Minerva Hoyt, Apostle of the Cactus
Near Joshua Tree, California
This park exists largely because of one determined woman named Minerva Hamilton Hoyt. Born in eighteen sixty-six, she was a wealthy socialite in the Pasadena and South Pasadena area who fell in love with the desert at a time when most Americans saw it as ugly, empty wasteland fit only for mining and dumping. In the nineteen twenties she watched vandals and collectors haul off cactus and even dynamite and burn Joshua trees, and she decided to fight back.
She staged elaborate desert plant exhibitions in cities like New York and London to show people the beauty they were destroying. She founded the International Desert Conservation League. When she traveled to Mexico to discuss protecting a cactus forest, the president of Mexico was so struck by her devotion that he called her the Apostle of the Cactus, and the name followed her home.
She lobbied California, then lobbied Washington, pushing for a great desert park. Her campaign paid off on August tenth, nineteen thirty-six, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the proclamation creating Joshua Tree National Monument. A cactus species was later named in her honor.
She died in nineteen forty-five, having turned a place people wanted to bulldoze into a place they now drive across the country to see.
