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190 epilogue Contested Terrain The Business of Land in the American West richard white W hen I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, the history of the public lands was at the heart of the training for a western historian. Paul Wallace Gates and Vernon Carstensen in particular built on the work of the pioneering historians in the field, Thomas Donaldson, Benjamin Hibbard, Roy Robbins, Fred Shannon, and others. These historians did not just write books, they created tomes: at three hundred pages they were just hitting their stride. They created a body of scholarship so grand, so sweeping, so detailed that it finally came to a halt by its own accumulated weight. For nearly a generation there seemed little else left to say; historians, at least, went on to other things. Only recently have some talented younger historians, such as Karen Merrell, again made land policy and the public lands a topic of much scholarly interest. The theme that emerged from the older scholarship was less that American land policy had become a contradictory mess than that it had always been a contradictory mess. Land policy was considered an ad hoc hodgepodge better explained historically by looking at the particular considerations that had prompted the passage of various acts than by trying to see how the laws conformed to some overarching principles. To be sure, there were overarching principles; it was just that they were ignored whenever they became inconvenient. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, this history of American land policy had become vaguely celebratory. In those years—when there was still a Epilogue: Contested Terrain 191 rough consensus by experts on management of public lands, on multiple use, and on the limits of the market—this contradictory history could be seen as yielding a muddled triumph of sorts. Things seemed to have worked out well, and the lessons learned on the public lands seemed clear. In 1964, as part of the compromise that produced the Wilderness Act, Congress established the U.S. Public Land Law Review Commission to recommend changes in public land law. At this time the task seemed largely one of codification and making explicit what had long been implicit in the law. The commission hired Paul Wallace Gates, the wellknown public lands historian, to produce his History of Public Land Law Development. In what remains a magisterial work, Gates concluded that pride in the public ownership of parks, forests, and dams seemed to have displaced earlier policies of putting public lands into private hands.1 It seemed that a corner had been turned. The commission proved Gates both right and wrong. Partly the brainchild of Wayne Aspinall, the Colorado congressman who for so long dominated public land politics, the commission and its report, One Third of the Nation’s Lands, attempted to bring the letter of the law into correspondence with what had over the years become the spirit of the law. A rough consensus on public ownership , multiple use, and environmental protection dominated much of the report. The commission sought direct legislative sanction that would end disposal as the principle behind U.S. land policy. In this way the report thus echoed Gates. In practice, however, the commission’s legacy was more complicated, because it also recommended the disposal of significant amounts of public lands. It would allow alienation so that cities could expand and new cities could be established. Perhaps more significant, the report recommended the sale of a substantial portion of federal lands, primarily those useful for grazing. In making these recommendations, the commission took into account future population growth, but it overestimated that growth. It predicted that between 1965 and 2000, population would grow by one hundred million. In 1965 population was estimated at 194,303,000, so estimated growth of one hundred million would supposedly yield a population of 294,000,000 in 2000. At the beginning of 1997, however, the estimated population was 266,581,648. The estimate for 2000 is 276,241,000. The commission therefore overestimated growth by almost twenty million people.2 The commission thus managed to recommend richard white 192 enshrining the public lands as a permanent facet of American life, even as it moved to diminish the extent of those lands. The report became another shot in a battle over public lands that had been raging since World War II and has continued to rage in one form or another ever since (for example, the Sagebrush Rebellion, the New Resource...

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