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8 Livestock Grazing Herbivory and Range Depletion 57 Word of rich silver ore east of the Sierra Nevada spread through California like wildfire in 1860. Crowds of men packed their belongings and hiked over the high mountain passes in search of riches. When ore was discovered at Aurora, prospectors began to spread out across northern Nevada. Fresh meat was needed in large quantities to supply the miners and the merchants who provisioned them. Livestock operators began releasing cattle and sheep on ranges that had been little grazed by large mammals since the long moist periods of the Pleistocene. The new concentration of animals caused extreme soil disturbance and steady depletion of grasses and herbs that had stabilized watersheds for millennia. The degradation of this groundcover would have serious consequences. Livestock grazing began in Nevada before the Comstock discovery. A party from Council Bluffs, Iowa, drove a small herd of cattle across northern Nevada to California in 1844.1 In the coming years, large numbers of sheep from Texas and New Mexico passed through Nevada en route to California,where demand for meat was high.2 Dick Wooton apparently followed the Humboldt River route in 1852 with a herd 9,000 sheep. The following year, Kit Carson and Lucien Maxwell came down the Humboldt route with a herd of 13,000 sheep, also bound for California. As the sheep population expanded in California, sheep owners began driving their animals east. Some 2–3 million sheep were driven east between 1865 and 1900. One of the first such operations was Major Kimball ’s thirty-five-man party who drove a herd of sheep across northern Washoe and Humboldt counties in 1864, bound for the Idaho gold fields. The Nevada cattle industry had its beginning in 1858 when 1,500 head were driven over the Sierra Nevada and grazed in Carson Valley and the Truckee Meadows. After fattening, they were driven back and “quickly snapped up at the California mining districts.”3 Newspaper publisher Horace Greeley saw evidence of a cattle drive through central Nevada on his cross-country trip 58 | n e v a d a ’ s c h a n g i n g w i l d l i f e h a b i t a t in 1859.4 At Pine Creek his stage was delayed where “a drove of 1,000 head of cattle” had destroyed the bridge. Lewis “Longhorn” Bradley, a future governor of Nevada, introduced five hundred Texas longhorns into the Reese River valley in 1862, becoming the first significant livestock operator in central Nevada. A “goodly number of ranchers” had established operations in the valley by the end of 1863.5 Significant cattle grazing in northern Nevada began during the drought of 1864, when Jack Southerland drove 20,000 head from his ranch in Tulare County, California, to this productive summer range.6 Nevada’s cattle industry was in full swing by 1869 when thousands of longhorns were trailed up from Texas. By the end of the 1870s cattle ranches occupied virtually all of Nevada’s valleys. Weather conditions at this time were highly favorable. Abundant rich native grass and adequate water allowed rapid increases in cattle numbers. Seizing the opportunity to expand their operations , some of the more industrious individuals began buying up land. Large ranches were formed in northern Nevada by leasing or purchasing blocks of Central Pacific Railroad lands. People could control enormous acreages of public domain land by purchasing relatively small tracts of nearby land along streams and around springs. Daniel Murphy was one of these enterprising individuals. In 1869 he was reputed to be one of the largest landowners in the world, owning sixty thousand acres in Elko and White Pine counties where he ran 20,000 head of cattle. John Sparks, in partnership with Jasper Harrell and James Tinnian, branded 14,000 calves in 1884. Their breeding herd was said to number 70,000.7 Sheep operations were well under way during the 1870s as available feed in the valleys and mountains allowed their numbers to expand. The combined stocking of cattle and sheep proved excessive, however, because the forage base could not sustain such concentrations of large herbivores. By the mid-1880s many areas had been overgrazed to the point of destruction. A December 3, 1886, Carson City Appeal article titled “Enough Cattle on the Range” noted that “there is enough horses,cattle and sheep to consume all the grass that grows.... Every year the fact is...

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