Whtie Sands Administrative History

Most troubling of the "baby boom" changes at White Sands was the need to improve law enforcement at the park. This phenomenon had touched all NPS units, as it had the nation as a whole, in the 1960s because of the rate of youthful violence in America's urban centers. Rebellion was a feature of Sixties life, fed by such movements as civil rights, antiwar protest, campus unrest, and the drug culture. Superintendents' reports for White Sands show the progression of law enforcement issues from the early 1960s, when speeding, littering, and an occasional fist fight took place, to the decade's end when drunkenness, burning of picnic tables, firing of bullets into monument signs, theft of property, and gang fights prevailed. Don Dayton revealed the severity of such incidents in 1966 when he informed the Southwest regional director: "The subject state law was never enforced here previously . . . . Over the years this has tended to make White Sands the logical place to hold beer parties that were prohibited elsewhere." This led Dayton to stop the use of alcohol at the dunes, with both the usual complaints and the decline of vandalism and violence. Dayton also had to close the park at 10:00PM in the summer, and to implement higher fees to meet increased costs of service to the public. Among those services was an experiment for a few years with a mounted horse patrol for visibility and speed of response. [21]

Figure 49. Crumbling adobe at Visitors Center in need of repair (1950s).
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)

Lost amid the press of daily business at the dunes was the effort of White Sands' staff to improve access to scientists and researchers. This included assisting NPS naturalist Natt Dodge with research on his pathbreaking Natural History of White Sands (1971) and the international studies of Edwin McKee, a USGS official from Denver, on dunes and their movement. McKee's work required cutting across dunes with large earthmovers borrowed from the military, along with constant measurement of dune drifting and reformation across the monument. McKee's and Dodge's research coincided with the ecological emphasis of the 1960s environmental movement, and the call by Interior secretary Stewart Udall for more analysis of the natural resources in the nation's park system (the "Leopold Report"). Unfortunately, the monument staff could not accommodate all requests for access to the dunes' resources. In August 1965, a group of Mescalero Apaches came to the park in search of "mint bush" for use in ancient tribal ceremonies. The staff told the former inhabitants of the Tularosa basin that "all flora is protected in the monument," and the shrubbery they had collected was confiscated. [22]

Intrusions by Mescalero medicine people, while in violation of NPS rules, would prove to be mere trifles compared to the generation of military encroachment onto the dunes. If the baby boom and postwar economic expansion triggered the exponential growth of White Sands visitation, so too did the quest for national security press upon the monument's borders like no other park service unit. By studying the relationship between the Department of Defense, represented by Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), and Holloman Air Force Base (HAFB), one learns several lessons about the park service and Cold War America. The massive expenditures of federal defense dollars ($150 billion in the West from 1945-1960), in the words of Gerald Nash, "opened up a vast new resource for jobs." Ironically, said Nash, "technology made great stretches of the once vaunted Great American Desert habitable and pleasant." But the wealth and prosperity generated by "vast new scientific and technological centers . . . with special emphasis on the aerospace and electronics industries," which caused western income to more than double after 1945, also placed great strains upon the ecology and natural resources of the Tularosa basin. While Alamogordo never became the city of 90,000 that Johnwill Faris predicted in 1956, the dunes could serve as a case study of Nash's charge in 1977: "By the middle of the twentieth century the West had already become an almost classic example of environmental imbalance brought about by wanton and unplanned applications of science and technology." [23]

Figure 50. Ranger checking stream gauge in Dog Canyon (1950s).
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)