School Days: Education During the Ranching Era on the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

edited by Peter L Eidenbach and Linda Hart
©1997     87 pages     $15.00

School Days is a set of recollections, stories, and photographs from ranching families who homesteaded New Mexico's last frontier - the barren deserts and rugged mountains of the Tularosa Basin and the Jornada del Muerto - during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. White Sands Missile Range is engaged in the recording of the rural homesteads, isolated windmills, Angora goat sheds, and other physical remains of the homesteading era that dot their landscape. Recording the architecture and archaeology helped preserve history but did little to illuminate it. To meet the need for additional information, the Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program provided funding for an oral-history project in which members of the families who homesteaded land that now lies on White Sands Missile Range were interviewed about their ranching experiences.

These rural families built wood-frame and adobe houses, dug water wells, and constructed corrals and earthen ponds or stock tanks to catch and hold the precious rainfall. As these families grew, the need for schools increased. A good education was prized by these new settlers. Several educational patterns developed in the rural New Mexico mountains. Some families pooled their efforts and built one-room schoolhouses. Others maintained a second home in town where their children lived during the school year. A few families sent their children to boarding schools. Occasionally young children received their early education through home schooling. School Days reports on the experiences of ranch children in these various settings. They speak of the teachers, the antics, the conditions, and piling into cars or trucks that served as buses and bouncing for hours along rocky, rutted, and washed out roads to get to school. Or they drift back to the homesickness that overcame them in the cold atmosphere of boarding school. And they look back with appreciation on their parents' determination that they receive a good education. A companion volume, Homes on the Range, presents the more complete stories of these people's lives in this rugged setting.
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