Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/13



In August 1935, Carl P. Russell, chief of the eastern museum division of the National Park Service (NPS), published in the National Geographic Magazine a stunning photographic essay on the White Sands National Monument. Accompanied to the Tularosa basin of southern New Mexico by the park service's chief photographer, George A. Grant, Russell wrote movingly of the ecological treasure that Congress only two years earlier had designated for protection from development. Whether one's interest ran to science, archeology, or history, said Russell, White Sands provided opportunities for research and study. And should one be motivated more by the heart, those whom Russell called "discerning travelers" might find "the loveliness of its white and green, [and] the cleanliness of its vast expanse" that ranked White Sands among what the veteran park service official called "Nature's masterpieces."

The story of White Sands National Monument offers the visitor, student, and public official an excellent setting in which to observe the forces of nature upon human beings, and their reaction to the challenge posed by the dunes. The historian C. Leland Sonnichsen, longtime faculty member at the nearby University of Texas at El Paso, wrote extensively about the daunting features of environment and ethnicity confronting all who entered the arid stretches of the Tularosa basin (so named for the expanse of "tulare," the Spanish word for "red weed"). Sonnichsen once described the high desert between the Rio Grande and Pecos River as "the laboratory for the science of doing without." How the National Park Service developed and maintained a site as striking and dramatic as Carl Russell's "masterpiece" says much about the history of the park service, the state of New Mexico (especially its understudied southern reaches), and the American West down through time.

Within the past decade, historians have sought to join with scientists, photographers, artists, and tourism promoters to assess the meaning of national parks and monuments. The most provocative of these works came from Alfred Runte, who in 1979 published National Parks: The American Experience. Taking issue with the conventional wisdom that the NPS was America's most-cherished federal agency, and that preservation of natural landscapes marked the high point of national altruism, Runte posited three factors motivating Congress and park advocates. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, citizens concerned with destruction by private interests of ecological treasures (primarily west of the Mississippi River) had to convince the nation's lawmakers that potential park land was "worthless." This idea echoed the privatism of the post-Civil War era, known {{dhr]}