Whtie Sands Administrative History

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]