Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/18

 6 and human landscape of the nation's massive conquest (one-third of the continental land mass).

William N. Goetzmann has written extensively about the journeys of the highly trained West Point engineering graduates throughout western North America. The first party of Army officers to study the Southwest came south in 1849 from Santa Fe under the command of Lieutenant William Randolph Marcy. The CTE unit did not veer eastward from the Las Cruces-Dona Ana area, in part because they found no Hispanic guides willing to engage the desolation and Mescalero presence of the Tularosa basin. Marcy did hear stories of large salt deposits, and he dispatched Lieutenant William Smith to study the feasibility of a military wagon road to the Sierra Blanca. Smith's report contained no references to the sand dunes, even though his route went past White Sands near present-day U.S. Highway 70.

As with much of the development of the American West, the Tularosa basin first gained economic viability with construction in 1855 of Fort Stanton. The military outpost above the present-day mountain community of Ruidoso was a reminder to the Mescalero Apaches of the interest that Americans had in the resources of the West, though limited funding prior to the Civil War kept settlements from appearing in the basin. The Army did build several service roads westward to the Rio Grande corridor, one of which headed south of White Sands through San Agustin Pass in the Organ Mountains. Then in 1861 a group of Hispanic families journeyed eastward across the basin to establish the farming community of Tularosa, which was joined two years later by more Hispanic families at the village of La Luz, northeast of present-day Alamogordo. It was these communities that first utilized the gypsum resources of White Sands, as villagers applied moistened sand to the walls of their adobe homes to deflect the rays of the summer sun, and to give the buildings a distinctive white appearance from a distance.

After the Civil War, two issues merged in southern New Mexico to bring attention to White Sands. The nation's concerted efforts to locate Indian tribes on reservations created a temporary market for beef for soldiers at Fort Stanton, and for the Mescaleros on their reservation (created in 1873). In addition, gold prospectors explored the mountain ranges surrounding the basin, with discoveries to the north and east of White Sands as early as 1865 in Nogal Canyon. Stage routes ran across the basin floor in the 1870s, with one line stopping at the "Point of Sands," near the present-day