This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.
Woodie Guthrie's misunderstood protest song, This land Is Your Land.
If you've lived in the West, or follow news regarding lands of any kind, you've seen the claim made at some point. Ranchers who lease the public domain are "welfare ranchers" who should be driven off the public domain, so it can be turned over to hordes of SUV driving weekend users, who will be kinder to the land in their light hiking gear, even if they used more fuel to get there than a third word nation consumes in a year.
Well, not so fast junior.
This is exactly the sort of attitude, I'd note, that has spawned in part the movement in the West to "take back" the land, which is an equally ill informed reactionary movement. Perhaps it would behoove people to take a look at reality, just a bit. Indeed, a little history would be in order.
As I've written a bit on the origin of public lands in the west, here and elsewhere, what I'm going to do, therefore, is to incorporate back in some of that text I've already written, which I think provides a good background to this stuff.
The popular concept of the war is that it represented an armed expression of unadulterated greed. While greed cannot be dismissed as an element, the larger question remains. What was it all about?
The cattle industry, as we know it, didn't really come about until the conclusion of the Civil War. Prior to that, the most significant meat livestock in the US was pork. Swine production produced the basic farm meat for most Americans, which is not to say that they didn't eat cattle, they did, but cattle production was fairly small scale in the East, and much of it was focused on dairy and mixed production. Meat cattle were more common in the South, and while it's popular to note that American ranching was a development of Mexican ranching, it was also very much a development of Southern ranching practices. This, in fact, partially gave rise to the Johnson County War, as will be seen.
At any rate, the American Beef Cattle industry was born when the railroads penetrated into Kansas after the Civil War, and returning Texas cattlemen found that the herds in their state had gone wild, and greatly increased. Cattle in Texas, up until that time, had followed the Mexican practice of being raised principally for their hides, not for meat, but the introduction of rail into Kansas meant that cattle could now be driven, albeit a long ways, to a railhead and then shipped to market. An explosion in urban centers in the East provided a natural market, and soon the cattle industry in Texas had switched over to being focused on shipping cattle for beef.
The Texas industry spread north as well and by the 1870s it was making inroads into Wyoming, although really only southern Wyoming for the most part. At the same time, and often forgotten, a dramatic increase in herds in Oregon, the byproduct of early farm herds and pioneer oxen herds, produced a surplus there that caused herds to be driven back east into Wyoming at the very moment that northern Wyoming opened up for ranching.
But what was ranching like here, at the time?
It was dominated by the fact of the Homestead Act, a bill passed during the Civil War in order to encourage western emigration into the vast public domain. But the bill had been written by men familiar only with Eastern farming, and it used the Eastern agricultural unit, 40 acres, as a model. That amount of acreage was perfectly adequate for a yeoman farmer, and indeed after the Civil War "40 acres and a mule" was the dream of the liberated slave, which they hoped to obtain from the Federal government. But 40 acres wasn't anywhere near adequate for any sort of livestock unit in the West, and most of the West wasn't suitable for farming. In the West, additionally, the Federal homesteading provisions oddly dovetailed with State and Territorial water law.
Water law was the domain of states or territories exclusively, and evolved in the mining districts of California, which accepted that claiming water in one place and moving it to another was a necessary right. This type of water law, much different from that existing in the well watered East, spread to the West, and a "first in time, first in right" concept of water law evolved. This was to be a significant factor in Western homesteading. Additionally, the Federal government allowed open use of unappropriated public lands for grazing. States and Territories, accepting this system, sought to organize the public grazing by district, and soon an entire legal system evolved which accepted the homesteading of a small acreage, usually for the control of water, and the use of vast surrounding public areas, perhaps collectively, but under the administration of some grazing body, some of which, particularly in Wyoming, were legally recognized. In the case of Wyoming, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association controlled the public grazing, and had quasi legal status in that livestock detectives, who policed the system, were recognized at law as stock detectives.
This was the system that the large ranching interests accepted, developed and became use to in the 1870s and 1880s. Large foreign corporations bought into Western ranching accepting that this was, in fact the system. It had apparent legal status.
But nothing made additional small homesteading illegal. And the penalty for failing to cooperate in the grazing districts mostly amounted to being shunned, or having no entry into annual roundups. This continued to encourage some to file small homesteads. Homesteading was actually extremely expensive, and it was difficult for many to do much more than that. Ironically, small homesteading was aided by the large ranchers practice of paying good hands partially in livestock, giving them the ability to start up where they otherwise would not have been. It was the dream of many a top hand, even if it had not been when they first took up employment as a cowboy, to get a large enough, albeit small, herd together and start out on their own. Indeed, if they hoped to marry, and most men did, they had little other choice, the only other option being to get out of ranch work entirely, as the pay for a cowhand was simply not great enough to allow for very many married men to engage in it.
By the 1880s this was beginning to cause a conflict between the well established ranchers, who tended to be large, and the newer ones, who tended to be small. The large stockmen were distressed by the carving up of what they regarded as their range, with some justification, and sought to combat it by legal means. One such method was the exclusion of smaller stockmen from the large regional roundups, which were done collectively at that time, and which were fairly controlled events. Exclusion for a roundup could be very problematic for a small stockman grazing on the public domain, as they all were, and this forced them into smaller unofficial roundups. Soon this created the idea that they were engaging in theft. To make matters even more problematic, Wyoming and other areas attempted to combat this through "Maverick" laws, which allowed any unbranded, cow attended, calf to be branded with the brand of its discoverer. This law, it was thought, would allow large stockmen to claim the strays found on their ranges, which they assumed, because of their larger herds, to be most likely to be theirs (a not unreasonable assumption), but in fact the law actually encouraged theft, as it allowed anybody with a brand to brand a calf, unattended or not, as long as nobody was watching. Soon a situation developed in which large stockmen were convinced that smaller stockmen were acting illegally or semi illegally, and that certain areas of the state were controlled by thieves or near thieves, while the small stockmen rightly regarded their livelihoods as being under siege. Soon, they'd be under defacto siege.
Cattle on livestock driveway in Wyoming.
So, to summarize, the way that the system developed was this way. Prior to the Civil War, the Federal government turned over most of the lands it held to the states, upon their becoming states. Starting with the Homestead Act, however, it kept most of the land, which it had a perfect legal right to do. The Homestead Act further crated a system, based upon eastern agriculture, in which small parcel were deeded to homesteaders, but they were too small to be viable economic units. It wasn't that agriculture itself wasn't viable, but the units had to be larger. This in turn created a de facto system in which, basically by necessity, water sources were homesteaded and the remaining public domain simply occupied.
Over time, this very much eroded and in fact it was the early 20th Century, not the late 19th, that was really the era of massive homesteading. In almost every state in the West upwards of half the lands were ultimately homesteaded, with only the very dry states being the exception. The use of the public domain continued on, of course, but really by the teens any unhomesteaded land was the natural range, due to lack of water, of some other parcel. This didn't keep people from continuing to homestead however, but by that time, over the warnings of local stockmen, most homesteads were doomed and destructive in the ranching region. When the Dust Bowl of the 1930s hit, these homestead failed.
A lot, but not all, of those homestead were farms, not ranches. Ranching was durable, precisely because it fit into the natural pattern of the land, contrary to what modern antis think. Ranching made use of the land for large ungulates, in a region in which there had been a closely related large ungulate. Cows aren't buffalo, but in most of their native Northern Hemisphere range, the two species actually overlap somewhat. That's because the wild Norther Hemisphere's cow, the ancestor of our modern domestic cow, the auroch, had a range that overlapped that of the European Wild Bison. Most Americans aren't even aware that there are European Bison, even now, but there are. Aurochs, on the other hand, are gone.
Now, of course, aurochs didn't live in North America, but our Bison differs little from the European one, and so, as is often completely ignored in modern environmentalist views of a romantic bovine free prairie, cattle on the range really simply basically replaced bison on the range. One big ungulate for another. Indeed, contrary to what is sometimes imagined, bison were quite capable of environmental destruction when their numbers were high, particularly on cottonwood groves near water sources.
Anyhow, the conditions of the Dust Bowl lead to the passing of the Taylor Grazing Act, a prime feature of which was to end the homesteading of the public range. This guaranteed that those small, 20th Century, homesteads that weren't viable would collapse back into the public domain or into larger ranches, depending upon whether they were proved up or not. Viable units would go on to be proved up, those that weren't would either be bought out by their neighbors, directly or via the banks, or return to larger grazing units. One entire region of Wyoming, the Thunder Basin National Grasslands, basically consists of failed early 20th Century farms that went back to grazing lands.
Abandoned hay farm homestead, homesteaded right after World War One, abandoned during the 1930s.
When the Taylor Grazing Act came in, the old system of open public lands ended, and its place the Federal government created a system by which it made it plan that it would retain the land henceforth, but lease it to designated nearby real livestock units. This made sense, and this is the system that we retain today.
Now, something is key to note in this is that, by and large, this land is land that was left in Federal ownership, or which returned to it, for a reason. Anti grazing forces like to show photos of the most bucolic land in the west, but the vast majority of retained Federal lands were very large dry stretches of grazing land that had not been homesteaded, because they could not be. That didn't make them unusable by any means, but it does mean that if they are separated from their private "base lands", they rapidly become pretty bleak.
When the lands passed back into Federal ownership, or were withdrawn from homesteading, and element of control was additionally placed on them, although that is very poorly understood. Mining interests, which always had primary access to Federal lands, retained it, and they still do today, although they can no longer patent land as they once could. I.e., they can enter land, file a claim, and mine, but they can't pass unpatented lands onto their own ownership. They can still do this, by the way, for the thousands up thousands of acres where the Federal government owns the subsurface mineral interest but not the surface. Ranchers who wish to continue grazing the Federal domain may do so via leases for the surface, attached to a base, as noted above. Sportsmen of all types have free access with no charge, even though some of the things they do, principally in the form of using vehicles on the Federal lands, are somewhat destructive. And if we consider the forest lands, which have a separate history as they were withdrawn for water conservation earlier, and for silvaculature as well, they can be logged under permit.
Another abandoned hay farm.
Now the irony of modern opposition to this system is that it largely fails to take into account the nature of the land, which is far from park land as a rule, and it comes from the one sector of use that doesn't pay for use. Ranchers, timber companies, oil and gas companies, and mining companies, all pay for use. Indeed, technically Wyoming state land requires a permit for recreational use, although hardly anyone ever bothers to get it.
Antis tend to point out, in regards to grazing, that the leasing of the land supposedly doesn't break even, but that statistic fails to take into account that funds that the Federal government expends in this area are ones that it elects to spend, but for which the leasing agricultural entities are largely not asking for. Prior to the Taylor Grazing Act the Federal government spent next to nothing on Western agriculture and it could choose to do so again and frankly be little missed. Ranchers aren't really asking the Federal government to do anything for them, and if the Federal government is, its choosing to do so. The Federal government would point out that this is what it does as the landlord, and any landlord would do the things it does, but if this is the case, it would seemingly have a bit of an efficiency problem. In reality, the administrative costs of the Federal government are ones that it simply elects to undertake, some of which, perhaps most of which, it does wisely, but it does it via under its own volition and a person could wonder if there was another cheaper way to do it. Indeed, I'd note that the current focus of the poorly thought out, in my view, Wyoming Senate File 0056 is to take this role over from the Federal government, at which point it would be come a state one, and which I suspect would result in simply less being done.
And agriculture itself expends resources on the public lands, which is hardly ever noted. Fencing, water projects, and the like, require permission from the BLM, but they're typically done at the ranchers expense. As noted in an earlier post, these projects result in an improvement to the ecology of the land. In contrast, a Federal lease is much more favorable to other uses than a private lease would be. Generally, private agriculture leases include exclusive use. That is the tenant can keep anyone off, other than the landlord. As in a Federal lease the Federal government is the landlord, and it acts on behalf of the people, it normally allows anyone to go onto the leased land. Therefore, the only thing the tenant usually gets is the right to use the land, which he or she often improves, and nothing else. The rancher rents lands on which the general public, or mineral extraction businesses, can and do freely access with no notice to the rancher at all. That's a condition that accepted by ranchers, but when people wonder why a Federal lease goes for less than a private one, that's an element of it.
And, frankly, leasing the large amount of the Federal domain keeps ranching in the West viable, the alternative to which is increased balkanization and destruction of the land. 40 acre ranchettes are ranches and don't preserve wildlands. Urbanites in far off distant Portland or professors in the Ivory Tower of small town Laramie don't recognize that, seemingly, but htey reason that there's so much wild land in the West has everything to do with agriculture.
But farmers and ranchers have always been easy to have contempt for. It's a long American habit to portray them as dull rustics, and even farmers and ranchers believe that easy living is to be found in the cities. But it's those guys in cotton and wool who are living close to nature, and that should be kept in mind. The Gortex clad armies in the newest hiking shoes have a lot more in common with the suits in a steel and glass building downtown, and indeed are sometimes the same people, than they do with anything or anyone out in the grazing lands.I'm not condeming them by any means, and I'm happy that people get out to enjoy things. But there always seems to be a group of people, and that can I'll admit include ranchers, who take the view that their use is the best use, and should be the exclusive use. So, we get "non consumptive" outdoor users who are hostile to agriculture and hunters. Conservationist who are hostile to agriculture and other conservationist. Boaters who are hostile to other water uses. Agriculturalist who feel the land should be theirs. State Legislators who worry more about mining and petoleum production than any other use. Everyone ought to take a step back from their propaganda and accept that multiple use is probably the best for the multitude, most of which never see most of this land.
In his classic 1930s protest ballad Guthrie noted:
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
That's true of the Federal lands, for everyone. Ranching helps keep it that way. And there's something to be said for that in addition, we'd note.
People opting to live on the land, really live on it, rather than just own it as a hobby or to say that they're "ranchers" keep a direct cultural tie to the land that we're loosing as a culture, and which the evidence is that we need to keep. A culture that looses connection with the land, and with agriculture itself, begins to suffer for it. This culture is. The disconnect between nature, food and urban life, which is what most Americans live, is vast. At the point where it becomes too separated, agriculture simply becomes one more industry in people's minds, while at the same time, no matter how much they may suppress it, they continue to crave the close connection to nature. Most nations encourage a small farming sector to keep on. We should do so as well. The vast size of the country won't do it in and of itself, and support from the government in some fashion, if not a monetary fashion, should be part of that. And, public lands should be part of that as well.
