Excerpt from Country Nodes: An Anthropological Evaluation of William Keys' Desert Queen Ranch, Joshua Tree National Monument, CaliforniaCheryl Erickson, librarian at the Twentynine Palms Branch, San Bernardino County Public Library, allowed us to use her files on local history and transcriptions of tapes from the oral history project she has initiated. Her interest in and concern for local history were matched by her hospitality to us.Herrick Hanks of the Bureau of Land Management at Riverside, California, gave us data about other southwestern properties nominated to or included on the National Register of Historic Places.I am deeply grateful to all of these persons, without whose help this project would never have been completed.The text was edited and prepared for publication by John Bancroft, editor at the Western Archeological Center, and Sally Tobola and Vonna Mason, typists. The illustrations were prepared by Jeannette Schloss.All interpretation and errors of fact are, of course, my own.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.