White Sands Dunes and Dreams: A History of White Sands National Monument Administrative History

The ecological complexity of the White Sands region had its human counterpart in the protracted efforts of southern New Mexicans to create a unit of the National Park Service at the dunes. Analysis of the political economy of Otero County in the early twentieth century reveals patterns of ambition and conflict that blessed and cursed the national monument campaign for over three decades. These conditions also revealed the challenges awaiting future generations interested in the management of the vast gypsum fields of the Tularosa basin.

Promoters of the "Land of Enchantment" (including park service officials) have been less enthused about the stories of southern New Mexico than they have the more renowned Rio Grande valley and the mountainous north. Yet the historical variables that affected these more populous, and perhaps more romanticized sectors of New Mexico also shaped the development of counties such as Otero. Then, too, the distinctive environmental circumstances of distance, aridity, and isolation gave rise to economic strategies rarely seen elsewhere in New Mexico. The natural forces that crafted the White Sands thus washed over the human landscape to the extent that the western writer Emerson Hough called the basin "as dangerous a country as ever lay out of doors." [1]

Much has been made in popular literature of the area's range wars (especially the Lincoln County Wars of 1878-1881), and of their most glamorous villain, William H. Antrim, or William Bonney, or Billy the Kid. This emphasis obscured the linkage between a harsh environment and extensive efforts to develop southeastern New Mexico's resources. The players in this drama exhibited the qualities of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking that scholars have either described as virtuous or destructive. The post-Civil War era nationwide (1865-1900) has been characterized as the "Gilded Age;" a term first employed by the author Mark Twain to explain the dichotomy between America's rising standard of living, and the manipulation of power and money by industrialists and financiers. 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. Because Congress refused to grant statehood to New Mexico until 1912, the political and economic power of the territory rested in Washington, DC, and in the hands of federal appointees in Santa Fe. In his book, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History (1966), Howard R. Lamar wrote of this process of isolation and dependency: "The ring reflected the corporative, monopolistic, and multiple enterprise tendencies of all American business after the Civil War." First with land, then with its bounty (timber, stock raising, agriculture, and mining), individuals like Thomas B. Catron, Stephen B. Elkins, and others created an economic pattern of resource use that would reach into the Tularosa basin and surround White Sands. [2]

The proximity of northern New Mexico to the railroad lines building southwestward to California drew the early attention of Anglo ranchers, miners, merchants, and political appointees. 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. Charles Eddy saw the potential for railroad transportation throughout the region, and promoted community building in Carlsbad (which he first named for himself) and in Roswell. Among Eddy's signal contributions was establishment of a large irrigation district near Carlsbad, which by the early twentieth century provided economic stability throughout the area and a model for future water projects. [3]

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. By 1897 he had garnered enough support for construction of the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad (EPNE), which by 1901 had established its terminus with the Rock Island and Pacific Railroad line at Santa Rosa, New Mexico. [4]

The arrival of the EPNE into the Tularosa basin had the same effect as did all railroad intrusions into the isolated interior West. Natural obstacles to transportation evaporated, and eager promoters provided handsome investments in search of quick returns. Yet the variables of aridity, heat, and distance kept the miracle of Carlsbad from spreading throughout Charles Eddy's new domain. The railroad created a new townsite some fifteen miles east of the dunes, named Alamogordo ("fat cottonwood" in Spanish), where for $5,000 the EPNE had purchased Oliver Lee's Alamo ranch and its precious water rights. The Alamogordo Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the rail line, then platted a village that grew within twelve months to one thousand inhabitants.

Figure 5. Desert lizard. (Courtesy White Sands National Monument)

Finding the legacy of Billy the Kid less romantic than later generations of novel readers, movie-goers, and tourism promoters, the town organizers petitioned the territorial governor, Miguel A. Otero, to provide law and order by carving out a separate county in the basin. The decision to name the county after the governor, said Mrs. Tom Charles, wife of the first superintendent at White Sands National Monument, came when a lawyer for the railroad, William Ashton Hawkins, and a Dona Ana County politician, Albert Bacon Fall, asked Otero to remove Alamogordo and the basin from the legal jurisdiction of distant Las Cruces and its authoritarian sheriff, Pat Garrett (more famous for his role in the slaying of Billy the Kid). According to Mrs. Charles, an accomplished news correspondent, Fall and Hawkins had opposed the power of Thomas Catron and the Santa Fe Ring, primarily Catron's efforts to control cattle ranching in southern New Mexico. 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. [5]

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. 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. The historian Samuel P. Hays, in his book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959), defined this transition from "use" to "preservation" as the "conservation movement," part of the larger political and economic revolution known as "Progressivism." Unlike their late-twentieth century successors (the environmentalists), conservationists believed in concepts like "wise use" of resources, "sustained yield" of production, and the "gospel of efficiency" in policy making, which often appeared as the cliche: "The greatest good for the greatest number." [6]

The debate over the future of Tularosa basin lands would influence White Sands throughout the twentieth century. Howard Lamar noted that by the 1890s, prominent citizens of the territory "worried about the burgeoning conservation movement which threatened their free use of New Mexico's woodlands." In addition, developers "began to lobby for reducing the size of Indian reservations." In 1898 the territory had successfully petitioned Congress for passage of the Fergusson Act, which granted two million acres of public land to the public school system for sale as revenue-generating property. Angered by these efforts, the EPNE mobilized opposition to the Mescalero National Park, not out of recognition of tribal sovereignty but a fear of future withdrawals of public lands from the marketplace. Among the voices raised in protest was that of William Hawkins, who believed that New Mexico had enough Indian reservations and military installations without adding national parks. [7]

Despite the "victory" of Hawkins and the EPNE, other interests kept pursuing the competing venues of preservation and development of the Tularosa basin. Miguel Otero sought to improve the image of his native land by encouraging both concepts of use and protection of resources. Symptomatic of the divided mind of the Progressive reformer, Otero wrote glowingly in 1903 of the potential that White Sands offered to the tourist and industrialist alike. Devoting a full page of his lengthy report to the Secretary of the Interior to the promotion of White Sands, the namesake of Otero County became almost poetic in his description of the dune fields: "On these gypsum sands is the playground of the mirage, and here it plays its greatest pranks with distance, perspective, and color." Shifting in the next paragraph to a development metaphor, the governor praised the use of the 99-percent pure gypsum for agricultural fertilizer, plaster of Paris, and even sulphuric acid. Otero closed his report by noting the presence of a cement plant in nearby Alamogordo that relied upon White Sands gypsum; proof positive that "the great desert . . . may some day be utilized in commerce and be found a great source of wealth." [8]

For the next ten years the White Sands tantalized developer and preservationist alike. By 1907 J.R. Milner and Bill Fetz, brothers-in-law, had constructed a plaster of Paris batching plant about one-half mile southwest of the future headquarters site of the monument. Mrs. Tom Charles wrote five decades later that Bill Fetz operated the plant, "cooking the sand by means of an iron roller, using mesquite roots for fuel." Fetz carried the processed plaster by ox-cart to Alamogordo, where contractors used the blocks for housing construction. One of his wagon-drivers was 14-year old Charlie Sutton, later to work for Tom Charles at the monument in road construction (1934-1935). Sutton, who also served as mayor of Alamogordo, remembered how Fetz and his employees extracted gypsum by drilling a long shaft into the dunes, and removing its contents at night to avoid the desert heat. Plant workers then slept inside the hollowed-out shafts, as the journey back to town over a rutted road was prohibitive. [9]

In 1907 the dunes also welcomed a Kansas farm family that had moved to Alamogordo for the health of its mother, Rachel Charles. Her husband, Tom Charles, would become White Sands' most prominent advocate, and replace the Milner-Fetz batching plant in 1933 with the heavily visited monument. Charles and his second wife, Bula, would work first as farmers, then insurance salespeople, and journalists to boost the fortunes of Alamogordo and the Tularosa basin: Tom Charles had graduated in 1897 from Kansas State University, where he had played varsity football. He then wrote for several newspapers, becoming president of the Kansas chapter of the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). When his wife Rachel contracted tuberculosis in the winter of 1906-1907, the Charles family moved by wagon to Alamogordo for the "cure." The Charleses found a community that by 1910 would boast nearly 3,000 people. The difficulty of dry-land farming in the basin brought the family into town by 1915, and three years later they purchased the Hughes-Tinklepaugh insurance agency, expanding it into one of the larger companies in New Mexico. [10]

Because of his early efforts to secure his family's financial status, Tom Charles at first did not engage in the plans of local and territorial officials to create versions of the "Mescalero National Park." William H. Andrews, the nonvoting congressional delegate from New Mexico, had sought in 1906 to develop some sort of recreational facility in the Tularosa basin. Andrews told Albert Fall of his idea in 1912, when the latter became U.S. Senator with the granting of New Mexican statehood. Fall had become interested in the concept because of his desire to expand his Three Rivers ranch, which adjoined the northwestern boundary of the Mescalero reservation. In addition, Fall had witnessed the collapse of the EPNE railroad in 1905 when the line could no longer secure fresh water for its steam engines. The large mining company, Phelps-Dodge, had purchased the EPNE and sought access to the westward-flowing streams that the Mescaleros controlled; a better source than the alkaline waters of the basin that ruined the boilers of the EPNE train engines. [11]

Figure 6. Visitors to White Sands dunes (1904). (Courtesy Museum of New Mexico. Negative No. 53095)

The story of Albert Fall and his land transactions have been the subject of much controversy and confusion. As a senator (1912-1920), and then as the ill-fated Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), Fall managed to expand his holdings at Three Rivers by a factor of ten (over one million acres of leased and purchased land). One aspect of his career that has drawn the ire of historians was his repeated efforts from 1912-1922 to take Mescalero land for a national park, with the dimensions shifting several times (finally including a small 640-acre section of White Sands). Local folklore in the Tularosa basin holds that Fall, convicted in 1927 of bribery and conspiracy for his "sale" of U.S. Navy oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to the Sinclair Oil Company (later the Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO), paid the price for crimes committed by many members of the Harding administration (until the 1970s Fall was the only convicted Cabinet officer to serve a prison sentence). Yet by examining his involvement in plans for a national park in southern New Mexico, one can see how Fall's connections to the Santa Fe Ring overcame his ostensibly "progressive" idea that White Sands and other natural attractions in the Tularosa basin merited protection from exploitation.

Within weeks of taking his Senate seat in the spring of 1912, Albert Fall introduced Senate Bill (S.) 6659, a companion measure to U.S. Representative George Curry's House Bill (H.) 24123, establishing the "Mescalero National Park." Curry, whom Governor Otero had appointed in 1899 as first sheriff of Otero County, and who would later serve as territorial governor in his own right (1907-1910), had transferred his allegiance to Fall (as did many civic and political leaders in the area), and thus supported Fall's plans to enhance the value of Three Rivers ranch. The Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), which had oversight of the Mescalero people, disliked the precedent of creating "recreation parks within reservations," and opposed the plans of Fall and Curry. This failed to intimidate the senator, who two years later drafted Senate Bill 4187, expanding the Mescalero park concept to include "allotment" of all reservation lands (survey and distribution of 160-acre plots to tribal members, with sales of the surplus to non-Indians), withdrawal of Mescalero title to $3 million of timber lands, opening the reservation to mining prospectors with no royalties due to the tribe, and leasing of lots on the west face of the Sierra Blanca for "summer cottages" for wealthy tourists. [12]

Undaunted by rejection of these two measures, Senator Fall in 1916 ventured yet again his idea for a regional national park. 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." Senator Fall and other prescient leaders knew that New Mexico, which in 1920 ranked 47th of 48 states in per capita income, could not afford the extensive network of highways needed to open southern New Mexico to postwar economic growth. In 1916 Congress had also authorized creation of the National Park Service (NPS), charging its director, Stephen T. Mather, with preserving natural beauty so that more Americans could have access to it. All three variables (the Rio Grande National Park, a southern highway, and the NPS) could bring good fortune to New Mexico, and hence Albert Fall's persistence with his dream of a Mescalero playground. [13]

The euphoria of 1916 (excluding the third congressional rejection of Fall's park) met the sobering realities of 1917 for New Mexico and the Tularosa basin. American entry into war in Europe coincided with turmoil in Mexico, where Senator Fall and other investors lost access to their oil properties because of the prolonged Mexican revolution. Economic constraints in wartime (among them cessation of railroad shipping) burdened Albert Fall with bad debts. The senator tried to sell his water rights to the EPNE railroad, but met opposition from Mescalero farmers who charged that this would endanger their irrigation water. Then in 1920 Fall further irritated the Mescaleros by fighting plans of the Indian Service to sell $500,000 of tribal timber for reinvestment in a 10,000-head tribal herd. Fall held grazing leases on the reservation, and believed that expansion of Mescalero cattle would overgraze tribal lands and reduce the value of his leases. [14]

Albert Fall gained leverage with the Mescaleros, and with Congress, when in 1921 he became Secretary of the Interior. Fall and his successor in the U.S. Senate, Holm O. Bursum of Socorro, hoped to revive a variety of economic development schemes that had been blocked by Progressives in Washington or delayed by the exigencies of World War l. These would include national park proposals, opening of Indian lands to mineral exploration, quieting title to Pueblo Indian lands contested by non-Indian owners, and easing of federal restrictions on western resource development. This strategy would generate a highly emotional resistance in New Mexico and nationwide, culminating in Fall's prosecution and, ironically, in the promotion of a separate White Sands monument by the Alamogordo insurance agent, Tom Charles.

Secretary Fall employed some of the marketing ideas of the "See America First" campaign that the NPS had supported during the First World War. Designed to stimulate travel to the parks, and thus extract more financial support from Congress, the NPS also encouraged formation of private lobbying groups, such as Robert Sterling Yard's National Park Association (NPA). During the gubernatorial administration of William McDonald (1912-1917), New Mexico business and civic leaders formed a statewide version of the NPA, the "National Park Association of New Mexico." Before the war its primary concern had been creation north of Santa Fe of the "Cliff Cities National Park," later to become Bandelier National Monument. In addition, the NPA petitioned Congress for a $500 million "national Park to Park highways" project. Senator Bursum offered to "push the matter vigorously," as New Mexico desperately needed outside funding to improve its meager transportation network. [15]

Along with building momentum within the state for national parks and their federal expenditures, Fall asked William Hawkins and Richard Burgess to campaign for a disconnected national park containing Mescalero lands and the Elephant Butte dam and reservoir, a two-million acre-foot water project on the Rio Grande north of Las Cruces. El Paso business leaders joined the petition drive, trying to link Mescalero National Park with highway construction to the Mexican border. Governor Merritt Mechem expressed surprise to Senator Bursum in November 1921, as he had learned of strong opposition from his own state game and fish commission. Alva L. Hobbs of Raton, chairman of the commission, wrote directly to Stephen Mather about rumors of NPS seizure of Elephant Butte, New Mexico's premier fishing site. Mather and his staff wrote several letters to Hobbs and other correspondents to placate their fears, concluding that the state would manage recreation at the reservoir if the Park Service ever took control. [16]

Local sponsorship of these schemes emboldened Fall in 1921 to seek national support for his reversal of Progressive-era land policies. That year he drafted legislation that would permit his Interior department to sell ten percent of the public lands in each state at public auction. The federal government would retain mineral rights, and no timber lands would be sold. Funds derived from these sales would be spent on road construction on the rest of a state's public domain. This would allow connection of the Mescalero and Elephant Butte park lands, and not incidentally open Three Rivers ranch to automobile and truck traffic from the more populous Rio Grande valley. These measures would also make it difficult for western legislators to oppose Fall's plans for the Tularosa basin. Given the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and a pliant administration in the White House, Secretary Fall had no reason to doubt the prospects for this latest park measure. [17]

Applying lessons learned from his previous forays into park planning, Albert Fall then moved in October 1921 with a new proposal: the "All-Year National Park [AYNP]." He called to his ranch a delegation from the Alamogordo chamber of commerce, one of whose members was Tom Charles. The Secretary took full advantage of his prestige with local citizens, discussing a wide range of regional concerns, only one of which was his park. Charles and his peers agreed to form a committee to stimulate support for the park throughout southern New Mexico and west Texas. He also consented to serve on the executive committee of a new lobbying group, the "Southwestern All-Year National Park Association [SAYNPA]," whose members included Governor Mechem and William Hawkins, now a resident of El Paso. [18]

In order to convince Congress of the groundswell of support for the AYNP, the Secretary worked with Charles and the Alamogordo chamber to host a "statewide" convention of chamber delegates interested in national parks for their sectors of New Mexico. To assuage the doubts of promoters of a site at Bandelier ruins, Fall asked Ralph Emerson Twitchell to bring a delegation from Santa Fe to the meeting. Twitchell, a respected attorney and amateur historian (the author of the multivolume series, Leading Facts of New Mexico History), joined with the Southern Pacific's William Hawkins to shepherd Fall's vastly expanded park through the chamber meeting.

Upon arrival at the SAYNPA gathering, the northern New Mexicans discovered Fall's larger agenda. The city of El Paso had sent one hundred delegates, and placed on the executive committee two of its nine members (the remaining seven all came from southern New Mexico). Robert Sterling Yard would later claim that "the advocates of all other [park] sites were shouted down," and that "several were voted out of the meeting." Yard further contended that the El Paso contingent pushed for a "circle system" of federal highways linking Elephant Butte and the Tularosa basin with "a popular El Paso resort south of the [Mescalero] Reservation," the mountain village of Cloudcroft. In addition, park boosters drafted plans to "involve the Government encircling the [Elephant Butte] reservoir with a superb [one] hundred miles highway." In closing, said Yard, the delegates deliberately employed the term "Southwestern" in their title to leave "the impression that this was not a local scheme but demanded by a large section of the country." [19]

The All-Year park moved along two tracks in 1921-1922: unashamed promotion by Fall and his allies, and unstinting opposition by the NPA and other groups. The NPA still smarted from the bold power play executed in Yosemite National Park a decade earlier known as the "Hetch Hetchy controversy." The city of San Francisco , in rebuilding after the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, had petitioned Congress for permission to construct a massive municipal water supply project in a pristine valley of Yosemite. Even the staunch Progressive/conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt, approved of the Hetch Hetchy dam and reservoir. Alfred Runte wrote of Hetch Hetchy that "if ever the cloud over the valley did have a silver lining, it was in teaching preservationists to rely as much on economic rationales [as] on the standard emotional ones." Believing that "the national parks were still the stepchildren of federal conservation policy," defenders of Yosemite vowed "to create a separate government agency committed solely to park management and protection." [20]

Albert Fall thus tested the Park Service's resolve a mere five years after its inception, doing so in the cavalier manner that echoed the laxity (if not the corruption) of the Harding years. Senator Bursum and the SAYNPA wrote the draft of the All-Year park bill, calling for inclusion of 2,000 acres of the Mescalero reservation, 640 acres of the Malpais lava beds east of Carrizozo, 640 acres of the "Gypsum Hills" (White Sands), and the shoreline of the Elephant Butte reservoir. In April 1922, Holm Bursum introduced the measure in the Senate, while the SAYNPA released a flurry of press notices in favor of the fragmented park. One such document quoted Enos Mills, the "father of the Rocky Mountain National Park," as saying: "No scenery in all Colorado [the site of the park] surpasses that of the Mescalero Indian Reservation." The release described the tribal lands as having "exceptional climatic advantages over any other public playground on the continent," with "beauties [that] may be enjoyed the year 'round." As an afterthought, the SAYNPA added: "Nearby are the famous White Sands , rightly designated 'one of the wonders of the world,' and the Mal Pals, the latest lava flow on this continent." Should Congress approve Fall's plan, said the release, it would provide "a means of attracting tourists and sightseers and prospective homebuilders to a part of the country, which for variety of unconventional scenery has no equal elsewhere in America." [21]

This press release revealed both the boldness of Fall's plan and his sophisticated understanding of the "car culture" to NPS strategies for expansion. By linking the park units to highway construction, then connecting both to the new "leisure economy" developing in southern California and Florida, Fall hoped to outmaneuver the NPA or any other obstructionists. Perhaps the ease with which he had dismissed early Park Service objections fooled him, as in May 1922 he ordered Stephen Mather to come to Three Rivers to study the AYNP concept. Among the officials meeting with Mather were Tom Charles and the Alamogordo chamber. Dietmar Schneider-Hector wrote that Mather spoke to the Alamogordo Commercial Club banquet on May 3, 1922, revealing "that the sites he had visited lacked scenery generally associated with national parks." Mather mollified the Alamogordo audience by "adding that there remained sufficient areas to compensate for the apparent deficiencies." Upon his return to Washington, Mather wrote Fall that the AYNP's "disjointed boundaries, lack of spectacular scenery, and questionable usage" made the measure "unrealistic" and "preposterous." [22]

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. In this regard they joined forces with the artistic communities forming in California and New Mexico (especially the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies), where members of the postwar "Lost Generation" of disaffected urbanites gathered to paint, write, sculpt, and photograph the otherworldliness of the Southwest's lands and people. [23]

Ironically, the defenders of Native land rights had jousted with Albert Fall in 1916, only to see his proposal return with a vengeance. In so doing, Fall and Bursum carefully crafted language that made it difficult for the Mescaleros to resist, and for non-Indian support groups like the "Indian Rights Association [IRA]" to mount an effective campaign of criticism. Fall knew that the Mescalero reservation had been created not by treaty negotiation (and hence Senate ratification), but by the more expeditious process of "executive order." As such, the reservation could be altered or abolished by subsequent presidential decrees. Mindful of the 1920s sentiments in favor of Indian rights, Fall sent Interior officials to meet with the Mescalero tribal council, even though the federal government (in the person of the Interior secretary) had final authority in Indian affairs. Fall's agents offered to protect the remaining acreage of the reservation by statute if the council released the 2,000-acre section coveted by Fall as "land conspicuous for beauty of scenery or adapted for summer camps." The tribe would then be given inducements such as sawmills to harvest timber, control of non-Indian grazing leases, and employment preference in any Park Service venues on the reservation. Preliminary tribal resistance did not deter Fall, who edited the council minutes to delete unfavorable commentary and reported to Congress a "90 percent approval" from all Mescalero adults. [24]

The historian Lawrence Kelly contended that non-Indian support groups had shown less enthusiasm for the Mescalero cause than they did for the more ominous "Bursum bill." Robert Sterling Yard, however, wrote in November 1922 that the AYNP bill was a combination of two outrages: abuse of Indian sovereignty and disdain for the integrity of the Park Service. Yet Kelly did note that Yard met with the most vocal critic of the Bursum bill, John Collier, and advised the erstwhile New York Progressive reformer to link the Pueblo lands bill with Fall's park plans. If Fall could become the target of national opprobrium, thought Yard, enough support would ensue for the Mescaleros and the NPS to override the Secretary's considerable power and ambition. [25]

This strategy of linkage began in July 1922, when Bursum and Fall rushed the AYNP bill through the Senate in seven days. S. 3519, said the NPA, would establish a dangerous precedent for the Park Service by permitting irrigation, hydroelectric power generation, hunting, mining, grazing, and timber cutting on park lands. In addition, the Secretary of the Interior could authorize such intrusions without congressional approval or oversight. The NPA scoffed at the absurd distances park visitors would travel to the All-Year park's units. Using the Mescalero land as a base, the Malpais lava beds were forty miles northeast; the "White Sands or Gypsum Hills of Otero County" were thirty-eight miles southwest; and Elephant Butte was ninety miles due west of the reservation. There were no paved roads connecting these units; the bill contained no surveys or studies of their feasibility; and it made no provisions for funding the establishment or maintenance of such a park. [26]

Secretary Fall and Senator Bursum, on the other hand, believed that the NPA was of no consequence, a theory seemingly vindicated by the speed with which S. 3519 moved through the Senate. On July 7, Bursum asked the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs to consider the measure, with neither reading nor discussion of the bill's contents. Distracted by a lengthy debate on tariff rates, the senators approved the measure unanimously, accepting Bursum's logic that the bill was now "purely local in character and affected only New Mexico," as well as extending a courtesy to a former Senate member (Fall). By sending the bill to Indian Affairs, Fall had bypassed the Public Lands Committee, the normal deliberative body for national parks. He also promised the Indian Affairs senators that the AYNP bill "will be more for the interests of the Mescaleros than any other legislation of recent years concerning other reservation Indians and their properties." [27]

Logic and procedure such as this gave Robert Sterling Yard and John Collier the leverage they needed to defeat Fall's park bill and Pueblo lands legislation. For the remainder of 1922 the NPA and Collier's Indian Rights Association (IRA) campaigned in Washington for rejection of Fall's agenda, with contributions pouring in from wealthy benefactors. As the pressure mounted, Fall slowly retreated from his measures, though not without vehement denials of charges of conflict of interest. On January 3, 1923, while Congress still debated the AYNP, Fall tendered his resignation as Secretary of the Interior. By year's end he would be implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, Warren Harding would die of mysterious causes just as the scale of the "Harding scandals" became public knowledge, Vice-President Calvin Coolidge would promise vigorous prosecution of officials like Fail, and John Collier would become the premier advocate of Indian policy reform. [28]

Local sponsors of White Sands knew of the bitterness engendered in Congress by Albert Fall's scheme, and plotted their strategy accordingly. In the mid-1920s the U. S. Forest Service discussed a program of increased usage of the Lincoln National Forest, including recreation and logging. This would also bring more federal spending to the Tularosa basin, as would talk of new reclamation projects for southern New Mexico. The Republican State Central Committee wrote to party members in the area to enlist support for Senator Bursum, who promised as part of his re-election campaign to increase federal spending in the state. Louis W. Galles, state director of the party's "Coolidge and Dawes Clubs," named for the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates for 1924, wrote to L.O. Piersol of Alamogordo stating that Bursum's access to the federal treasury meant everything to New Mexico. "Don't forget," said Galles, member of a prominent Albuquerque family that operated a large Chevrolet dealership, "that for every thousand dollars that New Mexico receives, she pays back to the [U. S.] Treasury through the Internal Revenue Service only about $1.00." Galles took pride in New Mexico's cleverness, claiming that "we profit by federal aid," with "the burden of taxes . . . laid upon the wealth of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California." [29]

This apparent inconsistency (conservative officials seeking federal investment when the free market failed) followed a pattern evident in New Mexico and the West throughout the twentieth century. Once private investors entered a region like the Tularosa basin, they quickly ascertained the prospects for future gains. Indicators such as population growth and income levels dictated investment decisions; hence the preference for capitalization of projects in the Rio Grande valley from El Paso to Santa Fe. By 1910 Alamogordo's population had stabilized at some 3,000 residents, a number that would change only imperceptibly over the next twenty years (3,224 by 1930). This modest advance (seven percent) stood in contrast to New Mexico's overall increase of twenty four percent for the years 1910-1930. The state's economy also did not perform well in these years, with forty percent of all chartered banks failing between 1920-1924. Personal income stagnated in the bottom ten percent of states (even before the Depression), and by 1933 New Mexicans earned on average only fifty-four percent of their fellow citizens nationwide. [30]

An educated, articulate midwesterner like Tom Charles knew that economic survival in the Tularosa basin required flexibility in matters of economics. Rather than hewing to the public version of Calvin Coolidge's conservatism (tax cuts, budget reductions, and veneration of the free market), the insurance agent and his chamber of commerce realized that federal funds remained New Mexico's best guarantor of financial health. Dietmar Schneider-Hector characterized Charles' efforts in the 1920s to create White Sands National Monument as "Arcadian Boosterism," a reference to local novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes' Bransford of Rainbow Range (1920). In this work Rhodes called Alamogordo "Arcadia," and claimed that among its major assets were "the railroad, two large modern sawmills, the climate and printer's ink." While witty and colorful, such descriptors disguise the sense of urgency felt by promoters of growth everywhere in the West, especially when the nation's fiscal health declined as precipitously as it did in the late 1920s and early 1930s. [31]

Tom Charles devoted a good portion of his time in the decade of the Twenties to alerting state and national leaders of the impending collapse of the Otero County economy. In 1923 he wrote to John Morrow, congressman from New Mexico , complaining of the unfairness of public land ownership in the county. Only five percent of the land (269,337 acres) belonged to private taxpayers, and only six percent of that (16,000 acres) was not classified as "arid" or "semi-arid." Local farmers had but 4,509 acres under irrigation. In contrast, the Lincoln National Forest and the Mescalero reservation received federal payments, which met some of Otero County's obligations for provision of public services. Unfortunately, said Charles, local residents could no longer finance basic services and road construction "because we are broke." Far from describing the county in the glowing terms of a Miguel Otero or an Albert Fall, Tom Charles begged the congressman for help because "we have a denuded range, eroded watersheds, silted reservoirs, flooded farms and busted stockmen." [32]

Charles' correspondence is filled with similar letters to prominent officials like U.S. Senator Sam Bratton, H.L. Kent, president of the New Mexico State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (later New Mexico State University), and regional directors of the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. His message at all times was the same: the need for less federal control of public lands (so as to increase local tax revenues), while expanding federal investment in the transportation and communications infrastructure. Charles and his wife, Bula, also began writing a series of travel articles for publications like the New Mexico Highway Journal (later the New Mexico Magazine), extolling not the hardships of Otero County but its blessings, most prominently the Lincoln National Forest, the Mescalero reservation, and the White Sands. [33]

These activities indicate that Tom Charles had more on his mind than merely shepherding a Park Service unit through Congress. Yet his energy, commitment, and acquired political network would be essential to the success of the monument, a condition recognized by local and national leaders alike. Charles also learned from the mistakes of Albert Fall, as he avoided the appearance of self-promotion or benefit in his pursuit of NPS status for the dunes. Dietmar Schneider-Hector contended that Charles merely mimicked the efforts of his mentor (Fall), and that Charles' "admiration" for the discredited Interior secretary somehow tainted his success. Schneider-Hector also took pains to separate Charles from the moniker "The Father of White Sands," crediting instead one Numa Frenger of Las Cruces, who wrote Charles in 1926 suggesting that "a large part of [the dunes] should be saved as a Government monument." Charles graciously acknowledged the concept, but reminded Frenger: "It has been a pretty hard fight to put the idea over. We are making progress however and such letters as yours will help us materially." [34]

For Charles and his contemporaries, a better transportation network would ensue only if they collaborated closely with state highway officials. Thus by the late 1920s (when forty percent of the New Mexico state budget came from federal highway construction), Charles and the local chamber of commerce had convinced state planners to build the future U.S. Highway 70 from Las Cruces to Alamogordo, and past the dunes. Charles by 1928 would call this the "White Sands road," which upon completion was only gravel. At that point he felt ready to promote Numa Frenger's suggestion more forcefully. As a courtesy to Albert Fall, Charles wrote asking the former Cabinet secretary's advice. "We drove out over the new road to the White Sands last night," said Charles, "and are certainly delighted with it." The future monument custodian called the road "one of the prettiest that I have ever seen in New Mexico, or any place else for that matter." Charles then asked Fall for his "judgment of the possibilities along the line of having a section of the sands set aside," and confessed "my total ignorance of the first steps in the matter." [35]

Whether this latter remark was sincere or disingenuous, Charles knew of the problems facing Alamogordo as the Great Depression rolled over New Mexico, and may have requested the advice of Fall to determine the best technique for maneuvering the monument through the federal government. President Herbert Hoover in 1932 had granted Fall an early release from prison for reasons of health, and Charles also knew of Hoover's desire to expand the holdings of the NPS. This shift of emphasis heartened Charles, who also pressed the case for White Sands because homesteaders had been attracted to the dunes with the grading of the federal highway. The Alamogordo area needed another economic boost, as private enterprise had failed to provide the Las Cruces road with amenities for travelers (no gasoline stations the length of the highway from downtown Las Cruces to Alamogordo, a distance of eighty miles) . Visitors thus had few incentives to return, and Tom Charles would have fewer customers for his insurance agency. [36]

One other factor influencing the campaign for creation of White Sands National Monument was passage in 1929 by the New Mexico legislature of "Joint Memorial No. 4." This measure asked Congress to lift the twenty-acre restriction on mining claims in the dunes, as this amount was not cost-effective for investors. The aging William Hawkins had read a feature story in the Alamogordo News late in 1929 where Senator Bratton had informed Tom Charles of his support for the monument. Hawkins complained to Bratton that such a facility would deprive the area of the resource potential at the dunes. The former railroad attorney also mentioned the possibility of transferring ownership of White Sands to the state, which could then lease or sell the lands and deposit the proceeds in the public school fund (at that time a major source of educational monies). "We have enough things locked up in New Mexico now," claimed Hawkins. If Bratton felt compelled to accede to Tom Charles' wishes, he said, "for God's sake cut it [the monument] down to a thousand or two thousand acres" from the total of 270 square miles of gypsum. [37]

Hawkins' opposition to creation of the NPS unit developed momentum in February 1930, when Park Service director Horace Albright asked President Hoover to withdraw nine townships (a total of 354 square miles) in the White Sands area for study. Both New Mexico senators, Sam Bratton and Bronson M. Cutting, supported Hoover's action, as did the El Paso and Alamogordo "boards of trade." Hawkins, a veteran of Albert Fall's AYNP deliberations, suddenly found the process of withdrawal highly offensive, and begged Governor Richard C. Dillon to intercede. Hawkins considered especially outrageous the idea that the Interior secretary (Ray Lyman Wilbur) need not "depend upon what is agreed upon in New Mexico, but very largely upon the experts to whom [Wilbur] may commit the [White Sands] question for examination." Dillon complied with Hawkins' request, and prevailed upon Secretary Wilbur not to act as capriciously as Albert Fall had planned a decade earlier when he coveted access to Mescalero lands. [38]

Two problems arose for Tom Charles and the park service after William Hawkins' intervention. The NPS did not have a qualified staff member available to visit White Sands and write a report before the close of the summer tourist season. Director Albright had asked Thomas Boles, superintendent of the nearby Carlsbad Caverns National Park, to examine the dunes as the official observer for the park service. Boles could not make the journey to White Sands, but wrote to Albright stating his belief that the dunes, in the words of Dietmar Schneider-Hector, "did not constitute an interest for the National Park Service." Local businesses also worried, as had William Hawkins, about the precedent of removing the entire dune field from economic development. But Tom Charles wrote to all public officials concerned of the volume of tourist traffic that would stop at White Sands should the monument be created. [39]

Correspondence in 1931 between Charles and parties interested in White Sands revealed the power of Hawkins, Fall, and other business leaders to shape the destiny of White Sands. Arno Cammerer, acting director of the NPS , came to the nearby town of Roswell in July of that year to gauge regional support for the monument. He informed the Roswell chamber of commerce president, J.S.B. Woolford, that the Park Service "had some one hundred twenty projects to inspect, but they were going to give the White Sands some priority." Tom Charles then informed Claude Simpson of Roswell that he would accept a monument reduced greatly in size; some 43 sections, or 27,000 acres. "It would give us some of the best of the sand," said Charles, "and still leave the main body intact for commercial use should the state [of New Mexico] ever get it and use it." Charles would be satisfied also with two miles of the dunes facing U.S. Highway 70. All that remained, he thought, was favorable treatment from Thomas Boles and from Roger Toll, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, whom the NPS considered its premier authority on park feasibility. [40]

As the summer tourist season neared its end, Charles became concerned when neither Boles nor Toll had paid a visit to Alamogordo or the dunes. He then contacted George L. Boundey, custodian at Tumacacori National Monument in southern Arizona. A former resident of Alamogordo who had lived one summer in a cabin at the dunes , Boundey worked for Frank Pinkley, superintendent of the NPS's division of southwestern monuments. Pinkley, who would be instrumental in guiding Charles once White Sands joined the park system, could offer critical support if he favored the dunes' application. Charles had learned by late September 1931 that Carlsbad's Boles had recommended a unit two miles wide and "seventeen or eighteen miles long," covering a "cross-section of the Sands and the old lake bed to the west [Lake Lucero]." Pinkley demurred, preferring that Charles proceed through channels with the Boles and Toll reports. By November the latter review had been completed, but Charles still worried about the obstructionism in Alamogordo. He thus informed Roger Toll: "There is a prevailing notion here that there is a great commercial value out there in the Sands." The local chamber had promised monument detractors not to seek the entire dune ecosystem. "We will appreciate your cooperation to that end," Charles wrote to the Yellowstone superintendent, concluding that "that promise not only has been made to Mr. Hawkins and his friends but to Governor [Arthur] Seligman and the Chambers of Commerce at our adjoining towns." [41]

Late twentieth century historians of the park service, like Alfred Runte, would note that incidents like the reduction of White Sands' acreage typified the failure of the NPS to ensure protection of natural ecosystems within park boundaries. The park service itself declared in 1933 that "the enduring obstacle to sound ecological management in the national parks was the prior emphasis on setting aside purely scenic wonders." Roger Toll's report did expand Tom Charles' idea of a more modest park from 27,000 acres to nearly 150,000 acres; yet this constituted less than half of the dune field. Given the variables at work in the Tularosa basin, however, Tom Charles had managed no small feat when in the fall of 1932 Senator Cutting promised in a private meeting in Alamogordo: "I will do everything I can for you but suggest that you be satisfied with a National Monument instead of an National Park, it will be much easier to get." [42]

The promise of Senator Cutting convinced Tom Charles that establishment of the monument lay close at hand. Cutting's biographer, Richard Lowitt, wrote that Cutting had great influence with President Hoover, sharing with him the Progressive faith in "wise use" of western lands. As 1932 was an election year, with Hoover facing a strong challenge from the charismatic Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president accelerated the pace of park review and selection. White Sands would benefit from Hoover's decision to expand the NPS with nine new units that year, and from the forty percent increase in park holdings by the time Hoover left the White House the following March. [43]

Hoover's ignominious defeat at the polls in November 1932 has been described as the nadir of his administration. Yet the president exercised his executive authority in the waning days of his term to accept the judgments of the NPS staff, and of Bronson Cutting, to establish White Sands National Monument. Acting under the auspices of the Antiquities Act of 1906, Hoover issued on January 18, 1933, a proclamation designating 142,987 acres of the White Sands dune fields as the nation s newest National Park Service facility. In recognition of the sands' distinctiveness and multifaceted appeal, Hoover wrote that the NPS should manage the unit not only for the generic purpose of preservation, but also for its "additional features of scenic, scientific, and educational interest." Bronson Cutting then congratulated Tom Charles by telegraph, and the thirty-five-year journey of dune preservation had reached a satisfactory conclusion. O. Fred Arthur, supervisor of the Lincoln National Forest from 1918-1934, spoke for many when he wrote upon retirement: "Tom Charles always worked best when confronted with opposition." Arthur, the veteran of many collaborative efforts with the Kansas insurance agent, concluded of Charles: "As everyone knows it was mainly through his persistence and efforts that the Monument became an actuality." [44]