Chapter Two
The Politics of Monument-Building:
White Sands, 1898–1933
The ecological complexity of the White Sands region had its human counterpart in the protracted efforts of southern New Mexicans to create a unit of the National Park Service at the dunes. Analysis of the political economy of Otero County in the early twentieth century reveals patterns of ambition and conflict that blessed and cursed the national monument campaign for over three decades. These conditions also revealed the challenges awaiting future generations interested in the management of the vast gypsum fields of the Tularosa basin.
Promoters of the "Land of Enchantment" (including park service officials) have been less enthused about the stories of southern New Mexico than they have the more renowned Rio Grande valley and the mountainous north. Yet the historical variables that affected these more populous, and perhaps more romanticized sectors of New Mexico also shaped the development of counties such as Otero. Then, too, the distinctive environmental circumstances of distance, aridity, and isolation gave rise to economic strategies rarely seen elsewhere in New Mexico. The natural forces that crafted the White Sands thus washed over the human landscape to the extent that the western writer Emerson Hough called the basin "as dangerous a country as ever lay out of doors."[1]
Much has been made in popular literature of the area's range wars (especially the Lincoln County Wars of 1878–1881), and of their most glamorous villain, William H. Antrim, or William Bonney, or Billy the Kid. This emphasis obscured the linkage between a harsh environment and extensive efforts to develop southeastern New Mexico's resources. The players in this drama exhibited the qualities of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking that scholars have either described as virtuous or destructive. The post-Civil War era nationwide (1865–1900) has been characterized as the "Gilded Age;" a term first employed by the author Mark Twain to explain the dichotomy between America's rising standard of living, and the manipulation of power and money by industrialists and financiers. The burgeoning cities of the eastern United States required vast amounts of raw materials for industrial production, and the most likely sector for exploitation was the interior West.
Out of this period of rapid economic growth came the "Santa Fe Ring," a small group of investors, politicians, and publicists that took advantage of the dependent status, modest income levels, and lack of access to the outside world that burdened much of territorial New Mexico. Because Congress refused to grant statehood to New Mexico until 1912, the political and economic power of the territory rested in Washington, DC, and in the hands of federal appointees in Santa Fe. In his book, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (1966), Howard R. Lamar wrote of this process of isolation and dependency: "The ring reflected the corporative, monopolistic, and multiple
- ↑ Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 137.
