Whtie Sands Administrative History

The nation's lawmakers may have misunderstood the environmental and ethnic variables of southern New Mexico, but Governor Miguel Antonio Otero knew of scientific fascination with the ecology and resource potential of the Tularosa basin. 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. Of these, the land-grant school at Las Cruces (now New Mexico State University), and the school of mines in Socorro (New Mexico Institute of Mining Technology), were nearest to White Sands, and produced a large volume of research on the basin and the dunes. The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (the territory's flagship liberal arts school), and even the teachers college in Las Vegas (New Mexico Highlands University) would send faculty to the dunes in the early twentieth century to gain knowledge about the flora, fauna, and mineral resources of the area. [22]

The scholarly output on White Sands and its environs impressed not only Governor Otero, but all who conducted literature searches for student term papers and scientific publications alike. O.E. Meinzer and R.F. Hare, in their 1915 report on the Tularosa basin for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), noted no fewer than twenty-five publications of varying length on the dunes and the region. The first mention of the sands came in 1870, when George Gibbs, a geology professor in New York City, published an article in the American Naturalist on the "Salt Plains of New Mexico." The dunes had come to his attention when he received a packet of gypsum sand mailed by General August V. Kautz, stationed with the Army at Fort Stanton. Kautz stopped often at the Point of Sands stage station while crossing the basin, and he knew from his training at West Point of the properties of gypsum. Gibbs quoted the general as saying of the dunes: "The sand is so white and the plain so extensive as to give the effect of snow scenery." Kautz had not "seen a description of the place in print," and thus mailed "a specimen of the sand" to Gibbs for his analysis. [23]

For the next fifteen years, no scholar attempted an assessment of the White Sands until M.W. Harrington wrote in the magazine Science (1885) of "Lost Rivers." He speculated that the Tularosa area had been part of "a supposed old river bed." Harrington further recorded an Indian legend of the basin's formation, "a year of fire, when this valley was filled with flames and poisonous gases." He proposed naming the basin the "Gran Quivira Valley," for the fanciful stories of Indian wealth in New Mexico pursued by Coronado. The 1890s saw further interest in White Sands by academics, as R.T. Hill wrote in the Geological Society of America Bulletin (1891) about the "Hueco-Organ Basin." In that same year R.S. Tarr published in the American Naturalist "A recent lava flow in New Mexico." Tarr took Harrington's "lost river" thesis a step further, deducing from the presence of gypsum deposits, salt marshes, and "ancient beaches" that the "well-defined valleys . . . extend much farther than the present streams succeed in going." [24]

The study of White Sands reached a new level of sophistication in 1898, when Clarence L. Herrick traveled from Albuquerque to collect data for the first of three scholarly articles in national journals. Herrick had built a distinguished reputation as a geologist and academic with a doctorate from the University of Chicago and an offer in 1897 of a research chair at his alma mater. Herrick, however, suffered from tuberculosis, and came west for "the cure" that late nineteenth century doctors prescribed: the clear air, high altitude, and arid climate of New Mexico.

Once in the Southwest, Herrick took a position on the faculty of the newly opened Socorro school of mines, where he taught from 1894-1897. He traveled widely in central New Mexico, as a mining boom west of Socorro had attracted other geologists. When Governor Otero assumed leadership of the territory in 1897, he encouraged the University of New Mexico to replace its missionary-schoolteacher president (Hiram Hadley) with the more sophisticated Herrick. 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.

What brought Herrick to the White Sands was passage in Congress in 1898 of the "Fergusson Act," named for the territorial delegate (Harvey Fergusson) who secured 200,000 acres of public lands for New Mexico's colleges. Otero instructed Herrick to survey these lands personally, and to select acreage which in his professional judgment would generate sufficient royalties to supplement the meager funding provided by the territorial legislature. Herrick rode horseback into the Zuni Mountains of far western New Mexico to claim timberlands for UNM, and then came east to the "saline lands" to assess their potential for salt production. [25]

In order to publicize his findings, President Herrick sent an article in 1898 to the American Geologist entitled, "The occurrence of copper and lead in the San Andreas [sic] and Caballos mountains." He then published simultaneously in his own University of New Mexico Bulletin and the prestigious Journal of Geology (1900) "The geology of the white sands of New Mexico." This marked the first thorough description of the formation of the San Andres Mountains and the alkali flats, with references to many springs of water throughout the area: After leaving UNM for reasons of health in 1901, Herrick returned to Socorro to write in 1904 the last of his tracts on the region, entitled "Lake Otero, an ancient salt lake basin in southeastern New Mexico," published in the American Geologist. He linked the basin to the Rio Grande valley formation, and measured the antediluvian lake bed at 1,600 to 1,800 square miles. Not surprisingly, Herrick recognized New Mexico's patron of science by naming the lake in the governor's honor. [26]

Evidence of the scientific curiosity about White Sands emerged immediately in scholarly journals. H.N. Herrick, Clarence's brother and himself a geologist at the University of Chicago, published in 1904 in the U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin "Gypsum deposits of New Mexico." Quickly appearing in that same year were two articles by C.R. Keyes, one in the American Journal of Science ("Unconformity of Cretaceous on older rocks in central New Mexico"), and another in the Engineering and Mining Journal ("Iron deposits of Chupadera Plateau"). The following year T.H. McBride published in Science "The Alamogordo desert," offering a survey of the botany as well as geology of the dunes. Even Clarence Herrick's successor at UNM, William G. Tight, wrote in 1905 in the American Geologist of "The Bolson plains of the Southwest." Tight, who had studied under Herrick at Denison University in Ohio and later at Chicago, served as editor of the American Geologist, the journal of the Geological Society of America, and in 1907 brought the group to Albuquerque to meet amidst the ecological distinctiveness of his adopted home. [27]

Later scholarship moved the findings of Clarence Herrick, et al., beyond their general surveys into more detailed accounts of the disparate elements of the basin and the dunes. Thus it was no surprise to the nation's scientists in the 1920s that local interests in Alamogordo, led by the homesteader Tom Charles, petitioned for inclusion of the White Sands into the national park system. Factors of politics, economics, and environmental concern had forged a thesis about the Tularosa basin that it was a land of extremes, posing challenges and offering rewards to whomever sought access to it. The journey of the monument, therefore, would be charted by the ecological and historical markers laid down over centuries and millennia, and would shape the operations and management of the monument throughout the twentieth century.

Figure 4. Cactus growth.
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)