Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/21

 A Monument in Waiting beaches" that the "well-defined valleys … extend much farther than the present streams succeed in going."

The study of White Sands reached a new level of sophistication in 1898, when Clarence L. Herrick traveled from Albuquerque to collect data for the first of three scholarly articles in national journals. Herrick had built a distinguished reputation as a geologist and academic with a doctorate from the University of Chicago and an offer in 1897 of a research chair at his alma mater. Herrick, however, suffered from tuberculosis, and came west for "the cure" that late nineteenth century doctors prescribed: the clear air, high altitude, and arid climate of New Mexico.

Once in the Southwest, Herrick took a position on the faculty of the newly opened Socorro school of mines, where he taught from 1894–1897. He traveled widely in central New Mexico, as a mining boom west of Socorro had attracted other geologists. When Governor Otero assumed leadership of the territory in 1897, he encouraged the University of New Mexico to replace its missionary-schoolteacher president (Hiram Hadley) with the more sophisticated Herrick. Otero and Herrick then undertook the arduous task of building a national reputation for territorial higher learning, focusing on the use of scientific research to develop New Mexico's resource economy, and thus its financial base for better education.

What brought Herrick to the White Sands was passage in Congress in 1898 of the "Fergusson Act," named for the territorial delegate (Harvey Fergusson) who secured 200,000 acres of public lands for New Mexico's colleges. Otero instructed Herrick to survey these lands personally, and to select acreage which in his professional judgment would generate sufficient royalties to supplement the meager funding provided by the territorial legislature. Herrick rode horseback into the Zuni Mountains of far western New Mexico to claim timberlands for UNM, and then came east to the "saline lands" to assess their potential for salt production.

In order to publicize his findings, President Herrick sent an article in 1898 to the American Geologist entitled, "The occurrence of copper and lead in the San Andreas [sic] and Caballos mountains." He then published simultaneously in his own University of New Mexico Bulletin and the prestigious Journal of Geology (1900) "The geology of the white sands of New Mexico." This marked the first thorough description of the formation of the San Andres Mountains and the alkali flats, with references to many springs of water throughout the area. After leaving UNM for reasons of health in 1901, Herrick returned to Socorro to write in 1904 the last of his tracts on the region, entitled "Lake Otero, an ancient salt lake basin in southeastern New Mexico," published in the American Geologist. He linked the basin to the Rio Grande valley formation, and measured the antediluvian lake bed at 1,600 to 1,800 square miles. Not surprisingly,