Whtie Sands Administrative History

The park service could not know the scale of change about to descend upon White Sands, but each passing week in the spring and summer of 1945 revealed a brave new world that challenged Johnwill Faris and his staff. By May the Army Engineers had informed Faris that the extent of test firing might require evacuation of personnel for indefinite periods. Faris learned that the vast stretch of the Tularosa basin (from Socorro to Carrizozo, then south to the Texas state line) had become part of the "Ordcit" project (which Faris for a time called "Ordcet"). On May 28, Faris wrote to Santa Fe NPS officials: "The sands proper are very much in the danger zone. My understanding is that we will be denied any and all use of the sands." Army Engineer appraisers took the monument's "Physical Plant Index" to El Paso to study the extent of NPS facilities that stood in the line of fire. Within days the regional office solicited urgent advice from Chicago, as War Department officials spoke as if "the White Sands are actually going to constitute a bomb target in themselves." E.T. Scoyen, associate director for Region III, underscored this concern with testimony taken from a hearing in Albuquerque of the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Lands. "One is led to conclude that the activity must be of great importance in the conduct of the war," Scoyen wrote to A.E. Demaray in Chicago, as "there could be no other adequate justification for breaking up ranch homes which have been going concerns for well over 50 years with severe financial losses in many instances." [42]

The Army felt confident that it could avoid major damage to NPS facilities at White Sands, but moved nonetheless to secure the park acreage by gaining permission to close U.S. Highway 70 from Alamogordo to Las Cruces. The speed of planning for the atomic test resulted in delays in communications, and also unintended remarks that sustained the levels of anxiety at the monument. On June 4,1945, A.E. Demaray wired Region III with word that the museum need not be dismantled. "We are assured," said Demaray, that the monument was "not a bombing target but merely within [the] path of [the] projectile." Yet the next day, Johnwill Faris reported that a member of his staff, Ray Knabenshue, had spoken with an army captain who said "that unless we [the park service] were out by the 15th [of June] the army would put us out." Faris took Knabenshue's comments seriously, in that he had been well-connected to national leaders prior to coming to White Sands for his health (Knabenshue had been employed by the Wright brothers early in their flying experiments, and his wife had served as personal secretary to FDR while he was governor of New York). The story proved groundless, however, and by June 10 Faris had regained his belief that the postwar era could help rather than hurt the monument. An example was his correspondence with the regional director to plan for "taking in all of the sands area as a postwar movement." Charles Richey had determined that "prevailing winds may move our best sands to lands outside our boundary." The park service should initiate a "complete investigation," and be ready if the acquisition occurred "not in the immediate future, but over a long period of time." [43]

This dream came to an end in July 1945, when the Army Engineers' "Manhattan Project" came south from Los Alamos, New Mexico to detonate the first atomic weapon in human history. When Johnwill Faris learned that White Sands could no longer draw water from the air base because of the project, he realized the scale of the Army's plans. Only two days prior to the July 16 nuclear blast at "Trinity Site," on the White Sands Proving Grounds, Faris discovered that the Army planned not only a twelve-inch waterline from Alamogordo, but also a 115,000-volt power line, and massive airplane runways. "It is a project that is being rushed from all angles," Faris told his Santa Fe superiors, "and things break fast." Then the NPS correspondence became silent on the pace of construction, even though the atomic explosion occurred less than sixty miles northwest of monument headquarters. Thus Faris could not realize how ironic was his letter on August 3 to the regional office protesting the NPS decision to remove the Billy the Kid exhibit from the White Sands museum. Faris, who in 1940 had voiced concern about the park service idolizing such a violent figure where children came to visit , now believed that the early history of the Southwest without Billy was "like the Civil War without [Abraham] Lincoln." Faris had learned in his six years at the dunes that "to a surprisingly large number of people in our southwest Billy the Kid was almost a crusader." To ignore him, "good or bad," said Faris, would now "show a distortion not in keeping with our policy of [portraying] true facts for our visitors." [44]

The need for secrecy lifted on August 6,1945, when press releases heralded the dawn of the nuclear age, and White Sands' place therein. Acting Region III director Scoyen wrote to Chicago NPS officials with an explanation of the impact of the atomic testing on both White Sands and Bandelier national monuments. The Bandelier custodian had once threatened to arrest Los Alamos Army officers engaged in "unauthorized operations," while Johnwill Faris had reported that the nuclear blast on July 16 "was covered up for a time as the explosion of a [munitions] magazine at the air base." Faris' wife Lena, whom Johnwill had sent with their two sons to California just before the test date, remembered in 1993 that the bomb was not only, in the words of historian Ferenc M. Szasz, "the day the sun rose twice" (a reference to the intense glare that pilots saw 600 miles away). The shock waves were also measured 550 miles west of White Sands at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation office in Boulder City, Nevada. Thus it did not surprise Mrs. Faris that the vacuum created by the explosion awoke Joe Shepperd and his wife, sleeping in their house at the monument, and pulled the covers across their bedroom. [45]

Figure 37. McDonald Ranch (1945).
(Courtesy Los Alamos Photographic Laboratory)