Whtie Sands Administrative History

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)