Herrick recognized New Mexico's patron of science by naming the lake in the governor's honor.[1]
Evidence of the scientific curiosity about White Sands emerged immediately in scholarly journals. H.N. Herrick, Clarence's brother and himself a geologist at the University of Chicago, published in 1904 in the U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin "Gypsum deposits of New Mexico." Quickly appearing in that same year were two articles by C.R. Keyes, one in the American Journal of Science ("Unconformity of Cretaceous on older rocks in central New Mexico"), and another in the Engineering and Mining Journal ("Iron deposits of Chupadera Plateau"). The following year T.H. McBride published in Science "The Alamogordo desert," offering a survey of the botany as well as geology of the dunes. Even Clarence Herrick's successor at UNM, William G. Tight, wrote in 1905 in the American Geologist of "The Bolson plains of the Southwest." Tight, who had studied under Herrick at Denison University in Ohio and later at Chicago, served as editor of the American Geologist, the journal of the Geological Society of America, and in 1907 brought the group to Albuquerque to meet amidst the ecological distinctiveness of his adopted home.[2]
Later scholarship moved the findings of Clarence Herrick, et al., beyond their general surveys into more detailed accounts of the disparate elements of the basin and the dunes. Thus it was no surprise to the nation's scientists in the 1920s that local interests in Alamogordo, led by the homesteader Tom Charles, petitioned for inclusion of the White Sands into the national park system. Factors of politics, economics, and environmental concern had forged a thesis about the Tularosa basin that it was a land of extremes, posing challenges and offering rewards to whomever sought access to it. The journey of the monument, therefore, would be charted by the ecological and historical markers laid down over centuries and millennia, and would shape the operations and management of the monument throughout the twentieth century.
