Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/55

 Chapter Three lands near Cloudcroft for inclusion in a national park. The impetus came from passage in Congress that year of legislation that permitted purchase of "sub-marginal lands" to remove them from cultivation or harvest. Conrad Wirth, assistant NPS director, informed Hatch that the service "could not consider this area … unless it was an outstanding example of a major type of American scenery." The park service did, however, advise President Roosevelt to release on November 28 Proclamation No. 2108, expanding White Sands by 158.91 acres. The New Mexico state highway department had redesigned U.S. 70, and the NPS needed this acreage just south of the monument boundary to guard against future commercial development. Tom Charles had learned that "one of the leading boot-leggers [vendors of illegal liquor] of the community has an idea of homesteading it for business purposes." Then late in 1934, local civic officials mounted a campaign to have the NPS purchase as a "wildlife refuge" the lake and well of L.L. Garton. Frank Pinkley doubted whether the "lake" could be of significant value to White Sands, but promised to explore these petitions in the near future.

The Garton well issue would mature the following year (1935), as would plans drafted in November 1934 by Robert Rose for a museum at White Sands. For the next six years the park service would design, construct, and outfit a museum and visitors center at the dunes that park officials would consider one of the best in the system. Pinkley's assistant superintendent predicted that the facility, which Rose wanted built in the shape of a cross (with a lobby in the center and exhibit space on the wings), would address three themes: high visitation; the need to explain simply the dunes' complex ecosystem; and the real probability of expansion in the future. "Here in the White Sands," said Rose, "we have one of the finest places in the National Park Service system to teach that principle of 'Adaptation to Environment.'" Just one year earlier, the NPS had released a study by George M. Wright, et al., Fauna of the National Parks of the United States (1933). The authors called upon the park service and Congress, in the words of Alfred Runte, to "round out the parks as effective biological units." The monument may have been reduced in size because of commercial and political pressures, but Rose believed that enough remained of the dunes "to satisfy that intellectual curiosity by bringing people in contact with the natural wonder or scientific feature itself."

Rose's recommendations became the baseline data for the next six years of museum planning and construction. The facility itself would not open to the public until 1938. Yet his idea to emphasize natural history over that of humans was in keeping with NPS logic to present the story that the park itself revealed. Rose did, however, cite the need to embrace more fully the life of the nearby Mescalero Apaches. A young