Read an Excerpt
Range Wars
The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range
By Ryan H. Edgington UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5563-0
CHAPTER 1
Seeds of Discontent
On October 5, 1942, a letter reached the former under secretary of the interior and soon-to-be governor of New Mexico John J. Dempsey. Rumors of an airfield, gunnery ranges, and a proving ground circulated among residents of south-central New Mexico. As World War II raged in Europe, North Africa, and across the Pacific Ocean, the growing presence of military surveyors in south-central New Mexico was a dead giveaway. R. G. Walker, chairman of the Otero County Board of Commissioners, told Dempsey that despite the state of war "we do not believe that it is necessary to take from Otero County the taxable values that will be involved in the divorcement of this southern part of the county."
Walker thought residents would "give up everything" for the war effort, but taking taxable lands that the county relied on for revenue went too far. He explained that ranching was vital to the regional economy, and that vast tracts of federal land more suitable for military use, namely the Mescalero Apache Reservation and Lincoln National Forest, existed in the region. Rangelands in south-central New Mexico could best support the war effort by producing meat.
Local ranchers showed as much enthusiasm for the military's plan as Walker. In September 1943 an anonymous editorial in Carlsbad's Daily-Current Argus argued that the "seizure of some 1,800 sections of land in southeastern Otero County by the War Department for a gunnery range would produce unwarranted hardship and an enormous waste of cattle range that it is inconceivable to believe the Department will countenance it when it has learned the facts." Ranchers and their families were "working 12 to 14 hours a day to produce the essential food for the armed forces and civilian personnel." While the military listened, they rarely offered the relief that ranchers sought.
Ranch owners and their supporters protested the potential taking of their homes and economic livelihoods rather than concede to the militarization of New Mexico. The militarized landscapes of south-central New Mexico emerged as contested places from the arrival of World War II–era military surveyors. Walker's objection to the confiscation of private lands and suggestion of alternative military sites reveal the often overlooked discontent among many westerners during World War II. The protest of wartime military presence in New Mexico emerged as part of a longer process where local communities tried to make sense of their everyday economic livelihoods in a region dominated by federally sponsored grazing lands, forests, and national parks. Those conflicts expanded to the taking of private property and interests in state and federal rangelands for large military sites. The military had withdrawn 3.5 million acres of public lands administered by the Grazing Service across ten western states by the end of 1942.
The militarization of south-central New Mexico during and after World War II stood as a major episode in the origins of a New West. The writer Tom Vanderbilt argues "the desert was the perfect home for the Cold War; not simply for its sheer size and ostensible emptiness, but because the desert has paradoxically come to signify the future of America." World War II realized that vision. In the 1940s and 1950s the militarized deserts of California, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico became the backbone of superpower America. The deserts were no longer seen as promised lands able to fulfill Jeffersonian democracy, and the military removed them from public use for military testing and scientific inquiry during the worldwide struggle against fascism and communism.
The bases, munitions factories, and proving grounds created conflicts between westerners and Washington DC not unlike those that arose with the creation of the national parks and forests. Militarized sites existed as part of a long legacy of land-use quarrels that spanned from the Mexican-American War to the 1990s. The Department of War and later the Department of Defense cast militarization as necessary for the greater public good. Since the 1840s, Hispanos, Indians, and Anglos squatted on federal lands not yet open to settlement. They resisted the Forest Service and National Park Service by ignoring laws that limited cutting timber, grazing livestock, and hunting wildlife. In places like Glacier National Park, Indians continued to lay claim to landscapes they relied on for subsistence. In northern New Mexico residents dispossessed of lands deeded under Spanish land grants challenged the presence of agents tasked with overseeing public lands.
In similar fashion New Mexicans wrestled with the creation of large federal landscapes created in the post-1940 era. The struggle against military designs for south-central New Mexico between 1943 and 1958 planted the seeds of discontent among a cross-section of the region's rural and eventually displaced population. Like the Wise Use movement that emerged in the rural West some forty years later, ranchers at White Sands argued for the fundamental American right to private property. The roots of that conflict ran deep.
With White Sands Proving Ground and its several military antecedents ranchers faced a private property lease and grazing permit suspension system. Under the arrangement the Department of War paid ranchers on a year-to-year basis for the temporary use of private property during the war. The military also agreed to pay ranchers for idle grazing permits on state lands. During World War II Congress amended the Taylor Grazing Act to include a proviso (section 315q) where ranchers would also receive payment for dormant federal grazing leases, which were a new wrinkle in an already contentious land tenure system. While property buyouts remained an option for the military once Congress appropriated funds, lease and suspension agreements remained the best form of property use at a time of war. With the growth of White Sands Proving Ground during the early 1950s, parties renegotiated contracts for another twenty years.
Ranchers leased their property to the military. Many property holders believed that they remained rightful owners of militarized lands both private and public. This belief, which would propel protest at White Sands in the 1970s and 1980s, reflected a deeper notion within the livestock industry. Namely ranchers, like the federal government, understood their relationship to the public domain through the lens of private property. As the historian Karen Merrill argues, "By World War I, ranchers saw their use of those lands through their private real estate; that private real estate, in turn, served as the institutional foundation for their access to public lands; those public lands were owned by a government, whose ownership was understood to be like that of an individual." However, in the political realm the federal government and ranchers held two very different notions of what property meant. The agreements at White Sands transformed the displaced livestock community into the missile range and kept alive the pastoral past in the region. In the 1970s and 1980s those messy agreements created prolonged conflict over notions of ownership and compensation.
Despite military land-use needs created by World War II and the early Cold War, the urgency of the war cannot alone explain the taking of south-central New Mexico for airfields, gunnery ranges, and eventually the massive missile range. Nor can it alone explain the concurrent protests from local residents. The military did not choose rural New Mexico for bombing and gunnery ranges by mere serendipity.
At the end of the Mexican-American War, American military land surveyors found a desert grassland environment untrammeled by large numbers of European livestock. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Spanish colonists rarely crossed the arid center of New Mexico preferring to stay closer to permanent settlements along the Rio Grande River. Potential conflict with Apaches and Comanches and the searing daytime temperatures created a no-man's-land. After 1700 the Mescalero Apaches held large horse herds and other livestock. They hunted wildlife in the region's mountains. What Anglos saw when they arrived were desert grasslands dominated by largely mobile societies.
At the end of the Mexican-American War the military established forts in an effort to stave off raids on new settlements by Apache and Comanche bands. With the military presence came settlers, permanent homesteads, and massive herds of cattle. In turn there emerged a new and powerful land-use ethic with devastating environmental consequences. Cattle came by the hundreds of thousands. In less than one hundred years a once semi-fertile grassland environment collapsed as a result of extensive grazing and the continuous droughts that characterized the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Mexico climate. These fell within the longer "climate shocks" that corresponded to El Niño and La Niña disturbances during the period from 1880 to 1902. In the place of grasses emerged an environment dominated by creosote bush, mesquite, and sand. Enclosure would forever alter the ecosystem of south-central New Mexico.
By the 1930s the region experienced the dust bowl conditions that crippled the Great Plains. The Department of Interior used the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act under the auspices of the newly created Division of Grazing (1934) and later the Grazing Service (1939) and the Bureau of Land Management (1946) to reduce the environmental pressure on eighty million acres of depleted rangelands across the West. The total amount of federal lands in south-central New Mexico taken by the military during and after World War II amounted to 1,415,547 acres or almost 63 percent of the total lands incorporated into the proving ground. The profound amount of public domain was a key reason why the War Department chose the landscape for testing sites.
Into an already marginal economy with a new wartime land-use ethic came the age of rapid military-scientific development. Major General Gladeon Marcus Barnes and his team from the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Research and Development designated the region perfect for White Sands Proving Ground in 1945. Since the Spanish colonized the region, travelers had seen south-central New Mexico as a waterless wasteland. It was the Jornada del Muerto ("Route" or "March" of the Dead Man) to colonists along the Camino Real both because of its aridity and an Indian presence. In relation to lands in Europe, eastern North America, and even along the Rio Grande, the area was indeed arid.
In confiscating the region for White Sands, the military pointed to its climate and landscape as desirable. The wartime emergency necessitated a need for vast and largely empty landscapes to carry out military testing. The basin was flat, had low vegetation density, and had sparse cloud cover that made the area perfect for missile and rocket testing. Surrounding mountains harbored good lookout points. The area also had good transportation routes and the militarized infrastructure (namely Fort Bliss and the Alamogordo Army Air Field) to support the proving ground's mission.
Ranchers remained. The property lease and permit suspension agreements left the displaced ranchers in the unusual position as peculiar landlords to the military even though they did not technically own grazing lands. Even after Manhattan Engineer District scientists exploded the first nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in July 1945 and as German and American scientists tested the first V-2 rockets at Fort Bliss and White Sands the following year, ranchers contested the taking of their property, a conflict that continued into the Clinton era.
Militarization came in two waves. Beginning in 1942 and lasting until 1945 the War Department created a number of smaller temporary facilities. The second wave came with the July 1945 establishment of White Sands Proving Ground. Until 1958 the military created more permanent sites (including Holloman Air Force Base and the McGregor Range) that incorporated lands militarized before and during the war and property acquired from other federal agencies and private titleholders. Ranchers protested throughout but rarely succeeded in retaining their lands. They failed to understand the connections between the already federalized landscape under the Grazing Service, militarization in the mid-nineteenth century, and the rise of military sites during and after the war. The seeds of discontent were sown not only during World War II but also in the history of the livestock economy. We must begin with the project to make south-central New Mexico a cattle kingdom to understand militarization in New Mexico.
The Pastoral Experiment
In his 1963 book Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West the historian C. L. Sonnichsen paints a picture of south-central New Mexico as inhospitable and "tough country." He explains, "in all the sun-scorched and sand blasted reaches of the Southwest there is no grimmer region." On the Tularosa Basin only the resilient and "rugged" have survived the desert's uninviting conditions. "The Tularosa Country," he describes, "is a parched desert where everything, from cactus to cowman, carries a weapon of some sort, and the only creatures who sleep with both eyes closed are dead." For Sonnichsen south-central New Mexico was a place where only the toughest of species, including snakes, prickly pear cactus, yucca plants, tarantula spiders, and cowboys could thrive.
Sonnichsen's characterization is not complete hyperbole. Several mountain ranges—the San Andres along the west, the Oscura to the north and east, the Organ and San Augustín south and west, the Jarilla at the southeastern edge, the Sacramento along the east, and Guadalupe at the southeastern end—hem in the Tularosa Basin. To the west of the San Andres (often referred to as the San Andreas) lay the Jornada Basin, known by Spanish colonists as part of the Jornada del Muerto. Between December and January temperatures hover at freezing and can dip to as low as negative six degrees Fahrenheit. Between June and August daytime temperatures average over ninety degrees Fahrenheit but can easily reach above the century mark.
Annual precipitation is scanty. While some fresh groundwater exists at depths of one thousand feet, water near the surface remains highly brackish. During the region's monsoon season (from late June to early September) it experiences more than thirty days of rainfall, making it susceptible to flash flooding. However, the basin receives only about ten inches total annual precipitation. In the winter it snows, and some small accumulation is not uncommon even on the desert floor. Higher elevations of the Sacramento and San Andres can get from twelve to thirty inches of precipitation each year. Stream flows from the Sacramento Mountains deposit small amounts of water into the Tularosa Basin, and those ribbons of water rarely offset the lack of annual precipitation. Humidity remains extremely low, leaving the desert floor parched. In 1956 the area went 123 consecutive days without measurable precipitation, attesting to its extreme environment.
Desert grasslands surrounded by pockets of Chihuahuan desert scrub, plains-mesa sand scrub, plains-mesa grasslands, and montane scrub make up the vegetation on this large northern section of the expansive Chihuahuan Desert. Shrubs, including honey mesquite and soaptree yucca, among other species of the shrub genera, are widespread in the region. Creosote bush exists plentifully in Chihuahuan desert scrub areas at the southern end of the Tularosa Basin and at the edges of the San Andres Mountains. Sand sagebrush characterizes the plains-mesa sand scrub of the west-central area of the basin. To the north and on the eastern slope of the Oscura Mountains, montane scrub areas include eleven distinct desert shrub species.
The gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument and the alkali flats on its western edge comprise a large section of the present-day center of White Sands Missile Range. The remnants of the ancient Lake Otero (which at one time engulfed between 1,600 and 1,800 square miles) are visible in the intermittent Lake Otero and the surrounding saline fen and alkali flats. Rain and other hydraulic forces, which deposited gypsum in the ancient lake bed over thousands of years, led to the creation of the dunes. As water slowly receded, the gypsum remained, where it experienced a series of eolion episodes that gave the dunes their ever-changing and flowing form. Where the dunes meet desert grasslands myriad species thrive, including soaptree yucca, soft-orange globe mallow, and squaw bush sumac. Between the dunes several plant species, including rabbit bush, alkali sacaton, and soaptree yucca, survive only until the wind-altered dunes overcome them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Range Wars by Ryan H. Edgington. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
