A 1920s Attempt at Preserving the Guadalupes

Hunter Peak and Bear Canyon as seen from the Foothills Trail.

NPS Photo

While Congress authorized Guadalupe Mountains National Park in 1966 and the National Park Service established the park in 1972, attempts to set the area aside as either a national park or monument date back to 1924, if not earlier.

Anglo-Americans had known of the Guadalupe Mountains by the mid-1800s. Spanish explorers and Mexicans knewof them centuries earlier. Native American awareness, habitation, and use of the mountains and their hidden resources predated Columbus’ discovery of the “New World.” Yet, except for small numbers of Native Americans, few people settled in the Guadalupe Mountains or surrounding desert until the last decades of the 19th century. Spanish explorers and settlers, and their later Anglo-American counterparts, mostly bypassed the region. For certain, Anglos passed through the region on their way to California, or in some cases, for the Rio Grande valley. Anglo settlement in the Pecos Valley and Guadalupe Mountains area did not begin in earnest until the 1870s; thereafter, settlement slowly and steadily increased.

One fascinating element about the Anglo-American exploration and settlement of the Guadalupes is the way inwhich the people interpreted the landscape and region. It is a process still very much occurring today in GuadalupeMountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The way people interpreted the landscape and, in particular, the way Americans defined themselves (as a society) according to landscape and the West is extraordinary. Indeed, this is a trend readily visible at Guadalupe Mountains’ sister park, Carlsbad Caverns. Names of cave formations—the way they were described and labeled in the 1920s and the way they are still identified and explained today—originate with cultural constructs prevalent in 1920s American society. These in turn can be traced back to Judeo-Christian philosophies—all the way back to the Greeks. Evidence of this trend is found throughout the entire Guadalupe Mountains–Carlsbad Caverns region.

Hence, writing about the history of national park units cannot be confined to the area within park or monumentboundaries alone. Individual park histories are about the parks, yes, but they are also the stories about the surrounding regions and communities, stories about the people who first settled in a given region, stories, too, about the people who passed through while making their way elsewhere. For all of these people left their mark: maybe physical remains such as structures or inscriptions on canyon walls, maybe published or unpublishedaccounts of their travels and impressions, or, perhaps they named features encountered during their ventures andthose names stuck.

The Delaware Basin is a perfect example; it includes the land stretching south from the Guadalupe escarpment.The mountain chain due south of El Capitan is called the Delaware Mountains. Both get their name from the Delaware, or Lenni Lenape, Indians who emigrated (due to increasing Anglo-American population pressure) from the Delaware–New Jersey–Pennsylvania area. These people slowly pushed west into Ohio and Illinois, then to Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond, where eventually they served as guides for United States military expeditions passing through the Guadalupe Mountains region in the mid-1800s. People such as Jim Shaw, John Connor, and Black Beaver (all Delaware) earned reputations as peerless guides, hunters, and negotiators.Black Beaver, perhaps the most famous, led Randolph B. Marcy’s 1849 expedition in search of the most practicalroute between Fort Smith, Arkansas (now a National Park Service unit), and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Marcy’s returntrip brought him across what is now the Delaware Basin. Whether the basin is named in honor of Black Beaver is unknown; nonetheless, it is named for his people in commemoration of their knowledge of and ability to successfully lead Anglo-Americans through this area.

Clearly, the Guadalupe Mountains had been known for a long time. Apache habitation and use of the mountains predated the Anglo-American arrival in the area. (The mountain chain due south of the Delawares is named Apache Mountains.) All previous knowledge and use of the Guadalupes notwithstanding, the first genuine interest in setting them aside as a national park emerged in 1924.

The previous September, U.S. Geological Survey geologist Willis Thomas Lee visited Carlsbad to inspect some of the Bureau of Reclamation dam sites along the Pecos River because they were not holding as much water as expected or wanted. In hopes of developing a better understanding of the region’s geology from within, he inspected Carlsbad Cave, then called the Bat Cave. After returning to Washington, D.C., Lee recommendedthat the cave be made into a national monument. His scientific rational for preservation—later quoted in aletter from Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work to President Calvin Coolidge—clinched it, and Coolidgesigned the Carlsbad Cave National Monument proclamation on October 25, 1923. At the same time, Lee proposed a more extensive exploration of the cave. Wisely, Lee cautioned against limiting the expedition to the cave alone; he felt the surrounding country with its numerous caves, some reportedly as spectacular as the Bat Cave, needed to be explored as well.

By the 1920s, Lee was a recognized authority on the geology of the Southern Rocky Mountains. He had studied them for years; in 1912 he had recommended that Capulin Volcano be reserved as a national monument. (Although his superiors at the U.S. Geological Survey rejected his recommendation, the National Park Service did preserve Capulin Volcano as a national monument in 1916.) Lee also wrote a very popular history of Rocky Mountain National Park published in 1917. In recommending a thorough exploration of the Bat Cave andGuadalupes, Lee had two equally important justifications: first, he wanted to study how the cave and its stalactites,stalagmites, and other formations had formed; second, he believed he might find caves containing remains of hitherto little or unknown prehistoric peoples who had inhabited the Guadalupe Mountains. He also cited possible botanical, faunal, and geographical discoveries as equally important reasons for such an exploration and study.

The National Geographic Society approved Lee’s proposal and allocated $16,000 for a six-month expedition, which commenced in March 1924. For the first half of the expedition, Lee and other expedition participants such asJames “Jim” Larkin White (the man recognized as the first major explorer of Carlsbad Cave) and Carl Livingston (alocal attorney and amateur archaeologist) chiefly worked at the cave. Toward the middle of the expedition, with the bulk of the photographic and surveying work in the cave completed, Lee turned his attention to the Guadalupe Mountains. With White, Livingston, and others, Lee rode on horseback through many of the canyons such as McKittrick and Gunsight canyons. As a result of these excursions, Lee judged the area worthy of inclusion in the National Park System. Basically, he considered the rugged mountains and canyons on par with some of the other crown jewels of the 1920s National Park System; consequently, he advocated their reservation as a national park or, at the least, a national monument.

Texas officials enthusiastically greeted Lee’s proposal. In fact, during the summer of 1924, Texas Governor Pat Neff, the state’s newly created state parks board (1923), and the state’s highway commissioners joined New Mexico’s governor and highway commissioners at Carlsbad Cave National Monument. After touring the cave, Lee took them to the Guadalupe Mountains, where he and others, such as Judge J.C. Hunter of Van Horn, stressed the importance of reserving the Guadalupe Mountains as a state or national park. Lee even went so far as to propose an interstate national park incorporating both Carlsbad Cave and the Guadalupe Mountains.

Today, the questions are: What impressions did people have of the Guadalupe Mountains? How did they describethem? What did they compare them to? What value did they ascribe to them? People equated exploration of Carlsbad Cave with conquest of the West—meaning, the West of myth as much as the West of reality. While understandable, it is nonetheless surprising, for Carlsbad Cave is a cave. Nevertheless, the entire western experience—contact, exploration, description, conquest, and preservation—is defined within the cave andits development as a park unit. People equate Jim White with the western experience, for instance; he is compared with and revered as much as America’s explorers and pioneers. Most telling is the persistent image of White as a cowboy despite his having worked as a guano miner for 20 years prior to the federal government’s creating the monument.

Definition and description of the Guadalupe Mountains landscape similarly consisted of identifying it with the West of popular conception: of a heroic and violent place where individual men triumphed over savagery, where outlaws assumed the guise of heroes, where men (and women) persevered and survived in spite of an unforgiving desert. Hence, the parks represented the West and, by extension, America. Even Lee, an erudite eastern scholar and respected geologist, couched his descriptions of the mountains and desert in these terms. “It is the Wild West,” Lee wrote, “the land of adobe shack, of range cattle and goats.” He also wrote that this is an area where sombrero-hatted cowboys are common sights. Once, it was the land of gunfighters and gold seekers, where the whitened bone of oxen that perished on the long stretches between watering holes along the Butterfield Trail are remembered by old timers. Other writers in the 1920s, including guidebook author Blanche Grant, portrayed the Carlsbad region as a land infested with desperate outlaws such as Billy the Kid and Geronimo. Blood had run free, she wrote, during many a showdown in the town of Old Phenix (near Carlsbad), which by the 1920s was no more than crumbling adobe ruins. Such portrayals shaped peoples’ perceptions of and experiences in southeastern New Mexico and west Texas, including the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Cave.

By the 1920s, the “frontier” as defined by historian Frederick Jackson Turner had been “closed” for little more than 30 years. Still, many Americans, particularly easterners, looked to the West to recapture some essence of the imagined American identity of rugged individualism, strength, and democracy. At the same time, these people sought escape (if only momentarily) from an oppressive, corporate-controlled East. In searching for the defining elements of American character, either real or imagined, they sought spiritual rejuvenation. As Turnerian as this description seems, it is the way people understood themselves and their place in the world in the 1920s. Turner did not create the civilization versus savagery or garden versus wilderness dichotomies. No, one can find these ideas in Greek writings. They are in the Bible. No doubt, these are social and cultural constructs that have existedin one manner or another from the time of man’s cognitive beginnings. Turner just proclaimed wilderness andthe frontier as democratic-making conditions, as original American ideas. He was the most recognized, most authoritative champion of a heroic America, and as a result people identified, and continue to identify, individualism, strength, and democracy as separate and distinct American characteristics.

In view of this, and given the fact that Americans set aside other National Park System units (e.g., Yosemite,Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon) for similar reasons, one wonders why neither Congress nor the National Park Service set aside the Guadalupe Mountains until 1966 despite interest as early as 1924. This is a 40-year gap. How did other writers and the media describe the Guadalupe Mountains–Carlsbad Cave West, and how did these portrayals change between the 1920s and 1960s? How did peoples’ perceptions of wilderness change?

There are several reasons why the Guadalupe Mountains were not incorporated into the National Park System in the 1920s. First, they were too inaccessible for many tourists. Paved roads did not exist in this region; indeed, few roads at all existed in the region. Highway 62-180 between El Paso and Carlsbad, which passes just south of the mountains, was not opened until the late 1920s. (Both Texas and New Mexico developed the road because of Carlsbad Cave and the interest in expanding it into a national park. Businessmen in the region, including El Pasoans, wanted to ensure that tourist dollars flowed into their coffers. At the same time, many merchants wanted the road as a more direct access route to markets; discovery of potash and oil in the region in the mid-1920s only expedited development.) Roads between Van Horn and Carlsbad or Pecos and Carlsbad similarly did not serve as “major” automobile arteries until after the creation of Carlsbad Cave National Monument. If the region’s inaccessibility was one cause for the Guadalupe Mountains not being set aside as a national monument or park in the 1920s, it is ironic. Why? Because the majority of tourists who visited Carlsbad Cave during the 1920s and 30s drove from central and east Texas.

Second, the absence of concerted state or local support in Texas may also explain why Guadalupe Mountains National Park was not authorized until 1966. Although Lee and others expressed interest and commitment to preserving the Guadalupe Mountains, little appears to have been done toward that end either on the federal or state level. In Texas, at least, greater emphasis appears to have been placed on establishing parks nearer the state’s more populated east. Similar to the dearth of popular support was a lack of commercial supportfrom the railroads, which historically played a central role in the development of early national parks.(Carlsbad Cave itself was the subject of much publicity from the railroads, especially the Santa Fe Railroad.) Indeed, the railroads continued to have enormous influence on park development and publicity through the 1940s, at which time automobiles surpassed trains as the principal means by which tourists traveled to national parks. Regardless, it appears that the railroads paid little attention to the Guadalupe Mountains.

A third factor that may have delayed creation of Guadalupe Mountains National Park is Congress’ penny-pinching,which in turn made National Park Service administrators wary of proposed parks, many of which were of questionable, pork-barrel-politics quality such as Wind Cave. And since the Guadalupes were similar to yet smaller (in size) than other existing mountain parks, they may have been viewed as “second class” when compared to the Grand Tetons, Mount Rainier, or Mount Olympus. When Congressman John Morrow of New Mexico requested an increased appropriation for Carlsbad Cave National Monument in the early 1920s, Louis Cramton, chairman of the subcommittee on Interior Department appropriations, explained that the National Park Service should be thankful to get any money at all for monuments. Congress was trying to cut back on expenses, he added, and developing the crown jewels of the system—Yosemite and Yellowstone, for example—superseded the creation of newparks. Only once the National Park Service adequately developed these parks would Congress consider creating and funding new parks. As can be seen, then, there was insufficient support in Washington, D.C., for new parks or, perhaps, even for additions to existing parks or monuments.

To an even greater extent, the lack of a concrete scientific rationale may have thwarted efforts to preserve theGuadalupe Mountains. Little about the region was known in the scientific community prior to the National Geographic Society’s six-month expedition led by W.T. Lee; in fact, the region’s geology, paleontology, and archaeology was all but known. Granted, Lee made inroads, publishing articles about and lecturing throughout the East on Carlsbad Cave and the Guadalupes. He even proposed a second National Geographic Society expedition to the Guadalupe Mountains. Unfortunately, Lee died in 1926 before anything further came of his proposal.And with Lee’s death, genuine scientific interest (for the gain of knowledge rather than money) in southeastern New Mexico appears to have receded for many years. Consequently, another 40 years passed before Americans, the National Park Service, and Congress recognized the scientific, natural, and educational uniqueness inherent in the Guadalupe Mountains.Again, what did transpire during those 42 years between Lee’s 1924 expedition and 1966 which eventually culminated in the creation of Guadalupe Mountains National Park? How did the National Park Service change? How did America change? And how did peoples’ perceptions of the Guadalupes change? Without an understanding of these changes on local, state, regional, and national levels, no one can rightfully claim to understand the history of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. This, then, is the task that lies ahead: to learn and write about Guadalupe Mountains National Park as an individual park unit and as a product of an ever-changing,ever-modifying American society. A thorough history of the park, therefore, should help readers understand the park’s history; more importantly, perhaps, it should help readers understand American history in its broadest sense.­­

Adapted from Macvaugh, Fred. “Guadalupe Mountains National Park: A 1920s Attempt at Preservation” Pages 411-416 in The Guadalupe Mountains Symposium, 1998. Armstrong and KellerLynn, editors. National Park Service, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas.