Update: It looks as though I was utterly, unmitigably wrong in writing this post. Just so you know.
The name Joshua tree was given by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Mojave Desert in the mid-19th century. The tree’s unique shape reminded them of a Biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer.
The Wikipedia entry for Joshua tree gives as succinct a version of the story as I have read. The story does have variations. Some say that the Mormons’ first glimpse of Joshua trees along the trail marked the halfway point of their journey. Others refer to Joshua “pointing the way to the Promised Land.” This page here says
Mormon settlers gave the Joshua tree its distinctive name when they were traveling westward toward their promised land.
It’s a pretty story, varied and appealingly inconsistent from speaker to speaker, and almost certainly untrue.
Let’s dispose of that second quote first, though it’s hardly sporting. To travel westward toward the Mormon’s Promised Land of Deseret, one must necessarily be somewhat to the east of Deseret. East of Deseret there are no Joshua trees outside of botanic gardens, most of which along the Mormon Trail did not yet exist during the Mormon Migration from 1847-1869.
That writer has his or her Trails confused. Mormon migrants did see big tree yuccas in the course of their 19th Century travels, but they saw them along a different Trail altogether. Mormon Battalion soldiers returning to the Salt Lake Valley brought with them descriptions of survivable routes through the desert to the Pacific coast. Brigham Young sent settler parties to occupy lands to the southwest starting in around 1850. In 1851, one such colony was founded in San Bernardino, California. A string of settlements grew between San Bernardino and Salt Lake, most of them along the old Spanish Trail, which Mormon Battalion soldiers had helped improve for wagon travel a few years before.
Among those settlements was Las Vegas, founded at the site of verdant freshwater marshes at the base of the Spring Range, which aside from a rest stop along the trail served as a base from which to proselytize the local Natives.
Saint George, founded in 1861 as a cotton-growing outpost in a region still known locally as “Dixie,” was another settlement on the Spanish Trail. St. George was founded in what is now the southwest corner of the state of Utah. The southwest corner of Utah is the northeast corner of Joshua tree country. Along the trail south from just a few miles past St. George to just a few miles north of San Bernardino, Mormon travelers were afforded many opportunities to view specimens of Yucca brevifolia passing them at approximately the speed of a mule.
So the popular story about the naming of the Joshua tree sounds plausible, on the face of it. But there seems to be no actual evidence for it.
The logical improbability of proving a negative is well known. (I say “improbability” because to call proving a negative “impossible” would require proving a negative.) But in more than a decade of looking, I have seen not a single reference to the phrase “Joshua tree” having been used prior to the twentieth century. I’m not alone in this assessment. In his Believing in place: a spiritual geography of the Great Basin, Richard V. Francaviglia states baldly:
The name Joshua tree did not enter the region’s vocabulary until the twentieth century[.]
Mass Mormon migration along the Spanish trail ended in 1857, when Brigham Young called the settlers back to Salt Lake as the Utah War started. The ranks of the Mormon settlers included devoted diarists who described conditions along the trail, including Native inhabitants, other settlers, animals, plants, and topography. None seem to use the term ‘Joshua tree” to describe these rather notable and conspicuous inhabitants of the Mojave.
Not that there weren’t colorful, evocative terms used to describe the tree. Gwin Harris Heap, the newspaperman who came up with the fabled idea of drafting camels as reliable Mojave Desert transport for the military, accompanied his cousin Edward F. Beale on a 1853 railroad survey expedition commissioned by Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and chronicled the trip. Emerging from the Mojave River bed onto plains that were probably somewhere around Helendale, Heap wrote:
Where we crossed the Mohaveh it was a rapid stream, twenty-five yards in breadth and one foot in depth, but its water was too warm to be drinkable. Passed several fine meadows near the river and saw bands of antelopes, also hares and partridges. . . . The road leading up to an extensive plain thickly covered with cedars and pines, intermingled with palmyra cactus and aloes.
“Palmyra cactus,” though botanically inaccurate even by the standards of the day, is itself nicely Biblical. The tree had other names as well. In Edmund C. Jaeger’s The California Deserts
As was the case with the Washingtonia palm this yucca was given the name of cabbage tree by the pioneer travelers, and today it is often erroneously brigaded with the palms under the name of “yucca palm.”
The name “yucca palm” was indeed common at one time, though you never hear it anymore. The city of Palmdale, in the Antelope Valley in California’s Mojave Desert, was founded as “Palmenthal” — “palm valley” — in 1886, so named for the forests of Joshua trees that covered the floor of the valley in those days. (The phrase was not, it would seem, restricted to Joshua trees, as witness this photo of a Mojave yucca in the Imperial Valley.)
Jaeger does use the term “Joshua tree” but his statement that at the time of writing that the name “yucca palm” was common is interesting. It would seem that the name Joshua tree, a strong and iconographic name, had not yet been around long enough to outcompete the other names in its ecological niche.
In “Yucca Palms,” a 1911 work by Arizona notable Sharlot Mabridth Hall, the poet describes the trees in explicitly Biblical imagery.
Gray pilgrims without pouch or staff,
Or dust stained robe, or cockle-shell;
Seek ye the path to some lost shrine
Here in the desert grim as Hell?
No arched cathedral dome bends down;
The earth is iron, the sky is brass
‘Tis ages since these blistered sands
Forgot the touch of flower and grass.
Stern penance do you for old wrongs
Mayhap, or saintship seek from pain;
With suppliant hands that never win
The benison of cooling rain.
In beggar rags like that wild throng
That once in Perugia stood,
Ye bear your serried scourges high,
A flagellante brotherhood.
Poets have their impenetrable motivations, but I find it hard to believe that given this rather specific imagery, Hall would not have entitled her poem “Joshua Trees” if she had ever heard the name.
Where the name “Joshua tree” did actually come from may remain a mystery. The spurious story of the name’s origin seems to have arisen almost simultaneously with the name itself. In Bourke Lee’s 1930 book Death Valley, Lee refers to Yucca brevifolia by the oddly hyphenated monicker “Joshua-tree,” without providing synonyms. He says:
The Mormons said that the tree pointed on toward the promised land, so they called it the Joshua-tree.
Good readin’, Chris; thanks.
I believe you’ll find that the name is a bastardization of the Paiute tchotchwa, which translates roughly as “tree of which it is said: to find night lizards, look under the dead branches”
hope this helps
Chris.
The southwest corner of Utah is the northwest corner of Joshua tree country.
I think you mean it’s the northeast corner.
Great post!
A fascinating story, Chris. Thanks for posting that great illustration, too. I can’t imagine how women tolerated the summer heat in those outfits. They must have had sturdy constitutions. At least the hats look practical.
Great post, Chris. This sort of untangling is just the sort of archival digging that I did a lot of, back in the day. Some small detail gets invented and then repeated over and over until it has some sort of truth to it. You know you’ve reached uncharted territory when you find an alternative - like the yucca palms you describe.
(In my own case, it was the discovery that the “B. B. Barney” cited in innumerable histories of Palm Springs was not only named Burleigh, but he had a brother named Bruce. So there were two B. B. Barneys in the area, and none of the standard sources had any clue.)
There seemed to be a lot of “fancification” in early writings of that period. My favorite was (and is) the translation of “Tahquitz Canyon” as “home of the fireflies” - something that was clearly aimed at non-locals, as anyone from the area would know that (a) Tahquitz is the name of a malignant Cahuilla semi-deity, and (b) there ain’t no fireflies in the deserts of Southern California!
Am I a digital humanitiesist yet, Rachel?
Oh, and thanks for the proofread, Jarrett. I hate doing that.
*laughs* You’ve blogged and tweeted about it… perhaps!
An interesting possibility, spyder!