Whtie Sands Administrative History

The travel year 1938 (October 1937-September 1938) marked the first time since its inception that White Sands could boast of "full-service" status. Completion of the visitors center-headquarters facilities contributed to the high level of patronage (110,000 visitors), with the months of July (16,830), August (22,941), and September (14,446) outdrawing the twelve-month counts of all other SWNM service units, except Frank Pinkley's own Casa Grande. This occurred even though the U.S. Highway 70 paving project stood unfinished. More scholars came to White Sands than at any time since creation of the monument. Prestigious institutions like the University of Michigan sent Dr. Frank Blair, the research associate of L.R. Dice, director of the school's "Laboratory of Vertebrate Genetics" and himself discoverer in 1927 of the dunes' "white mice." Charles B. Lipman, dean of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted seeds of plants that grew in the whitest gypsum formations. The University of Chicago's Charles E. Olmsted, an instructor of botany, visited six national parks and monuments of the Southwest that year, and wrote to Tom Charles: "We still feel that . . . White Sands National Monument is more than worthy of its status and preservation." Olmsted "recommended it as something truly unique - both scenically and emotionally," especially the "sunrise and sunset . . . over those strange white dunes against the purple jagged mountains." [61]

For general public promotion, Tom Charles offered similar access to the monument via correspondence. Mrs. A.F. Quisenberry of El Paso wrote to Charles in March to inform him that FDR's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, would visit her that month. Charles suggested a circle tour of Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, promising that "Government officials want to co-operate with you in protecting her visit from over crowded conditions." Theater operators in Albuquerque and Portales wanted sacks of gypsum for use in the lobbies of their movie houses. So did Coe Howard, state representative from Portales, who asked for a truckload of gypsum for New Mexico's exhibit in Amarillo's "Tri-State Fair" (Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). Tom Charles offered to lend one of the park service trucks for the task. If Frank Pinkley refused, he then remarked: "Possibly I can work my friend the Governor [Tingley] to send a [state] highway truck over with a little sand in it." (Pinkley rejected both options.) Then the Rock Island railroad mounted in the window of its Chicago offices a display of White Sands gypsum as a travel promotion. D.M. Wootton, publicity manager for the Rock Island, noted the prominence of the exhibit in the "Insurance Exchange Building" in the busy Chicago "Loop." Wootton's gesture prompted Charles to exclaim to the NPS's Isabelle Story: "I do not know how I can ever repay my friends . . . for the many nice things they say and do for the Great White Sands." [62]

While scientific research and popular venues had been part of Charles' strategy for promotion of the monument, in 1938 three new concepts appeared: a children's story about the dunes by NPS naturalist Natt Dodge; Charles' efforts to tell the tale of the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, and his journey through the Southwestern deserts in the 1530s; and also the custodian's printing and sale of a pamphlet with NPS photographs entitled, "The Story of the Great White Sands." Dodge, who in 1971 would publish the masterful Natural History of White Sands, had visited the dunes in 1938 with his family. The naturalist noted the joy with which his own children frolicked in the gypsum, and wanted to write an article about the annual visits of the state school for the blind. "There is quite a field for exploiting the play angle at the Sands," said Dodge, "simply because, with reasonable control, there is little chance of danger either to the monument or to the people." The dunes offered "the one spot" in the park service "where we can let recreation mean play." In an ironic, if unconscious reference to the resistance of Tom Charles' superiors to acknowledge the pre-eminence of recreation at White Sands, Dodge conceded: "Rolling rocks over cliffs isn't so good in a National Park, so that sort of thing has to be taboo." But the dunes were "unique," and "kids can roll down [them], run races, throw sand, or build castles without harming either the scenery or themselves." [63]

Charles' own writings about the monument had focused upon the recreational potential and natural beauty of southern New Mexico. Yet he also became enamored of the story of Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca, the shipwrecked Spanish official who wandered from Florida to northern Mexico in the years 1528-1536. The 1930s had witnessed a surge of interest in the historical antecedents of modern America, as much to assuage the doubts of many citizens for the future of the country as to chronicle the past. In particular, the scholarship of Herbert Eugene Bolton, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, brought into focus the exploits of the sixteenth century Spanish conquerors in the "Borderlands" (the crescent of land between San Francisco, northern Mexico, and Florida). Bolton's work, and that of his graduate students, evolved as did the fascination with regionalism in architecture that had prompted the park service to design the White Sands visitors center in adobe style.

In the September 1938 issue of New Mexico Magazine, Charles wrote of his speculation that Cabeza de Vaca had traversed the southern edge of the Tularosa basin before turning south for Mexico City. Charles sought to link the explorer with the monument as George Grant had done with Billy the Kid, since White Sands had the only historical museum display in the basin. Such a connection would also bring White Sands into the orbit of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission (or "4C's"), an ambitious project begun in 1934 at the University of New Mexico to commemorate in 1940 the 400 years of Spanish presence in the region since the journey of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (1540-1542). Governor Tingley, UNM President James F. Zimmerman, and Albuquerque insurance salesman and New Deal official Clinton P. Anderson, sought to place New Mexico on the national tourist map with a series of scholarly and popular events. By 1938 the planning phase of the 4C's had yet to bear financial fruit, but the ever-ambitious Alamogordo chamber of commerce urged Charles to remind the 4C's promoters in the northern part of the state to include venues south of Albuquerque. [64]

Charles' fascination with the Cabeza de Vaca story, like his persistence in supporting establishment of the monument, had worn down the skepticism of others. In January 1937, Joe Bursey, director of the state tourism bureau (and publisher of New Mexico Magazine), had rejected a similar article from Charles because of the far-fetched notion of Vaca's wanderings northward. But Charles read certain passages in Vaca' s journals that described environmental features akin to the basin: the southern edge of the buffalo country; the presence of pinon (pine nuts more common in northern New Mexico); and the general belief among historians that Vaca had to cross the "Llano Estacado" ("staked plains") of west Texas, somewhere north of El Paso. Charles even corresponded with the famed Borderlands historian, Carlos E. Castaneda, the Latin American librarian at the University of Texas, Austin. Castaneda, the proponent of Spanish contributions to a state more enamored of its Anglo accomplishments (most notably the 1836 Texas Revolt and its defense of the Alamo), agreed to help Charles establish the Vaca-Tularosa linkage with access to his own research, entitled, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas. [65]

Figure 16. Hispanic workers making corbels for Visitors Center (1930s).
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)