Michael Welsh

“ Within the past decade, historians have sought to join with scientists, photographers, artists, and tourism promoters to assess the meaning of national parks and monuments. The most provocative of these works came from Alfred Runte, who in 1979 published National Parks: The American Experience. Taking issue with the conventional wisdom that the NPS was America's most-cherished federal agency, and that preservation of natural landscapes marked the high point of national altruism, Runte posited three factors motivating Congress and park advocates. ”

“ Range wars had persisted in the basin since the death in 1881 of Billy the Kid. Hawkins and Fall, who would influence basin politics for the next three decades, appealed not only to Governor Otero's vanity but also to his desire to check the power of Catron and his Santa Fe contemporaries. Hawkins would work as an attorney for the EPNE and later the Southern Pacific Railroad, while Fall would move from Las Cruces in 1905 to the Tularosa-Carrizozo area, purchasing the 100,000-acre cattle operation of Pat Coghlan and naming it the Three Rivers Ranch. ”

“ The story of White Sands National Monument offers the visitor, student, and public official an excellent setting in which to observe the forces of nature upon human beings, and their reaction to the challenge posed by the dunes. The historian C. Leland Sonnichsen, longtime faculty member at the nearby University of Texas at El Paso, wrote extensively about the daunting features of environment and ethnicity confronting all who entered the arid stretches of the Tularosa basin (so named for the expanse of "tulare," the Spanish word for "red weed") . ”

“ For the remainder of the winter of 1933-1934, Tom Charles shared his monument with the work crew from the Civil Works Administration. No sooner had the laborers begun to cut an eight-mile clay-based road into the dunes than did Charles receive word from Santa Fe that all CWA projects would be halted. CWA chief Harry Hopkins disliked the national pattern of project directors exceeding his limits on the category of expenditures called "other than labor" costs (overhead) . ”

“ Changing its name to "Rio Grande National Park," Fall hoped to take advantage of passage that year of the Federal Highway Act. One route anticipated by federal officials was the "Southern National Highway," which could connect Alamogordo to El Paso and then San Diego. Ostensibly designed for transportation of military personnel and supplies in time of national emergency (like the impending "Great War" in Europe) , the highways would later stimulate in the 1920s the boom in tourism and commercial traffic known as the "car culture." ”

“ The environmental factors limiting Spanish development of southern New Mexico also confronted the third wave of historic change for White Sands: the arrival in the 1840s of American soldiers. The United States in 1846 committed troops to the conquest of Mexico's far northern frontier, as much to gain access to West Coast ports as to dominate the interior Southwest. While Americans shared the ambition of the Spanish and later Mexican empires for expansion, the United States brought levels of technology and capital that permitted transcendence of environmental limits that had daunted others. ”

“ Perhaps Albert Fall would have succeeded with his All-Year park had he not coupled the measure with another initiative close to the hearts of many New Mexico land speculators and developers: the Bursum bill" to quiet title to Pueblo Indian land claims. In the early 1920s, some Progressive reformers had tired of their exercises on behalf of urban social change, and looked about for new, less-taxing causes. One area of their interest was the American West, appealing for its beauty, tranquility, and exotic Native cultures. ”

“ Although NPS records do not show it, attendance at White Sands' opening-day festivities had to catch the eye of public and private officials alike. Most units in the Southwest did not record 4,650 visitors in a whole year, and White Sands' distance from major population centers made the day all the more remarkable. In 1934 El Paso, one hundred thirty miles away by dirt roads, had 105,000 residents, and provided the bulk of out-of-town visitation. No other community within 200 miles had more than Albuquerque's 27,200, and Alamogordo's 3,100 people came often that summer. ”

“ The son of New Mexico's territorial delegate to Congress in the 1850s, Otero had engaged in his own resource speculation in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. He also championed the application of technology to overcome environmental limits, having assisted his father in bringing the railroad, the telephone, and the automobile to the territory. Finally, Governor Otero realized that the twentieth century would reward those who utilized information, and he pursued aggressively the improvement of scientific education at the territory's fledgling institutions of higher learning. ”

“ The rapid exploitation of western lands bothered a small but vocal segment of the American public, for whom the aesthetic value of unspoiled nature rivalled the marketability of timber, minerals, and water. ”

“ In its place were a myriad of federal rules, regulations, and employment agencies that removed control of economic life from county courthouses and state capitols to Washington, DC. For New Mexico and its Tularosa basin, however, public funding offered the only source of investment for private enterprise. Thus it was that local and state officials would devote considerable attention to the growth of the monument, both helping and hindering park service personnel charged with preserving the dunes and catering to a multiplicity of public tastes. ”

“ Otero and Herrick then undertook the arduous task of building a national reputation for territorial higher learning, focusing on the use of scientific research to develop New Mexico's resource economy, and thus its financial base for better education. ”

“ The burgeoning cities of the eastern United States required vast amounts of raw materials for industrial production, and the most likely sector for exploitation was the interior West.
Out of this period of rapid economic growth came the "Santa Fe Ring," a small group of investors, politicians, and publicists that took advantage of the dependent status, modest income levels, and lack of access to the outside world that burdened much of territorial New Mexico. ”

“ Much like the plant and animal life of the Tularosa basin, human beings faced identical choices of adaptation for survival. The earliest people identified in the dunes area belonged to the "Folsom" culture; hunters who used spear points like those discovered in far northeastern New Mexico in the early 1900s near the town of Folsom. Archeologists speculated that their preference for "big-game" hunting, especially the bison of 10,000 years ago, kept them away from the dunes proper because of their sparse vegetation. ”

“ The park service's own film maker, Paul Wilkerson, came to White Sands in October to prepare a newsreel for distribution in the nation's movie houses. Then in November the National Geographic Magazine accepted Tom Charles' invitation to visit the dunes and craft a photographic essay. The chief NPS photographer, George Grant, spent several days in the Tularosa basin and surrounding mountains seeking unusual stories. He found most appealing the proximity of the dunes to the Lincoln County War. "Every school boy wishes to know about Billy the Kid," said Grant. ”

“ Economic activity in the basin that included such high-profile figures as Hawkins and Fall drew the attention of other investors. One such group in El Paso wanted the federal government in 1898 to establish a twelve-square mile "national park" that included "the extreme northwest corner" of the Mescalero Indian reservation, thirty-eight miles northeast of the dunes. The El Paso initiative for a "Mescalero National Park" signalled changing public tastes at the close of the Gilded Age regarding natural resource development. ”

“ While agriculture prospered in the Pecos valley, the Eddy brothers wondered if similar applications of technology, capital, and expertise could generate prosperity to the west in the Tularosa basin. Gold strikes in the Sierra Blanca had created the boomtown of White Oaks, while timber harvests had begun in the Sacramento mountains. Charles Eddy approached a group of investors in El Paso, Texas, suggesting the merits of a rail line between that border town and the mines. ”

“ Superintendent Pinkley could offer little hope to Charles or his CWA workers, who had no alternative sources of employment in the Tularosa basin. All he could advise was that Charles write a new proposal for road work, as "I have the feeling that about the time our forces are cut down to the point of inefficiency they [FDR's staff] are going to turn loose a bunch of money for us." [13]
Such promises neither built roads nor fed workers at White Sands. ”

“ White Sands, more than most monuments of the West, provided scholars of the natural world with a living laboratory that encompassed fields from botany to zoology. By 1940, the NPS itself would list a bibliography of more than two dozen scholarly and popular works about the dunes. This contributed as much to raising awareness among federal officials as did the advocacy of southern New Mexico officials eager for the economic benefits of tourism to the monument. [8] ”

“ Very little energy was expended by outside interests in southeastern New Mexico, except for the large cattle ranches owned by Texans migrating westward. Drawn by federal contracts to supply beef to soldiers at the various military posts along the Pecos and Tularosa rivers, and to Indians on the Mescalero Apache reservation, the ranchers had little time or money to invest in larger development schemes. This would change in the 1880s, when two New York brothers, Charles and John Eddy, came by stagecoach to the Pecos River valley to operate a cattle ranch. ”

“ The geologic history of the dunes began millions of years ago, when natural forces created the Tularosa basin. The basin extends for 150 miles in length, and averages fifty miles in width. The area of the White Sands dunes (within and outside the monument boundaries) stretches some 275 square miles, with average dimensions of 27 miles long and ten miles wide. Some forty percent of the dunes are within the monument itself, while the remainder lie on the property of the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) , the U.S. Army's huge weapons testing center to the north and west of the monument. ”