notices in favor of the fragmented park. One such document quoted Enos Mills, the "father of the Rocky Mountain National Park," as saying: "No scenery in all Colorado [the site of the park] surpasses that of the Mescalero Indian Reservation." The release described the tribal lands as having "exceptional climatic advantages over any other public playground on the continent," with "beauties [that] may be enjoyed the year 'round." As an afterthought, the SAYNPA added: "Nearby are the famous White Sands, rightly designated 'one of the wonders of the world,' and the Mai Pais, the latest lava flow on this continent." Should Congress approve Fall's plan, said the release, it would provide "a means of attracting tourists and sightseers and prospective homebuilders to a part of the country, which for variety of unconventional scenery has no equal elsewhere in America."[1]
This press release revealed both the boldness of Fall's plan and his sophisticated understanding of the "car culture" to NPS strategies for expansion. By linking the park units to highway construction, then connecting both to the new "leisure economy" developing in southern California and Florida, Fall hoped to outmaneuver the NPA or any other obstructionists. Perhaps the ease with which he had dismissed early Park Service objections fooled him, as in May 1922 he ordered Stephen Mather to come to Three Rivers to study the AYNP concept. Among the officials meeting with Mather were Tom Charles and the Alamogordo chamber. Dietmar Schneider-Hector wrote that Mather spoke to the Alamogordo Commercial Club banquet on May 3, 1922, revealing "that the sites he had visited lacked scenery generally associated with national parks." Mather mollified the Alamogordo audience by "adding that there remained sufficient areas to compensate for the apparent deficiencies." Upon his return to Washington, Mather wrote Fall that the AYNP's "disjointed boundaries, lack of spectacular scenery, and questionable usage" made the measure "unrealistic" and "preposterous."[2]
Perhaps Albert Fall would have succeeded with his All-Year park had he not coupled the measure with another initiative close to the hearts of many New Mexico land speculators and developers: the "Bursum bill" to quiet title to Pueblo Indian land claims. In the early 1920s, some Progressive reformers had tired of their exercises on behalf of urban social change, and looked about for new, less-taxing causes. One area of their interest was the American West, appealing for its beauty, tranquility, and exotic Native cultures. In this regard they joined forces with the artistic communities forming in California and New Mexico (especially the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies), where members of the postwar "Lost Generation" of disaffected urbanites gathered to paint, write, sculpt, and photograph the otherworldliness of the Southwest's lands and people.[3]
- ↑ Press Release, "What Others Say Of the Park Site," n.d. 1922, Letters Received and Letters Sent Files, Mechem Papers.
- ↑ Schneider-Hector, White Sands, 65–66.
- ↑ For a discussion of the role of the "Lost Generation" in the 1920s Southwest, see Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900–1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
