Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/15

A Monument in Waiting Interior department, supervisor of NPS activities, was deluged with requests both frivolous and meritorious from local boosters of a given site. To rationalize the preservation process, the Archeological Institute of America (AIA), and one of its foremost officials, Edgar Lee Hewett, campaigned with Congress to give the President authority to designate areas for NPS protection by executive fiat. This would halt the desecration of Indian ruins in the Southwest, an issue close to the heart of Hewett, whose long career in archeology gave rise to several programs of research and teaching, including the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico, both in Santa Fe, and the anthropology departments of the University of Southern California and the University of New Mexico.

Rothman's research highlighted the role of natural scientists in the development of national monuments, a factor that White Sands shared with its peers. Committed more to preservation than were boosters of national parks, scientists saw the ecological variety of the smaller sites as worthy of close scrutiny undisturbed by excessive visitation. White Sands, more than most monuments of the West, provided scholars of the natural world with a living laboratory that encompassed fields from botany to zoology. By 1940, the NPS itself would list a bibliography of more than two dozen scholarly and popular works about the dunes. This contributed as much to raising awareness among federal officials as did the advocacy of southern New Mexico officials eager for the economic benefits of tourism to the monument.

The geologic history of the dunes began millions of years ago, when natural forces created the Tularosa basin. The basin extends for 150 miles in length, and averages fifty miles in width. The area of the White Sands dunes (within and outside the monument boundaries) stretches some 275 square miles, with average dimensions of 27 miles long and ten miles wide. Some forty percent of the dunes are within the monument itself, while the remainder lie on the property of the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), the U.S. Army's huge weapons testing center to the north and west of the monument.

Natt N. Dodge, chief naturalist for the Southwest Regional Office (SWR) of the park service, compiled in 1971 the research of many of the scientists attracted to the basin and dunes since the mid-nineteenth century. He noted that the Tularosa basin had once been part of the vast "Delaware basin," dating back some 230 million years. High in salt content, the Delaware basin collected saline deposits over the millennia that became the basis of the "Yeso formation," with the term "yeso" translated from the Spanish word for "gypsum." About 70 million years ago, the event called by geologists