Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Attempted grabs of federal land are nothing new.
Before the current attempt of Montana State Senator Jennifer Fielder and her tea party buddies to transfer federal lands to the states, there was the failed James Watt led Sagebrush Rebellion of the Reagan years.
And before the Sagebrush Rebellion, there was the granddaddy of all attempted land grabs, the stockgrowers led attempt in the late 1940s and early 1950s to convert the public domain to private ownership by first delivering it to the states.
But before the stockgrowers and their allies could get away with grabbing the federal lands — our lands — historian and magazine journalist Bernard DeVoto shot down their scheme with a series of devastating exposés in Harpers, where he wrote the Easy Chair, beginning with the classic and enduring The West Against Itself.
As DeVoto’s biographer, Wallace Stegner, tells the story in The Uneasy Chair, DeVoto was in Boise, Idaho, near the end of a long western trip, when his friend in the U.S. Forest Service’s regional office, Chet Olson, tracked him down.
Olson brought word of discussions held between committees of the American Livestock Association and the National Woolgrowers’Association in Salt Lake City, and he had copies of the resolutions they had passed. He put them into DeVoto’s hands, because he hope that an airing in the Easy Chair might forestall the designs the stockmen had against the grazing division of the National Forest Service.
Devoto already knew something was up when Olson delivered the resolutions. He had, as he recounted in an essay appended to his 1955 collection of Easy Chairs, gone west to conduct research for a book, but keeping open his ears he began hearing interesting things. Including things in a Miles City saloon.
…When I headed west in June I knew nothing about the intended attack on the Forest Service but I began to pick up hints about it as soon as I crossed the Hundredth Meridian. I remember with pleasure that I got my first real tip by listening (I could have avoided listening only by going outside) to a very loud and very drunk cattleman in the Range Riders Café in Miles City. …In the next few weeks I talked to a good many boastful and indiscreet stockmen, as well as to many other stockmen, most of them small operators, who bitterly resented the intention of the national associations. None of them of either persuasion knew any specific details. Neither did anyone else I talked to — for I soon realized that something important was being cooked-up and I set out to learn what it was. By the first of August I had the whole story, except for the specific details of the legislative program. They were the heart of the matter. I decided that they could be obtained.
What was being cooked-up, of course, was a remarkably audacious scheme to transfer the federal public domain to private ownership by first transferring it to the states, which it was argued, best knew how to manage the land. Wyoming Sen. Edward Robertson, a sheep and cattle rancher, was carrying the legislation, with help from his Wyoming sidekick, Rep. Frank Barrett.
DeVoto bided his time, waiting until just before Congress convened in January, 1947, to tell the story. He cut loose in the January, 1947, issue of Harpers, which reached its readers in mid-December, with The West Against Itself.
Right now the cattlemen and sheepmen are carrying the ball. We must confine ourselves to them and their principal objectives — remembering that the organized assault aims at many other objectives which would benefit other groups. Their limited objectives are:
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The immediate objectives make this attempt one of the biggest landgrabs in American history. The ultimate objectives make it incomparably the biggest. …The public lands are first to be transferred to the states on the fully justified assumption that if there should be a state government not wholly compliant to the desires of stockgrowers, it could be pressured into compliance. The intention is to free them of all regulation except such as stockgrowers might impose upon themselves. Nothing in history suggests that the states are adequate to protect their own resources, or even want to, or suggests that cattlemen and sheepmen are capable of regulating themselves even for their own benefit, still less the public’s. And the regulations immediately to be got rid of are those by which the government has been trying to prevent overgrazing of the public range. Cattlemen and sheepmen, I repeat, want to shovel most of the West into its rivers.
From the states the public lands are to be transferred to private ownership. Present holders of permits are to be constituted a prior and privileged caste, to the exclusion of others except on such terms as they may dictate. They are to be permitted to buy the lands — the public lands, the West’s lands, your lands — at a fraction of what they are worth. And the larger intention is to liquidate all the publicly held resources of the West.
Robertson, Barrett, and their fellow schemers never saw it coming. DeVoto bushwhacked them with a bright beam of sunlight. They blinked in surprise and fury, bellowed in pious outrage — but the truth was out, and once out, it was never rebottled by those hard drinking, grandiose scheming, men in Stetsons whose bedrock belief was “Your land should belong to me.”
It took several years to defeat the land grabbers, of course, and it took others as well as DeVoto to spread the word. But he exposed the dirty business, and he led the charge. Once aroused, the American people sealed the victory, as he knew they would, letting Congress know the federal public domain was going to stay the federal public domain. The hard drinkers in the big hats grumbled, then retreated to their ranches and saloons.
But they didn’t go away. Along with their equally greedy offspring, they returned a generation later, backing James Watt, arguing that federal lands were still mismanaged and should be transferred to the loving care of the states. By then DeVoto was 20 years dead, but his spirit lived on in Wallace Stegner, David Brower, the Udall brothers, George Miller, and dozens of others. The Sagebrush Rebels were serious, but they didn't get to first base because the public, and thus most of Congress, took them both seriously and seriously to task.
Now, another generation later, the “Your land should be my land” sons and daughters of the Sagebrushers are at it again, meeting in Salt Lake City, passing resolutions, arguing that the states can manage the lands better than the citified bureaucrats in far away Washington, D.C. Here’s Montana State Senator Jennifer Fielder writing in the Flathead Beacon:
Shifting to state-based management would result in priorities consistent with Montana values. Better access, more jobs, increased funding for public services, protection of our environment, and active prevention of catastrophic wildfires could become the rule rather than the exception.
As chair of Montana’s study of federal land management, I continue to assess available information and consider a variety of solutions to correct problems with federal land management. I welcome your comments and questions at www.jenniferfielder.us.
Fielder and her fellow travelers, reports Tristan Scott of the Flathead Beacon, assert that Montana’s DNRC manages timber much more profitably than the U.S. Forest Service:
In Montana, the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation manages 599,000 forest acres, compared to the U.S. Forest Service’s 17.1 million acres in Montana, with state timber sales generating an average of $8.9 million per year for the former, and an average of $1.6 million a year for the latter, according to the EQC working group.
That works out to $15 per acre for the DNRC and just 10 cents per acre for the U.S. Forest Service, a difference of more than two orders of magnitude. That’s quite a difference. So is the difference in the quality of the timberlands. Montana’s state forests are low elevation, mostly, with good soils and sufficient rainfall. But the federal forests in Montana are higher, drier, rockier, less productive, and mostly poorly suited for growing commercial timber. If Montana somehow obtained title to federal timberlands, it would at best be a break even operation, an administrative headache that surely would be cured by selling the lands to the highest private bidders. Our land would become their land, and they would post it with flashing neon NO TRESPASSING signs on every fencepost.
Fielder and her fellow Teabush Rebels cite dubious economics, but overall their motivation is philosophical. Like Sen. Robertson and the original post-WWII land grabbers, they don't believe in public lands. And so every generation they emerge from the graveyard of dead ideas to howl anew that the federal public domain — our national forests, grasslands, parks, rivers, monuments, and resources — must be transferred to the states as a first step to its ultimate conversion to private ownership by the usual suspects.
Wherever he is, DeVoto knows he’s seen this before. If today he were writing Flathead Memo instead of me, I think he still would close The West Against Itself in the same way:
There you have it. A few groups of Western interests, so small numerically as to constitute a minute fraction of the West, are hellbent on destroying the West. They are stronger than they would otherwise be because they are skillfully manipulating their support sentiments that have always been powerful in the West — the home rule which means basically that we want federal help without federal regulation, the “individualism” that has always made the small Western operator a handy tool of the big one, and the wild myth that stockgrowers constitute an aristocracy in which all Westerners somehow share. They have managed to line up behind them many Western interests that would perish if they should succeed. And they count on the inevitable postwar reaction against government regulation to put their program over.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
But if it has this mad beauty it also has an almost cosmic irony, in that fulfillment of the great dream of the West, mature economic development and local ownership and control, has been made possible by the developments of our age at exactly the same time. That dream envisions the establishment of an economy on the natural resources of the West, developed and integrated to produce a steady, sustained, permanent yield. While the West moves to build that kind of economy, a part of the West is simultaneously moving to destroy the natural resources forever. That paradox is absolutely true to the Western mind and spirit. But the future of the West hinges on whether it can defend itself against itself.
“DeVoto,” Stegner concluded, “went West in 1946 a historian and tourist. He came back an embattled conservationist, one whose activities would eventually entitle him to be ranked with George Perkins March, Powell, Karl Schurz, Pinchot, and [Theodore] Roosevelt.”
And because of DeVoto’s pen and pith, the greedy hands that grabbed for our federal lands almost 70 years ago are still empty.
Reformatted and edited for typos, etc., on 8 December 2014.