Frances Lawton Keys: A Homesteader's Life at the Desert Queen Ranch

Muriel, Hortense and Frances Lawton, left to right, with Bill Keys, about 1919. NPS.

Frances Lawton Keys was one of the Anglo pioneers who came to the arid Southern California desert in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, piecing together a living from ventures on public domain land. Her work at the Desert Queen Ranch, now in Joshua Tree National Park, shows how much women contributed to the economy of the West.

From Ohio to the desert

• Early life: Frances Mae Lawton was born in 1887 in Lucas County, Ohio, to Wallace R. Lawton and Lena H. Weeks. After a few years in Canada, the family moved to California, where she worked as a stenographer.
• Marriage: in Los Angeles she met Bill Keys, a prospector, miner and adventurer. They married in 1918, a year after he filed for a homestead in Joshua Tree, meaning to become a rancher.
• Home: their house, on land once owned by the Desert Queen Mine, owed much of its look to Frances, who wallpapered and whitewashed the walls.

A hard life

• Family: the Keyses had seven children; three died young, including twelve-year-old Ellsworth, in an accident while working the family well. Son Willis's oral history tells much of what we know of ranch life.
• Food: they kept goats, chickens and cattle and grew radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, corn and beans. Frances trained the children to gather eggs and milk goats, canned and preserved harvests to last the winter, butchered animals, and cooked every meal on a wood stove — propane came only in her last years.
• Doctor and teacher: isolation made her the family doctor and teacher. She taught in a schoolhouse Bill built until 1932, when a teacher from a nearby town took over the Keys children and a few from the Yucca Valley.

Selling to the desert towns

• Bonnets: guarding her fair skin from sun and wind, she made her own bonnets — and found customers among women in Twentynine Palms and the Yucca Valley.
• Market goods: she sold surplus canned goods and produce in the Yucca Valley and to residents and early tourists in Twentynine Palms, now a gateway to the park.
• Guarding the ranch: fiercely protective, she was known to greet visitors with a pistol on her hip.

Disputes and prison

Homesteaders fought over claims and boundaries. In 1943, Bill Keys shot and killed Worth Bagley — in self-defense, he always maintained — and was sent to San Quentin State Prison. Frances and the younger children lived alone on the ranch for a time, then moved to Alhambra, California, where Willis had found work. Bill was paroled in 1948, the couple returned to the ranch, and in 1958 the governor pardoned him.

Later years

Frances collected artifacts from the old gold mines, especially colored glass such as pharmacy and tobacco bottles. She died in 1963 and is buried in the family plot beside the children who died before her, and beside Bill, who died seven years later; her headstone was cut by hand from native stone. Bill later sold the mine and ranch, and in 1974 the ranch became a National Park Service historic site.

Part of the NPS series Women's History in the Pacific West — Lower Colorado Basin Collection. Previous: Mary Beal. Next: Alice Ballard.

Sources

Based on "Frances Lawton Keys," by Faith Bennett, National Park Service, with the University of California, Davis, History Department and support from the National Park Foundation; citing Kerwin L. Klein, "The William Keys Ranch" (Southern California Quarterly, 1991), Willis Keys and Art Kidwell, Growing Up at the Desert Queen Ranch (1997), Patricia L. Parker, Country Nodes (NPS, 1977), and the Historic American Buildings Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain.