BCJ_SPRING 17 Digital Edition

OUR HERITAGE OF DESERT
Public Lands in American History
Bryan Huskey photo
BY LOUIS S. WARREN
WALLACE STEGNER CALLED THE WEST “the geography of
hope.” There could scarce be a better description of the nation’s
public lands. The playas of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the piñon
and juniper forests of Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, the soaring peaks
and Great Plains vistas of the Bighorn Scenic Byway in Wyoming
– these and many other publicaly owned places have found their
way into American hearts. For millions, they inspire reflection
and even a sense of redemptive awe.
But now, confronting the same stark beauty, ranks of corporate
lobbyists are energized by a new hope, to hand these lands over
to the states, make them private property, and make them pay.
In reality, the public lands are already profitable. A $646 billion
outdoor recreation industry depends on them, and communities
across the country rely on the water that flows through them and
the wildlife they produce. But for anybody who knows the real
history of this beloved West, there are other reasons to resist the
sales pitch of the privatizers.
This is because, for more than two centuries, Congress repeatedly
tried to give the public lands to private owners and to the
Western states. Again and again, Westerners rejected the offer, for
the very good reason that the lands were (and are) too arid to
support either crops or homes. The question now is whether Congress
should try again, and at what cost. The West has been hard
done by generations of hucksters and con artists. The campaign
to privatize the public lands is proof they’re not done with us yet.
How is it that a vast swath of Western public lands – hundreds
of millions acres – has remained in government hands? The short
answer is that, except for the Indians from whom they had been
taken and a small number of Hispanic settlers in New Mexico,
practically nobody wanted them. The longer answer begins with
a journey back in time, way back, to the end of the American
Revolution, before the U.S. Constitution became law.
As every schoolchild knows, when the revolution ended, the 13
former colonies became states, and their initial constitution was
called the Articles of Confederation. Less widely known is that
six of the 13 new states claimed millions of acres that had been
seized during the war from Indian tribes across the Ohio River.
The remaining seven states had no such claims. To avoid dispute
over these lands, and as part of their agreement to create a new
nation, the states ceded the new Western lands to the new confederal
government. Congress, not the states, took responsibility for
disposing of this newly created public domain.
In short order, Congress passed laws to assure the surveying and
sale of the public domain. The aim was to draw settlers to Western
lands and allow them to create more states. A portion of the land
was granted to new state governments to sell and raise funds for
schools. Most of the rest was privatized immediately, or as fast
as buyers could be found. Much of it was sold to individuals for
about a dollar per acre. Congress thus dispensed with the earliest
public domain quite handily, birthing the states of Ohio, Illinois,
Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Today, precious little public
land in those states remains.
This system continued after the new constitution was adopted
in 1789 and the new nation expanded west. The Louisiana Purchase
in 1803, the cession of Oregon country by the British in
1846, the grabbing of today’s Southwest from Mexico in 1848,
and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 filled out the map of the nation
we know today. A wave of settlers washed ashore in California
and Oregon by the late 1840s, and the federal government
busily surveyed the land and worked to dispose of it quickly. They
gave away millions of acres to new states to aid internal improvements.
In far away Oregon, they even experimented with giving
free farm land to some immigrants.
But the great interior of the country still awaited its farmers. As
the tide of settlement pushed west of Iowa, the Civil War erupted
and in 1862 Congress, hoping to keep the West from falling into
the hands of the South, passed two new laws to give the land
away. First came the Homestead Act, by which Congress expanded
the Oregon experiment and offered settlers up to 160 acres
simply for making a farm and living on it for five years. Those
who did not want to wait to “prove up” could buy the land after
six months, at $1.25 an acre.
Second, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, which gave to
the corporations building the new transcontinental railroads ten
square miles of land for every mile of track they laid. Congress
later doubled this generous subsidy and, before the railroad boom
was over, an area bigger than California would pass to the railroad
companies who mostly sold it to settlers and speculators.
With so much cheap or even free land suddenly available,
during the 1870s eager farmers swarmed into Nebraska, Kansas
and the Dakotas. But the rush hit a headwind. Because of the rain
shadow cast by the Rocky Mountains, precipitation diminishes
markedly on the west side of the Hundredth Meridian. Most of
this high Great Plains country– the western two-thirds of Kansas,
Nebraska and the Dakotas, all of Wyoming and most of Colorado
and Montana, was too cold and too dry to allow much farming.
The arid Plains were not the only obstacles. Further west still,
the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades cast their
own rain shadows. Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and much of
Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and even southern California were
unrelentingly dry.
When it came to dispensing with this thirsty public domain,
Congress would act in ways visionary, desperate or craven – and
sometimes all three. In 1872, they recognized a new value for
the remote highlands and established Yellowstone National Park,
beginning a tradition of reserving scenic wonders for public enjoyment.
But that same year, they began to up the ante on the great giveaway.
They offered land for five dollars an acre to anybody who
staked a valid mining claim on it. The next year, in 1873, they
offered any homesteader a second 160-acre parcel in return for
planting trees on it, in hopes that trees would bring rain. (They
did not; the trees mostly died.) They began to enlarge maximum
homestead claims in hopes of compensating for the land’s aridity.
By 1909, they had doubled the old 160 acre homesteading limit
to 320 acres, and in some places to 640 acres.
At the same time, Congress reserved other lands in hopes of
better sustaining Western settlements. Recognizing that farms
and cities on the dry lowlands depended on rivers fed by mountain
snow, and that those rivers could erode and fill with sediment
if their banks were ploughed, overgrazed or overcut, Congress
in 1891 passed a law allowing the creation of “forest reserves”
– soon to be called national forests. These high elevation stands
of trees under federal management would protect Western rivers
and streams.
Putting those rivers to use, Congress set out to water the desert
they had been unable to give away, with dams and irrigation
works funded by the National Reclamation Act of 1902. Soon
they were offering “reclamation homesteads” on these projects,
and under this and other, expanded versions of the old homestead
law, more land was claimed in homesteads after 1900 than before.
But the growth of private land ownership finally stalled. The
1920s saw a ferocious Western drought coincide with a global
glut of grain. Farms and ranches that barely got enough rain in
good years now turned to dust, while market prices for their produce
plummeted. Many settlers simply abandoned their homestead
claims without proving up, and the land reverted to federal
ownership. In the end, homesteaders would take 269 million
acres from the public lands. But by 1930, they had rejected an
area almost as large, 200 million acres, as too high or dry. These
lands remained unclaimed by private owners or any government
agency.
Eager to cut federal expenses, President Herbert Hoover tried
to give to the states some of the remaining public lands. But the
states refused them. As George H. Dern, governor of Utah from
1925 to 1933, explained, the states already owned millions of
acres “of this same kind of land, which they can neither sell nor
lease, and which is yielding no income. Why should they want
more of this precious heritage of desert?”
As that dismal decade wore on and Plains states choked on
the fatal storms of the Dust Bowl, it became clear that farming
the arid lands had been a disaster. Western state governors, beset
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