price for crimes committed by many members of the Harding administration (until the 1970s Fall was the only convicted Cabinet officer to serve a prison sentence). Yet by examining his involvement in plans for a national park in southern New Mexico, one can see how Fall's connections to the Santa Fe Ring overcame his ostensibly "progressive" idea that White Sands and other natural attractions in the Tularosa basin merited protection from exploitation.
Within weeks of taking his Senate seat in the spring of 1912, Albert Fall introduced Senate Bill (S.) 6659, a companion measure to U.S. Representative George Curry's House Bill (H.) 24123, establishing the "Mescalero National Park." Curry, whom Governor Otero had appointed in 1899 as first sheriff of Otero County, and who would later serve as territorial governor in his own right (1907-1910), had transferred his allegiance to Fall (as did many civic and political leaders in the area), and thus supported Fall's plans to enhance the value of Three Rivers ranch. The Office of Indian Affairs (01 A), which had oversight of the Mescalero people, disliked the precedent of creating "recreation parks within reservations," and opposed the plans of Fall and Curry. This failed to intimidate the senator, who two years later drafted Senate Bill 4187, expanding the Mescalero park concept to include "allotment" of all reservation lands (survey and distribution of 160-acre plots to tribal members, with sales of the surplus to non-Indians), withdrawal of Mescalero title to $3 million of timber lands, opening the reservation to mining prospectors with no royalties due to the tribe, and leasing of lots on the west face of the Sierra Blanca for "summer cottages" for wealthy tourists.[1]
Undaunted by rejection of these two measures, Senator Fall in 1916 ventured yet again his idea for a regional national park. Changing its name to "Rio Grande National Park," Fall hoped to take advantage of passage that year of the Federal Highway Act. One route anticipated by federal officials was the "Southern National Highway," which could connect Alamogordo to El Paso and then San Diego. Ostensibly designed for transportation of military personnel and supplies in time of national emergency (like the impending "Great War" in Europe), the highways would later stimulate in the 1920s the boom in tourism and commercial traffic known as the "car culture." Senator Fall and other prescient leaders knew that New Mexico, which in 1920 ranked 47th of 48 states in per capita income, could not afford the extensive network of highways needed to open southern New Mexico to postwar economic growth. In 1916 Congress had also authorized creation of the National Park Service (NPS), charging its director, Stephen T. Mather, with preserving natural beauty so that more Americans could have access to it. All three variables (the Rio Grande National Park, a southern highway, and the NPS) could bring good fortune to New Mexico, and hence Albert Fall's persistence with his dream of a Mescalero playground.[2]
- ↑ Schneider-Hector, White Sands, 56–57; Kelly, Assault on Assimilation, 172.
- ↑ Schneider-Hector, White Sands, 56, 58, 60; Kelly, Assault on Assimilation, 173; Michael Welsh, "A Land of Extremes: The Economy of Modern New Mexico, 1940–1990," in Richard W. Etulain, ed. Contemporary New Mexico, 1940–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 69–81.
