when did joshua tree became a national park
October 31, 1994
title: Joshua Tree National Park text: Joshua Tree National Park Joshua Tree National Park is an American national park in southeastern California, east of Los Angeles, near San Bernardino and Palm Springs. The park is named for the Joshua trees ("Yucca brevifolia") native to the Mojave Desert. Originally declared a national monument in 1936, Joshua Tree was redesignated as a national park in 1994 when the U.S. Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act. Encompassing a total of —an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island—the park includes of designated wilderness. Straddling the border between San Bernardino County and Riverside County, the park includes title: Joshua Tree National Park text: a gasoline-powered two-stamp mill, the Wall Street Mill, and moved it to his ranch to process ore. The ranch and mill were added to the NRHP in 1975 and the mine in 1976. Some of the mines in the park yielded copper, zinc, and iron. On August 10, 1936, after Minerva Hoyt and others persuaded the state and federal governments to protect the area, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the power of the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish Joshua Tree National Monument. It protected about . In 1950, the size of the park was reduced by about to open the title: Joshua Tree National Park text: the region, ranchers dug wells and built rainwater catchments called "tanks", such as White Tank and Barker Dam. In 1900, C. O. Barker, a miner and cattleman, built the original Barker Dam, later improved by William "Bill" Keys, a rancher. Grazing continued in the park through 1945. Barker Dam was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1975. Between the 1860s and the 1940s, miners worked about 300 pit mines, mostly small, in what later became the park. The most successful, the Lost Horse Mine, produced gold and silver worth about $5 million in today's currency. Johnny title: Joshua Tree National Park text: parts of two deserts, each an ecosystem whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation: the higher Mojave Desert and the lower Colorado Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains traverse the southwest edge of the park. The earliest known residents of the land in and around what later became Joshua Tree National Park were the people of the Pinto Culture, who lived and hunted here between 8000 and 4000 BCE. Their stone tools and spear points, discovered in the Pinto Basin in the 1930s, suggest that they hunted game and gathered seasonal plants, but little else is known about them. Later title: Joshua Tree National Park text: land to more mining. The park was elevated to a National Park on October 31, 1994, by the Desert Protection Act, which also added to the park. The higher and cooler Mojave Desert is the special habitat of "Yucca brevifolia", the Joshua tree for which the park is named. It occurs in patterns from dense forests to distantly spaced specimens. In addition to Joshua tree forests, the western part of the park includes some of the most interesting geologic displays found in California's deserts. The dominant geologic features of this landscape are hills of bare rock, usually broken up into