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.[1]
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.[2]
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
- ↑ For a popular narrative of the Inde, see C.L. Sonnichsen, The Mescalero Apache, second edition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); a more thorough anthropological treatment is Morris E. Opler, Apache Odyssey: A Journey Between Two Worlds (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969).
- ↑ David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 79, 80, 82.
