Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/31

 Chapter Two In 1907 the dunes also welcomed a Kansas farm family that had moved to Alamogordo for the health of its mother, Rachel Charles. Her husband, Tom Charles, would become White Sands' most prominent advocate, and replace the Milner-Fetz batching plant in 1933 with the heavily visited monument. Charles and his second wife, Bula, would work first as farmers, then insurance salespeople, and journalists to boost the fortunes of Alamogordo and the Tularosa basin. Tom Charles had graduated in 1897 from Kansas State University, where he had played varsity football. He then wrote for several newspapers, becoming president of the Kansas chapter of the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). When his wife Rachel contracted tuberculosis in the winter of 1906–1907, the Charles family moved by wagon to Alamogordo for the "cure." The Charleses found a community that by 1910 would boast nearly 3,000 people. The difficulty of dry-land farming in the basin brought the family into town by 1915, and three years later they purchased the Hughes-Tinklepaugh insurance agency, expanding it into one of the larger companies in New Mexico.

Because of his early efforts to secure his family's financial status, Tom Charles at first did not engage in the plans of local and territorial officials to create versions of the "Mescalero National Park." William H. Andrews, the nonvoting congressional delegate from New Mexico, had sought in 1906 to develop some sort of recreational facility in the Tularosa basin. Andrews told Albert Fall of his idea in 1912, when the latter became U.S. Senator with the granting of New Mexican statehood. Fall had become interested in the concept because of his desire to expand his Three Rivers ranch, which adjoined the northwestern boundary of the Mescalero reservation. In addition, Fall had witnessed the collapse of the EPNE railroad in 1905 when the line could no longer secure fresh water for its steam engines. The large mining company, Phelps-Dodge, had purchased the EPNE and sought access to the westward-flowing streams that the Mescaleros controlled; a better source than the alkaline waters of the basin that ruined the boilers of the EPNE train engines.

The story of Albert Fall and his land transactions have been the subject of much controversy and confusion. As a senator (1912–1920), and then as the ill-fated Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding (1921–1923), Fall managed to expand his holdings at Three Rivers by a factor of ten (over one million acres of leased and purchased land). One aspect of his career that has drawn the ire of historians was his repeated efforts from 1912–1922 to take Mescalero land for a national park, with the dimensions shifting several times (finally including a small 640-acre section of White Sands). Local folklore in the Tularosa basin holds that Fall, convicted in 1927 of bribery and conspiracy for his "sale" of U.S. Navy oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to the Sinclair Oil Company (later the Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO), paid the