entrance to the monument. There stage riders found water for themselves and their horses, and modest accommodations for food and lodging.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
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
- ↑ Meinzer and Hare, "Tularosa Basin," 18; Schneider-Hector, "White Sands," 118.
- ↑ Schneider-Hector, "White Sands," 119.
- ↑ Ibid., 120.
- ↑ Ibid., 121–22; Meinzer and Hare, "Tularosa Basin," 18; Peter L. Eidenbach, "The Culture History of White Sands National Monument," 1992, unpublished MS, WHSA Library.
