Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/35

 Chapter Two Mexico. To assuage the doubts of promoters of a site at Bandelier ruins, Fall asked Ralph Emerson Twitchell to bring a delegation from Santa Fe to the meeting. Twitchell, a respected attorney and amateur historian (the author of the multivolume series, Leading Facts of New Mexico History), joined with the Southern Pacific's William Hawkins to shepherd Fall's vastly expanded park through the chamber meeting.

Upon arrival at the SAYNPA gathering, the northern New Mexicans discovered Fall's larger agenda. The city of El Paso had sent one hundred delegates, and placed on the executive committee two of its nine members (the remaining seven all came from southern New Mexico). Robert Sterling Yard would later claim that "the advocates of all other [park] sites were shouted down," and that "several were voted out of the meeting." Yard further contended that the El Paso contingent pushed for a "circle system" of federal highways linking Elephant Butte and the Tularosa basin with "a popular El Paso resort south of the [Mescalero] Reservation," the mountain village of Cloudcroft. In addition, park boosters drafted plans to "involve the Government encircling the [Elephant Butte] reservoir with a superb [one] hundred miles highway." In closing, said Yard, the delegates deliberately employed the term "Southwestern" in their title to leave "the impression that this was not a local scheme but demanded by a large section of the country."

The All-Year park moved along two tracks in 1921–1922: unashamed promotion by Fall and his allies, and unstinting opposition by the NPA and other groups. The NPA still smarted from the bold power play executed in Yosemite National Park a decade earlier known as the "Hetch Hetchy controversy." The city of San Francisco, in rebuilding after the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, had petitioned Congress for permission to construct a massive municipal water supply project in a pristine valley of Yosemite. Even the staunch Progressive/conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt, approved of the Hetch Hetchy dam and reservoir. Alfred Runte wrote of Hetch Hetchy that "if ever the cloud over the valley did have a silver lining, it was in teaching preservationists to rely as much on economic rationales [as] on the standard emotional ones." Believing that "the national parks were still the stepchildren of federal conservation policy," defenders of Yosemite vowed "to create a separate government agency committed solely to park management and protection."

Albert Fall thus tested the Park Service's resolve a mere five years after its inception, doing so in the cavalier manner that echoed the laxity (if not the corruption) of the Harding years. Senator Bursum and the SAYNPA wrote the draft of the All-Year park bill, calling for inclusion of 2,000 acres of the Mescalero reservation, 640 acres of the Malpais lava beds east of Carrizozo, 640 acres of the "Gypsum Hills" (White Sands), and the shoreline of the Elephant Butte reservoir. In April 1922, Holm Bursum introduced the measure in the Senate, while the SAYNPA released a flurry of press