precious water rights. The Alamogordo Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the rail line, then platted a village that grew within twelve months to one thousand inhabitants.
Finding the legacy of Billy the Kid less romantic than later generations of novel readers, movie-goers, and tourism promoters, the town organizers petitioned the territorial governor, Miguel A. Otero, to provide law and order by carving out a separate county in the basin. The decision to name the county after the governor, said Mrs. Tom Charles, wife of the first superintendent at White Sands National Monument, came when a lawyer for the railroad, William Ashton Hawkins, and a Dona Ana County politician, Albert Bacon Fall, asked Otero to remove Alamogordo and the basin from the legal jurisdiction of distant Las Cruces and its authoritarian sheriff, Pat Garrett (more famous for his role in the slaying of Billy the Kid). According to Mrs. Charles, an accomplished news correspondent, Fall and Hawkins had opposed the power of Thomas Catron and the Santa Fe Ring, primarily Catron's efforts to control cattle ranching in southern New Mexico. Range wars had persisted in the basin since the death in 1881 of Billy the Kid. Hawkins and Fall, who would influence basin politics for the next three decades, appealed not only to Governor Otero's vanity but also to his desire to check the power of Catron and his Santa Fe contemporaries. Hawkins would work as an attorney for the EPNE and later the Southern Pacific Railroad, while Fall would move from Las Cruces in 1905 to the Tularosa-Carrizozo area, purchasing the 100,000-acre cattle operation of Pat Coghlan and naming it the Three Rivers Ranch.[1]
Economic activity in the basin that included such high-profile figures as Hawkins and Fall drew the attention of other investors. One such group in El Paso wanted the federal government in 1898 to establish a twelve-square mile "national park" that included "the extreme northwest corner" of the Mescalero Indian reservation, thirty-eight miles northeast of the dunes. The El Paso initiative for a "Mescalero National Park" signalled changing public tastes at the close of the Gilded Age regarding natural resource development. The rapid exploitation of western lands bothered a small but vocal segment of the American public, for whom the aesthetic value of unspoiled nature rivalled the marketability of timber, minerals, and water. The historian Samuel P. Hays, in his book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959), defined this transition from "use" to "preservation" as the "conservation movement," part of the larger political and economic revolution known as "Progressivism." Unlike their late-twentieth century successors (the environmentalists), conservationists believed in concepts like "wise use" of resources, "sustained yield" of production, and the "gospel of efficiency" in policy making, which often appeared as the cliche: "The greatest good for the greatest number."[2]
The debate over the future of Tularosa basin lands would influence White Sands throughout the twentieth century. Howard Lamar noted that by the 1890s, prominent
- ↑ Ibid.; Transcript of news feature by Mrs. Tom Charles, September 21, 1954, Charles Papers, MS 18, File 3-2, NMSU.
- ↑ Dietmar Schneider-Hector, White Sands: The History of a National Monument (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1993), 52–54; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).
