Needless to say, before there was a Joshua Tree National Park, it was just…somewhere out in the desert. Native Americans lived here first, of course, and then white men moved in, here and there, either mining or ranching. And by far the most colorful and legendary of the latter was Bill Keys, who lived here from 1910 until he dies in 1969. His Desert Queen Ranch has been preserved by the NP Service, and one can sign up for a daily tour. Which we did. I hadn’t expected to see cars, but this first sight of the place changed that quickly.
Bill Keys came here to work on the Desert Queen Mine, but after the owner died, his widow deeded the ranch to him in exchange for unpaid back wages. A few years later he went to Pasadena to do some shopping, and met his future wife behind a sales counter in a department store. it was quite a transition for her to move out here, having been a city girl. They had seven kids, three of them died young and were buried here.
During the decades that Bill lived here, the climate was somewhat wetter and there was just barely enough annual grass and other vegetation to support limited cattle ranching. And the Keys family had a huge irrigated vegetable garden and fruit orchard behind the house; his wife and the girls canned over 600 jars of the stuff every summer, in the blazing desert heat.
It’s been over a month now, so some of the details are getting fuzz, but this ex-military Jeep was traded for something shortly after the war, and Bill drove it until his death in 1969.
Presumably the seat was in better shape then. The desert sun is harsher on some materials than others.
The ranch house has been well preserved. Bill built it mostly out of recycled wood, scavenged if some other settler or miner gave up trying to make it in the harsh conditions here.
Needless to say, water was the critical ingredient to life out here. The Desert Queen had two main sources: a reservoir in a little canyon nearby created by building a dam and piping the water to the ranch, and a well. The well has a windmill, and also agas engine to power it.
A Fairbanks-Morse engine, specifically, and making 6 hp @ 450 rpm.
This is an earlier hand-dug well. One of the Keys boys died when a bucket somehow came undone and hit him in the head while he was digging in the bottom of it.
Another of the vehicles was this 4×4 truck, an ex-military machine most likely too. I can’t readily identify its provenance, but I’m sure one of you will.
It’s got a long bed; probably to haul pipes and such.
If I had a bit more time, I’d figure out what make this engine is. But you do…
Bill was a very intelligent and resourceful man, the keys to his success in this harsh environment. Rather than mine himself, which was risky and the returns, even if there was good ore, were quite modest due to the costs involved in extracting it and processing it. So Bill made a steady income from processing the ore for others, with this stamping mill, which crushed the ore so that the resulting material could be processed with mercury to extract the gold. Bill charged $5.00 per ton, which was not exactly small change.
The machine is pretty simple, with a single heavy stamping cylinder that is raised repeatedly to be dropped by gravity. Power was provided by a variety of sources over the decades, starting with a horse or mule, and progressing to steam and then gas engines.
There several of them still around.
Bill knew how to keep anything running.
And he was a hoarder, which given the great difficulties in accessing products, was an asset in his case. he bought, traded or scavenged all sorts of stuff. Lots of it.
And of course folks came to him who needed stuff. Although he obviously ended up with a lot more than he sold.
A bit further on is this fine old mack truck. it’s not the legendary original Bulldog, but a somewhat smaller truck.
But still plenty tough. Chain drive to the rear wheels, as all Macks had until quite late.
Yes, it really is a Mack. So when is mack going to make pickups? Somehow a “Mack” on the back of a pickup seems like it might be a draw these days.
Need pipes or fittings? Bill’s got em’.
Stoves too. Reliable ones, at that.
And old cars. Don’t these curved shapes harmonize perfectly with the rounded rocks all around?
A ’37 Plymouth and ’41 Dodge, IIRC.
Something else.
I fell in love with this Dodge business coupe.
A Luxury Liner indeed.
I’m thinking this is a Mopar too. Bill seems to have been partial to them.
One of the cabins for workers. And some bedsteads.
This car was turned into a chicken house.
And a number of wagons, of course.
In 1943, in an incident straight out of a western dime novel, a relatively new neighbor and difficult character named Worth Bagley ambushed Keys just outside Keys’ ranch, on an established access route to one of Bill’s mines that Bagley claimed went over his land. Bill returned fire and shot Bagley to death. The trial was a mockery of justice, with some powerful cattle ranching interests twisting the results against Keys.
Bill Key’s remarkable resourcefulness, ingenuity and resilience are on display all around the ranch, and the fact that it’s preserved and available to be seen is a testament to those enduring qualities.
very interesting
What a neat looking place and thank you Paul for sharing this. I wonder if there was any escape from the desert heat like a cave or something.
even though I’ve lived in the southwest for 11 years, it still never fails to amaze me that anyone would voluntarily choose to live here in the days before air conditioning.
My aunt is a park ranger at Joshua Tree and has been for many years. She took us out to Keys Ranch back in ’92 or ’93, I remember the cars and the Mack truck in particular. Everything looks exactly the same as I remember from a quarter century ago. Upholstery may not hold up well in the desert sun, but sheetmetal sure does.
The Plymouth is a 1939. On my shortlist 🙂
The something else I’m guessing is a 1937 Studebaker because of the trim at the bottom of the hood.
You are correct on the 37 Baker, as shown by a photo following my comment below.
Shows how rural folks tend to retain their derelict stuff instead of paying big $$s to haul it off to a proper scrap or junkyard.
Mack Bulldogs did OK in the Army’s 1919 transcontinental convoy, but Packards and the Millitor were outstanding. Once you read Ike’s trip diary (available online), you completely understand his later support for the Interstate Highway Act. It got especially rough west of the Mississippi; at one point, they had nothing to drive on but an abandoned right-of-way for the Pacific Railroad.
Shows how rural folks tend to retain their derelict stuff instead of paying big $$s to haul it off to a proper scrap or junkyard.
Like my grandparents, who had every car they ever owned going back to the late 1940s parked somewhere on their farm. And tractors and other farm implements, and the big old coal burning furnace from the basement of their farmhouse after then eventually replaced it with a propane furnace, and washing machines with wringer attachments. Grandma still kept the old wood burning stove in the kitchen, though, and still occasionally used it for cooking even though she also had an electric one.
As a kid it was great fun to explore their farm and look at all the old cars and other artifacts. I’ve still got an “Indian chief” hood ornament I took off of a 1940s Pontiac when I was a teenager.
VERY cool! I could spend all day drooling over all this awesomeness. The Dodges/Plymouths really speak to me. Probably because my dream rat rod is based on Mopars of this vintage. The front clips on these are really attractive.
I’m digging those old Macks too. They really have a cetain indestructability to the overall look.
Id really like to spend some time giving that old Jeep the hairy eyeball. I love flatties (Willys Jeeps with flat front fenders, pretty much everything up to the CJ-5) anyway, but I’m really curious to know if this is a M-38 military Jeep or a CJ-3A. They are very similar with the only blatant ‘tells’ being more pronounced ‘bugging out’ of the headlights, and divots in the passenger side for the shovel and pickaxe, and the presence or lack of a glovebox. I thought I had it pegged as a CJ, due to the tailgate but M-38s actually have the same tailgate panel as the CJs, less the ‘Willys’ stamping and theyre bolted shut…not that regular chains couldn’t be easily retrofitted. Obviously the half cab is an add-on, and that windshield appears to be a 2-piece. Flatties are notorious for being switcherooed with different body parts like the windshields, so this is no real surprise.
The unidentified tan coupe in the foreground of photo 25 (right after the stoves) is a 39 Studebaker Commander or President Club Sedan – a body halfway between a 2 door sedan and a coupe. The unidentified interior shot is from this car. Those cars had a lovely art deco dash.
The car three to the left of it (featured two photos later in photo 27) is a 37 Studebaker. Studes and Mopars – I think I like this guy.
39 big Stude (not a Champion) below.
A 37 Stude. The tell is those chrome hood bars that flow into the sides of the hood. I am having trouble putting the hood length into perspective so cannot say which series it is.
The ’37 sedan was most likely a Dictator six since they comprised 90.8% of the production.
The tan ’39 two door club sedan was rare in both series: Commander Model 9A: 4,218 of 43,724; President Model 5C: 598 of 8,205. Production numbers were researched by Richard Quinn, editor emeritus for the Antique Studebaker Club, from the company records in the archives of the Studebaker National Museum.
Looking at the old stoves (although the middle one appears be an oven only; I don’t see any burners) they all appear to use natural gas as their fuel. But surely there wasn’t a gas utility out there in the desert. I would have thought someone out in the boonies like that would use a wood or coal burning stove. Nowadays people in rural areas can use LP gas, but I don’t know if that was a thing in the 1920s or 30s when these stoves were made. So now I’m wondering how these gas stoves came to be out there in the desert. Or am I wrong about them using natural gas?
Having looked in the window of the ranch house kitchen, I saw a giant propane freezer and a propane stove. They obviously had propane, in the later decades out there. Frankly, farms and ranches all over the country had mostly propane stoves. People got tired of starting a fire every time they wanted to cook something.
Perhaps my perception of rural life in that era is skewed by the wood burning stove in my grandmother’s kitchen. Maybe she was just behind the times.
I grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska. Our home used a coal-burning furnace and a coal/electric kitchen stove well into the 1980s. Propane was widely available for decades before then but I suspect they kept using coal because it was cheap and it did the job.
Yes, that’s exactly like my grandparents’ farmhouse in rural Wisconsin — coal burning furnace in the basement, and a wood stove in the kitchen. They had an electric stove as well for as long as I can remember (I was born in 1980) but the wood stove was still occasionally used for cooking as well as a secondary heat source in the winter. It also doubled as an incinerator; the stove was where we always put our trash whenever we visited, and I suspect grandma would just burn it when the stove got full. I don’t think they replaced the coal furnace with a propane one until I was in my teens.
Getting back to the stoves featured here, I have no idea when propane became widely available, but the stoves look to be from the 20s or 30s. Was propane available that far back? Or I guess it’s plausible that they were actually bought secondhand later on and converted from natural gas to propane. The more that I think about it, that seems likely. Someone in the city remodels their kitchen in the 1950s and gets rid of their old stove. Someone in a rural area buys it and converts it to propane.
It is my understanding that Propane/LP gas became available before WWI and was widely used in rural areas by the 1940s. I think in some areas of the US propane/LP was available before electricity was. As a kid some friends had a vacation getaway in rural central Michigan. I was fascinated by the old Servel gas refrigerator they had in the cabin, that looked to date from a little after WWII. They would light the pilot light as soon as we arrived and food would be nice and cold by the next morning.
Coal not typically available in the far West. And not many trees left in the high desert … at least not anything good for firewood. So the fuel would have to be hauled in by truck (after the ‘40’s or so) and propane was probably cheapest and lightest. Even today it seems like the delivery vehicles that go to the most remote places are propane and UPS or FedEx.
Both sets of my grandparents still had wood stoves in their kitchens up into the 1980s, and still used them too.
My mom’s parents had a Monarch “hybrid” wood/electric stove that was made in 1959 (it sat out in the chicken coop from the 1990s until a crackhead renter burned it down a few years ago – I had occasionally considered trying to restore it but I don’t have any place to put it).
This stove had a firebox and cooktop on the LH side, and a conventional four-burner electric cooktop on the RH side, with an oven in the middle that worked with both wood and electric power. This always fascinated me as a kid as I had never seen one before or since.
I think I still have the original owner’s manual for it somewhere; my grandparents saved every owner’s manual for everything they ever owned in a file.
Don’t these curved shapes harmonize perfectly with the rounded rocks all around?
Absolutely, but what I find even more harmonious about them, and just about everything else there is the complete lack of plastics. Everything there slowly biodegrades and gets consumed by nature, and look like look like natural formations, rather than litter.
I too love the Dodge business coupe, that’s probably my favorite of the business coupe bodystyles of the era.
Very interesting. If it were me I would I would have stayed in Pasadena! I’m guessing that he met his wife during the Great Depression and felt that he could have more control over his destiny out in the desert. Or maybe he just didn’t like being around a lot of people.
When I first lived in VT in the early ’70s stoves like that were still common and still often in daily use. The top burners were fueled with kerosene (not propane). They were called pot burners or “pots”. The ovens got their heat from burning wood.
The stove in the center of the photo was prolific. It was referred to as a ‘creme and green’. They are still highly valued as collectibles.
A nice history lesson here Paul .
-Nate