engineering officers in 1849. They passed west of the San Andres Mountains and Organ Mountains. A lieutenant was dispatched east across the basin with a scouting party to map a potential military wagon route to the Sierra Blanca. Hispanic families started farming communities at Tularosa in 1861 and La Luz in 1863. The villagers mixed water with gypsum sand from the dunefield to create plaster for the adobe walls of their homes. The white color was not only decorative but functional in deflecting the rays of the summer sun. In the 1880s, a brief period of heavy rainfall supported the return of lush grasslands in the Tularosa Basin which attracted the attention of goat, sheep, and cattle grazers, predominately from Texas. Large cattle drives pushed into the basin, and ranching became the dominant economy for the next sixty years. In 1897, the Lucero brothers, Jose, Felipe, and Estevan, began ranching on the south shore of the lake that would eventually bear their name. By 1940, Felipe consolidated the family's ranches into a property. Shortly afterward, the National Park Service took over ownership of the Lucero family properties with their appropriation of Lake Lucero and Alkali Flat. The remnants of the Lucero family ranch include the stock pens, watering trough, a water well, and a fallen windmill which visitors can see on a ranger-led tour to Lake Lucero once each month, in the cooler months of the year. At the turn of the twentieth century, the discovery of oil, coal, silver, gold, and other precious mineral deposits inspired many settlers to cover the Tularosa Basin in mining claims. By 1904, over 114 people made mineral claims to more than of Lake Lucero; however, very few of the claims were developed. Eddy's Soda Prospect, developed by the same Eddy brothers that had founded the El Paso and Northeastern Railway and the town of Alamogordo, was a mineral recovery operation for glauberite salt mining along the southern shore of Lake Lucero. In 1907, J.R. Milner and Bill Fetz constructed a plaster of Paris batching plant along the southern edge of the dunes. The operation involved drilling long shafts into the dunes and extracting gypsum to cook into plaster at night. Though successful, the establishment of the national monument permanently shut down the plant. National monument The idea of creating a national park to protect the white sands formation dates to 1898 when a