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.[1]
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.[2]
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
- ↑ Cynthia Secor Welsh, "A 'Star Will Be Added:' Miguel Antonio Otero and the Struggle for Statehood," New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 67, no. 1 (January 1992): 33–51; Michael Welsh, "A History of the University of New Mexico, 1889–1994," unpublished MS in possession of the author.
- ↑ Meinzer and Hare, "Tularosa Basin," 22–23.
