Whtie Sands Administrative History

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. In like manner, later cave dwellers called the "Hueco" culture (from the Spanish word for "tank") appeared along the west face of the Sacramento Mountains by AD 500. Building upon the centuries of agricultural evolution in the region, the Hueco people lived in pit houses and cultivated crops by diverting water from nearby streams. Pottery remains found along the margins of the basin have been linked to the cliff-dwelling "Mogollon" culture of southwestern New Mexico, indicating the trade networks and leisure time available to these advanced peoples amid the harshness of the Tularosa basin. [13]

Drought conditions throughout the Southwest after AD 1100 struck the basin, depopulating the area in a fashion similar to that of the Chaco culture of northwestern New Mexico. Archeologists uncovered amid the dunes fire rings of a more nomadic people whose presence in the Tularosa basin is dated from about 1300. The descendants of these hunters named themselves the "Inde," translating from the Athabascan language as "the people." The Spanish, the first Europeans into the area, described them with the term "Mescalero Apache," the name with which most Americans are familiar. The Spanish recognized the Inde use of mescal, the heart of the agave plant found throughout the region, as a source of food and medicine. To this they added the term "Apache," which came from Zuni Pueblo in far western New Mexico to mean the "enemies" of Zuni. The Mescaleros were mountain people who traveled great distances in search of game, from the buffalo plains of southern Colorado and western Kansas, to the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua. They adapted well to the rigors of the desert and mountain landscape; a condition they attributed to their creation story that the first Inde emerged from the side of Sierra Blanca ("White Mountain"), the imposing landmark at 12,000 feet on the eastern border of the Tularosa basin. [14]

Because of their commitment to life in the basin, the Inde posed serious challenges to other Native societies in the Southwest that might have entered the region. The first European explorers considered the basin no more appealing. Romanticists of the 1930s sought linkages of the Tularosa area to such "conquistadores" as Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca, whose travels from Florida to Texas to northern Mexico from 1528-1536 marked the entering wedge of Spanish conquest in the interior of North America. Subsequent "entradas" into New Mexico by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (1540-1542) and Don Juan de Onate (1598) skirted the Tularosa basin to the north (Coronado) and west (Onate). The closest that any Spaniard came to the area was Antonio de Espejo, who in 1583 came north along the Rio Pecos. He and other Spanish explorers described the entire stretch of southern New Mexico as "Las Salinas," or the "salt lands," for the alkaline quality of soil in the basin. Later Spanish period settlement (1598-1821) preferred the more temperate climate of northern New Mexico's river valleys, leaving no record of Spanish intrusion into the White Sands. [15]

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. One measure of this commitment was the deployment of surveying parties of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers (CTE), charged with inventorying the natural and human landscape of the nation's massive conquest (one-third of the continental land mass).

William N. Goetzmann has written extensively about the journeys of the highly trained West Point engineering graduates throughout western North America. The first party of Army officers to study the Southwest came south in 1849 from Santa Fe under the command of Lieutenant William Randolph Marcy. The CTE unit did not veer eastward from the Las Cruces-Dona Ana area, in part because they found no Hispanic guides willing to engage the desolation and Mescalero presence of the Tularosa basin. Marcy did hear stories of large salt deposits, and he dispatched Lieutenant William Smith to study the feasibility of a military wagon road to the Sierra Blanca. Smith's report contained no references to the sand dunes, even though his route went past White Sands near present-day U.S. Highway 70. [16]

As with much of the development of the American West, the Tularosa basin first gained economic viability with construction in 1855 of Fort Stanton. The military outpost above the present-day mountain community of Ruidoso was a reminder to the Mescalero Apaches of the interest that Americans had in the resources of the West, though limited funding prior to the Civil War kept settlements from appearing in the basin. The Army did build several service roads westward to the Rio Grande corridor, one of which headed south of White Sands through San Agustin Pass in the Organ Mountains. Then in 1861 a group of Hispanic families journeyed eastward across the basin to establish the farming community of Tularosa, which was joined two years later by more Hispanic families at the village of La Luz, northeast of present-day Alamogordo. It was these communities that first utilized the gypsum resources of White Sands, as villagers applied moistened sand to the walls of their adobe homes to deflect the rays of the summer sun, and to give the buildings a distinctive white appearance from a distance. [17]

After the Civil War, two issues merged in southern New Mexico to bring attention to White Sands. The nation's concerted efforts to locate Indian tribes on reservations created a temporary market for beef for soldiers at Fort Stanton, and for the Mescaleros on their reservation (created in 1873). In addition, gold prospectors explored the mountain ranges surrounding the basin, with discoveries to the north and east of White Sands as early as 1865 in Nogal Canyon. Stage routes ran across the basin floor in the 1870s, with one line stopping at the "Point of Sands," near the present-day entrance to the monument. There stage riders found water for themselves and their horses, and modest accommodations for food and lodging. [18]

By the 1880s, American technology and military power had solidified the nation's claim to the Tularosa basin. The only recorded engagement in the White Sands between Apaches and the U. S. Army occurred on July 25, 1881. Lieutenant John F. Guilfoyle and his unit of the Ninth Cavalry (the famed black, or "buffalo" soldiers) pursued a mixed band of Mescalero and Chiricahua warriors led by chief Nana, son of the legendary Cochise. There were no fatalities listed in Guilfoyle's report, and the Apaches escaped into the San Andres beyond the alkali flats. [19]

Completion in 1881 of the Southern Pacific Railway route from Albuquerque to El Paso also provided the Tularosa basin with its best access to the outside world. Homesteaders followed the large cattle operations of such historical figures as John Chisum, who in 1875 had run over 10,000 head of cattle past the dunes to graze in the northern part of the basin. John Slaughter likewise drove stock to market past the White Sands, giving rise to the "John Slaughter Cattle Trail." Competition for acreage and water spawned the historic Lincoln County Wars (1878-1881), luring Billy the Kid and other outlaws to the basin. [20]

Range wars would linger in the memories of novelists and filmmakers, but to residents of the Tularosa basin the potential for growth created by better transportation and removal of the Mescaleros proved more rewarding . In 1897 two brothers from Dona Ana County, Jose and Felipe Lucero, were among several claimants of homesteads near the proposed rail line from Las Cruces to the Sierra Blanca mining town of White Oaks. The Luceros, both sheriffs in Las Cruces, settled on 160-acre tracts around the saline lake that still bears their name on the southwestern side of the monument. Then in June 1898, the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad arrived in the basin. The townsite of Alamogordo sprang up, sold by a group of Pittsburgh investors incorporated as the "Alamogordo Improvement Company." They purchased the land from a local rancher, Oliver Lee, who had gained notoriety for his trial in 1896 on charges of murdering a prominent Las Cruces judge, Albert Jennings Fountain, and his nine-year old son Henry. Acquitted in the trial, Lee sold his Alamo Ranch to create the town that would press for inclusion of the dunes into the National Park Service. [21]

Figure 3. Cave formation, Lake Lucero.
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)