President Coolidge declared Carlsbad Caverns a national monument in 1923 and Congress made it into a national park in 1930. I’ve been to the caverns and, while they are interesting, I suspect their year-round temperature of 56 degrees made them a lot more interesting in the days before air conditioning.
Click image to download an 18.6-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.
For once, the use of black-and-white photos in a travel booklet is actually more authentic than the color photos often used today. The colors are very pretty but they are solely the result of colored lights; without the colored lenses over the lights, the limestone is mostly a dull grey. Considering the Park Service’s dedication to nature and authenticity, it is a bit surprising that it continues to use the colored lights. I suppose any lights at all in the caverns is unnatural, but the Park Service allows only flashlights in an associated cave called Slaughter Canyon.
Page 8 of the booklet discusses Jim White, a local cowboy who was the first person to explore the caves around the turn of the century. When the booklet was issued in 1940, White was still alive and selling his ghost-written autobiography, Jim White’s Own Story, in the cavern’s coffee shop — much to the Park Service’s dismay, which thought he was a country bumpkin, but White was a friend of one of New Mexico’s U.S. senators, so the Park Service was unable to evict him.
Page 21 pictures Thomas Boles, the park’s first superintendent, who was another country bumpkin. He insisted that all cave visitors take part in guided tours, usually guided by him, during which he made hyperbolic and often false claims about the caves — among other things saying some of the formations were the oldest rocks in the world. The Park Service probably wanted to get rid of him as much as White, and finally transferred him to Hot Springs National Park in 1946.