Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good

Introduction: In Search of Western Lands

3 “ introduction In Search of Western Lands william g. robbins The postponement of outgrowing the romantic metaphor of frontier , of unspoiled mountain backdrop, of rustic cabin in the sun, of being left alone, of feeling like the land will continue to endure our assaults on it, is almost too seductive to resist. —Eric Torso I f Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history ,” historian Patricia Nelson Limerick observed, “its movies would be about real estate”—that is, about drawing lines and creating borders. A good contemporary beginning might be the neighborhood of Peace Cove, Oregon, a rural greenscape of nurseries and berry patches along the meandering Willamette River about twenty or so miles upstream from Portland. The neighborhood earned headlines in the Portland Oregonian in early 1997, when Hollywood Video millionaire Mark Wattles asked for a variance from Oregon’s land-use laws to build a fiftythousand -square-foot home on prime farmland along the river. When Wattles purchased the thirty-plus-acre rhubarb farm two years earlier, the land carried an agricultural exemption that limited property taxes to $545 a year. The title included a farm-management plan, limiting to one acre a potential home and landscaping area. Wattles—who acknowledged, “I have a lot of money. I don’t know what to do with all the money I have”— received a green light from county planners in mid-1996 to build and landscape up to eight acres of the rich farmland along the riverfront.1 The monster home—which includes an eight-thousand-square-foot basketball court and a four-thousand-square-foot swimming pool—has placed Oregon’s pacesetting land-use planning system at some risk. Gov- william g. robbins 4 ernor Tom McCall (1967–75), who signed the Oregon plan into law in May 1973, had urged the legislature to put a stop to “the unfettered despoiling ” of the state. “Sagebrush subdivision, coastal ‘condomania’ and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley,” he said, threatened to mock the state’s reputation as an environmental model. The groundbreaking measure required every Oregon city and county to draft comprehensive land-use planning structures that would adhere to certain state-mandated guidelines.2 The Wattles case suggests that land issues in Oregon and elsewhere in the American West continue to resonate with historical questions framed by the tensions between private claims, opportunity, and pursuit of the main chance with concerns for the larger common good. Since the inception of the American republic, the constitutional guarantees to individual liberty and freedom of opportunity have clashed with similar constitutional promises to guarantee the rights of aboriginal people and to promote the general welfare of all citizens. Because much of the territory of the American West was annexed and peopled by the expanding U.S. empire since the mid-nineteenth century, the more significant of those disputes have centered in the vast area of the trans-Mississippi West. With its sizable federal lands, the presence of most of the country’s Indian reservations, and its still extensive natural–resource base, the American West has been the focus of the more contentious disputes involving private claims and the common good. The struggle for control over western land has often been violent and tumultuous. The greatest violence, of course, took place between the Euro-American newcomers and indigenous peoples. The EuroAmericans gradually wrested control of the region through a series of military campaigns and forced treaties that often confined native peoples to inferior lands. Although the Indian wars were over by the 1870s, violent clashes over western land continued in the form of range wars between cattle barons (who saw the Great Plains as a vast commons to enter and occupy) and homesteading, fence-building farmers (who wanted exclusive property rights to limited acreages). Because millions of acres of mineral , timber, and grazing lands—as well as appropriation rights to water—are federally owned, the public’s interest and individual property claims have often clashed.3 The Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s and the early 1980s and the Wise-Use movement of more recent years re- Introduction: In Search of Western Lands 5 defined access to public lands as an inherent property right and an expression of individual liberty.4 By contrast, those who opposed singular claims to public land argued that the invocation of exclusive private rights violated the general belief that the public commons was to be shared equally among all citizens. Despite the romance that...