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

From Open Range to Closed Range on the Public Lands

96 From Open Range to Closed Range on the Public Lands william d. rowley L ivestock grazing on public or common lands spans the history of the nation’s westward expansion. European Americans introduced large grazing animals to the “new world”—horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and goats.1 The animals demanded extensive grazing grounds that took them to coastal savannas, to the forests and mountains, to the rolling prairies, and finally to the plains and mountains of the American West. In each instance these animals altered the land’s ecology.2 Grazing lands often became private, but in the West they typically remained public. The mixture of private and public grazing lands gave rise to a host of problems and quarrels that continue to wrack the western range. In the years after the Civil War the demise of the great bison herds in the grasslands of the West and the confinement of Indian tribes to reservations opened vast lands to the invasion of what General Phil Sheridan described as the era of the “speckled cattle.” From 1867 to 1887 a veritable cattle kingdom reigned from the eastern plains states to the Rocky Mountains. It was built on the northern movement of Texas longhorns and the introduction of finer breeds from the East.3 Long trail drives moved cattle north from Texas and Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma ) to the railheads in Kansas, Nebraska, and even Wyoming. Lush northern ranges encouraged stock operators to establish base ranches claimed from the public domain under the various U.S. land laws. By the 1870s ranch holdings reached as far north as the Dakotas and Montana and even to parts of the northern Great Basin in Nevada. From these is- From Open Range to Closed Range on the Public Lands 97 lands of private land or base ranches, cattle grazed over thousands of acres that comprised the surrounding sea of public range. Sometimes there was no base ranch, and owners put their animals directly onto the public range. This distinction between ranch and range is important. Stock operators used the public domain as a gigantic grazing commons. Western stock owners could not afford to own outright the thousands of acres of marginal western grazing land needed to support the numbers of stock necessary for an economically viable operation. One scholar noted in the early twentieth century: “The land laws made it nearly impossible for one owner to acquire legally the thousands of acres that were needed to support a large herd.” In addition, without the control of a water source, there could be no cattle ranch, “and control of the water rendered the unwatered hinterland of the region useless so far as other cattlemen were concerned.”4 But U.S. land law favored the acquisition of only small acreage by western standards (160 to 640 acres). When the governmental scientist and famed Colorado River explorer John Wesley Powell looked at the western plains and mountains in the late 1870s, he recommended in his Report on the Arid Lands of the United States that Congress grant landed estates in this region of at least 2,560 acres. This allowed a rancher-farmer grazing lands, irrigated acreage, surface water sources from streams, and woodlands for fencing and fuel.5 Congress never moved to grant land in these recommended large parcels, however. It rejected fostering landed baronial holdings in the West. Because the land laws favored only smaller holdings, stock interests sought leasing arrangements over large acreage on the public domain to secure their usage over time. Again, Congress declined. Many people, members of Congress included, argued that long-term leasing threatened to freeze much of the West into a permanent grazing economy, to bar the growth of diversified stock and crop farming, and to discourage the influx of population into the region. Even local boosters in the western communities surrounded by an open-range grazing economy supported the congressional view. The future, they insisted, should be shaped by population growth on farms and in communities, not by the maintenance of the pastoral stage of development. Aspiring stock owners, including sheep owners , looked with suspicion at a system of long-term quasi land tenure for cattle outfits that possessed the power to bar newcomers. Railroad companies , desiring population growth along their routes, objected to a perma- william d. rowley 98 nent labeling of the lands for grazing purposes only. They hoped for a future that included not only carrying cattle, but for the lucrative trade of...