Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra, and the case I'm going to share with you today is from a long, long time ago.

1896, to be exact, and it's a doozy.

It takes place near White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

During a time when, to put it mildly, the Western American frontier was pretty wild and lawlessness was rampant.

A great book I read which expands even more about this characterization of the time period is murder on the White Sands, the disappearance of Albert and Henry Fountain, which was written by author Corey Rekko.

His novel provided a wealth of information about

this case, so I highly recommend ordering a copy for yourself if you want to dig even further

into the details of this mystery. And for accuracy, it should be noted that the park itself

wasn't formally established until 2019. Before then, it had been a national monument since 1933,

and before that, when this story takes place, there were a lot of unincorporated communities around

what is now the parkland. The National Park Service's website for White Sands National Park

has given it the moniker, like no place else on earth. And from the pictures I've

seen of its beautiful gypsum dune fields, I would 100% agree with that description. It's stunning.

One unique feature of the park is that it wasn't always a desert. At one point in time,

there were grasslands teeming with life. There are millennia-old fossilized footprints

from animals and humans still visible on Lake Otero. In fact, the park has the largest

collection of human footprints according to the National Park Service. And it's these fossils

that tell us a lot about how people interacted with the environment there, as well as extinct animals

like giant sloths, mammoths, and so forth. Traces of the past are vitally important

to understanding the depth of this area's historic and cultural significance. Being able to read

about this landscape and mine clues from it about how humans behaved is a task that's still happening

today. But it's also a task lawmen in the late 1890s found themselves faced with when a

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