natural wonders in California, because the real thing wasn't fake enough for the camera.
But here's the part that stings, and it's worth remembering, because it's true. There was a travel writer of that era named J. Smeaton Chase, a fellow who loved these canyons deeply and wrote a famous book about this desert. And Chase recorded, with real anger, that in those early film days, some of the movie crews working in these palm groves actually SET FIRE to the palms — for the spectacle of it, for a dramatic shot of flames, treating this sacred, ancient, living oasis as a disposable prop to be burned for a few seconds on screen. Now — you just heard from me how fan palms can survive fire, so the grove endured. But think of the arrogance of it: outsiders coming onto this tribe's most sacred ground and torching it for entertainment. It's a small, ugly window into how this land and its people were treated by the wider world for a long time — and one more reason to admire how fiercely the Cahuilla held on to it, and how well they protect it now, so that today you walk it in peace, and no one's setting anything alight for a camera. Walk on, gently.
Photo: Secuiro · CC0
