Page:Michael Welsh - Dunes and Dreams, A History of White Sands National Monument (1995).pdf/65

 Chapter Three dunes entrance. Then in November, Pinkley sent Jim Felton to White Sands for the express purpose of greeting all patrons at the newly opened visitors center. A discrepancy occurred immediately in December, as Felton's daily eight-hour count of 1,830 visitors clashed with Charles' formulaic estimate of 4,742.

By whatever numbers one cited, White Sands' popularity grew dramatically as facilities and transportation access increased. In July the SWNM reported visitation at the dunes had exceeded 12,400. More intriguing were comparisons of attendance for all SWNM units since 1935. That year White Sands contributed one-sixth of all visits to the region's monuments; in 1936 this grew to forty percent, and 35 percent in 1937. To make the point more clear, SWNM contrasted White Sands with Capulin Mountain National Monument, a dormant volcano crater along U.S. Highway 87 in far northeastern New Mexico. In July 1935, Capulin had outdrawn White Sands (5,000 visitors to 4,755); yet within two years the dunes had doubled the visitation of the New Mexican volcano (12,421–6,000). One reason for this surge was the inclusion of Independence Day as a major feature of the White Sands' calendar. Charles counted an astonishing 1,877 vehicles in the dunes that day. Then Isabelle Story of the NPS public affairs office wrote a piece for the entitled, "Oases for Tourists." Featuring Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, and White Sands, the October 17 feature coincided with dedication ceremonies for the headquarters' parking lot, where 1,200 guests listened to the 100-member Alamogordo High School band.

The pride of the monument was the ambitious design for its museum. First attempted three years earlier by Robert Rose, planning for the White Sands story devolved upon Charlie R. Steen, the young archeologist who operated out of Santa Fe. Steen believed that the sequence of museum cases at White Sands should tell three stories. The first would be the origins of the dunes in the gypsum deposits of the San Andres mountains. Following this should be the ecology of the White Sands. Finally, the museum cases needed to tell the ethnology of the Mescaleros and the early Spanish exploration of the Tularosa basin. All of the design, felt Steen, should be tasteful and simple, as the museum occupied a structure built in the highly popular regional style of "Spanish colonial," or "adobe" architecture. This distinctive form, made prominent in Santa Fe in the 1920s and 1930s by architect John Gaw Meem, would be more renowned in northern New Mexico, where descendants of the seventeenth-century Spanish colonists resided. Thus the White Sands compound reflected the broader view of the park service, whose regional headquarters in Santa Fe (also done in adobe style) was under construction that same year.

Structural work at White Sands took a precarious turn in the summer of 1937, as the now-familiar "change orders" coming from New Deal officials jeopardized production schedules and funding. The debate over location and extent of the picnic area persisted