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I'm not quite sure where I fit into this chataqua; indeed, this is the first time I've ever been involved in one, so if I foul up on protocol, I hope you'll forgive me.
The series so far in Westcliffe has involved Winfield Scott Stratton and Enos Mills. While I find much to admire in both men, they both have a trait that I don't want to share for a while -- they're both dead.
I tried to think of someone from the past that I might
impersonate. One candidate was Davis H. Bloody
Bridles
Waite, governor of Colorado from 1893 to 1895.
Waite was a mountain-town newspaper editor with a flowing
beard and a sharp pen, so there are some obvious
similarities.
Waite was our only governor who was neither Republican nor Democrat -- he was a Populist. And he took his labor support seriously. When the miners of Cripple Creek went on strike in 1894, and the company goons, assisted by the El Paso County Sheriff's Department, came to town to force them to either leave or go back to work -- Waite called out the militia to protect the miners, rather than the mine owners. It was the first and only time in American history this happened.
These days, populism means something like more
consumer protection.
In those days, it meant some
serious left-wing politics.
Waite got his nickname for a speech he gave in 1893,
railing against monopolists and the Money Power, wherein he
said It is better, infinitely better, that blood should
flow to the horses' bridles than that our national
liberties should be destroyed.
My interest in Waite developed at an early age because according to family lore, he's the reason there are Quillens in Colorado. My great-grandfather, William Henry Quillen, was a stonemason in Missouri and Kansas, and a traveling agitator for the Farmers' Union, and then for the Populist Party.
My father and grandfather whispered that William Henry was a Populist, in a tone that said they considered this as shameful as being a bigamist or a horse thief. So naturally, I got interested.
When the Populists elected Waite in 1892, William Henry Quillen decided that he wanted to be part of the wonderful things that were happening in Colorado, and he moved the family west.
And boy was he wrong. Ever since then, both the Quillens and the state of Colorado have been mostly conservative Republicans.
Perhaps that's for the best. Consider the Populist national platform in 1892 -- the year that the Populist Presidential Candidate, Gen. James B. Weaver carried Colorado and four other states:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized ... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. ... imported pauperized labor beats down their labor
The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes--tramps and millionaires.
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver, and the oppression of usurers, may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.
Makes you feel proud of how far that Colorado and
America have come in the past 108 years, doesn't it? After
all, today our press is not subsidized or muzzled,
it's part of the Liberal Media Monopoly, except that
doesn't quite explain why the Wet Mountain Tribune is the
largest newspaper in the observable universe owned by a
registered Democrat.
Since there's obviously no need today to address the issues of political corruption and big business that troubled Gov. Waite and the other Populists, I'll forego attempting to imitate him, or any other figure from the past, and examine the past in another light -- how our public lands developed, and what we might anticipate in the future.
Once I started researching the topic, I realized that the only approach that worked for me was historical. That's probably on account of the reference materials I had at hand.
You see, about a dozen years ago, Martha and I got most
of our livelihood from writing adult westerns for the
Trailsman series. The contract did not call for enduring
literary merit, but for approximately 60,000 words,
featuring Skye Fargo [the hero] and emphasizing sex and
violence.
Even so, we felt compelled to do some research. One of our plots had the Trailsman guiding a survey party into the Sangre de Cristo range, so that he, too, could encounter the notorious Caverno del Oro. If you're ever in a used bookstore, and you're desperate for a book with a local setting, you could look among the cheap westerns for Cave of Death by Jon Sharpe.
At any rate, we needed to find out what the government surveyors did besides squint through transits, so I bought a book, a reprint of a 1935 work called Public Land Surveys: History - Instruction - Methods. [by Lowell O. Stewart. 1976 reprint is by The Myers Printing Co., Minneapolis, Minn.]
It was about as interesting as the title indicates, and it languished at the bottom of some pile until it mysteriously appeared.
As I learned from the book, disputes about America's public lands are older than the current American system of government.
Rather than take a revisionist view and start with Ute and Spanish customs on the squishy liberal basis that they were here first, I'll follow what we learned in school -- what I call Eastern Seaboard Standard History, which holds that America started in Boston and steadily progressed westward.
So like wholesome, patriotic Americans, we begin with the 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast. Many of their charters, granted by the British government in the 16th and 17th centuries, specified their boundaries as extending to the Pacific Ocean -- even though British claims pretty much ended at the Mississippi River.
We're on land that was once claimed by Virginia. It was also claimed by Maryland and Pennsylvania. This didn't matter all that much under British rule, because in 1765, Parliament outlawed settlement west of the Appalachians.
This law was obeyed about as well as the 55-mph speed
limit, and it was one reason the colonies declared their
independence in 1776. As the Declaration put it, King
George had discouraged growth and settlement by raising
the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
The British surrendered in 1781, and after successfully
declaring that they could govern themselves, the former
colonies now had to find a way to do that. Their first
effort was called the Articles of Confederation, which
featured strong state governments and a central federal
government so weak that one hesitates to use the word
government
to describe it.
And it was this congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, which established federal control over public lands. Recall that some colonies, which were now states, had claims on all land west to the Pacific. Also note that many states had been unable to pay their soldiers in cash during the Revolutionary War, and had instead given out vouchers for land somewhere out West -- in those days, Kentucky or Ohio.
But what good would a Virginia voucher do if the soldier used it on land that turned out to be in Extended Western Maryland, which might have issued the same land to someone else? It wouldn't do to provoke a revolt against the new government by the veteran soldiers who had just fought to establish that government.
Congress took its usual course, even in 1784. It assigned the issue to a committee. However, this committee was headed by a masterful politician, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia -- who, of course, denied he was a politician throughout his distinguished career.
Jefferson's committee produced a compromise. The 13 seaboard states would get somewhat sensible western boundaries. The land beyond, unless it was already in private hands (George Washington, among others, held speculative interests in some western lands, and so of course, existing property rights would be respected) would be turned over to the central government.
In return for giving up their claims for 3,000-mile strips from sea to shining sea, or at least from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the states would be released from their obligations to pay their veterans with land.
That obligation, land payments to veterans, would be assumed by the Confederation.
And so, federal public lands are older than the current federal government. The central government, such as it was, began taking control of these lands in 1784, and the Constitution was not adopted until 1787.
That bit of history should settle one major modern contention in the West, as to whether the federal or state claim to public lands is the stronger claim. If seniority means anything -- and we seem to think it does when it comes to water -- then the federal claim is much stronger. It goes back to 1782, and Colorado wasn't even a territory until 1861. Indeed, this area wasn't even part of the United States until 1848.
The thing that surprised me in this research was how
American
and national
the public lands are.
You could almost make the argument that the federal
government was formed just to administer the public
lands.
And Americans from everywhere feel that sense of ownership. Once Martha and I were discussing this, and I argued that the state should get ownership of the national forests and BLM land. Martha grew up in Michigan, as did Gen. George Armstrong Custer, namesake of this county.
Custer wasn't riding for Michigan or Colorado or
South Dakota when he went out West to take land from the
Lakota,
she said. He was riding for the United
States, and he got himself and his command wiped out in the
service of the United States. That land belongs to all
Americans.
And that was certainly the attitude of Thomas Jefferson in 1784. So if you want to blame somebody for the feds controlling all this public land, blame Thomas Jefferson -- who ironically was a steadfast opponent of federal power.
While we're at it, we can blame Jefferson for a few other problems in the West, even though he never got any farther west than Albermarle County, Virginia, during his lifetime.
Jefferson's committee in the Confederation congress didn't just arrange for the western lands to be transferred to the central government. It also devised rules for surveying those lands.
Jefferson was a rationalist in tune with the
intellectual fashions of his day, especially if they came
from France. Now, if you remember some high-school algebra
or geometry, you probably recall drawing graphs of
equations on a grid that is called a Cartesian
co-ordinate system.
That name comes from Ren Descarte, a French mathematician who discovered that you could describe almost anything by putting it on a grid. This fascinated Jefferson, and so when his congressional committee issued its recommendation, Jefferson made sure that the lands out west would be surveyed on a universal grid tied to the distant equator and the poles -- not with the traditional metes-and-bounds method tied to local landmarks.
That Jefferson belief in a rational system of land
description is why we live in one of those big square
states out west.
If someone else had been in charge of
that committee, we might have political boundaries that
bore some relationship to the physical landscape, rather
than these arbitrary lines which force us to think we have
more in common with Julesberg than with Moab, or Fort
Collins than Santa F.
We also suffer from a Jefferson contribution to public discourse. Jefferson hated cities; he considered them cesspools of iniquity and degradation. But he was also an urbane, cultivated man who enjoyed the products either created or inspired by cities, like books and music.
How did he resolve this? He declared that Europe had cities enough to serve all such needs for North America, and so the United States didn't need to have cities -- he wanted it to be an agrarian commonwealth of freeholder farmers.
To put this another way, Jefferson wanted the stuff that comes from cities, but he didn't want any cities anywhere near him. Sort of like those people who want electricity, but don't want power plants or transmission lines near them, or the people who want graded roads and concrete foundations, but don't want gravel pits near them.
As nearly as I can tell, Jefferson thus invented NIMBY -- Not In My Back Yard. And it also appeared that he left a profoundly anti-urban bias in the American attitude.
That's a pity, because after about a decade of sporadic research -- I keep telling people that I'm working on a book called Is Denver Necessary -- I've concluded that we need to pay close attention to cities and their role if we're going to understand some important parts of American history, and that includes public lands.
As America expanded westward, the federal government
acquired land by treaty, usually after warfare. A fair
chunk of Colorado, for instance, was acquired by an 1880
treaty that Chief Ouray described as the sort of
agreement that a buffalo makes with an arrow.
Treaties typically reserved some lands for the Indians
or for military purposes -- thus we get Indian
reservations
and military reservations
-- and
they tried to honor existing titles and land claims, as
with the land grants and subsistence farms in the land
conquered from Mexico.
The rest of the land was called unappropriated public
domain,
and there was an immense struggle over what to
do with it.
Some thought it should be sold off to the highest bidder to pay down the national debt -- indeed, the only time in American history that the United States was not in debt was in 1836, and the money came from land sales.
Others saw it as an opportunity to practice some
social engineering
in various ways. Recognize
squatters, and you'd have one kind of people on the
frontier. Dispossess squatters and arrange matters so that
the smallest unit the government would sell would be a
36-square-mile township, and you'd get a different kind of
people -- speculators and their victims.
Build canals and railroads into the land under the
American system
advocated by Henry Clay and the Whig
Party, and you'd get another sort of economic and social
system.
For our part of the world, we can start with the decade or so before the United States invaded Mexican in 1846.
Two cities then vied for control of the Interior West, except that in one of those cities -- Chihuahua -- this territory was known as La Frontera del Norte. The other city was St. Louis.
They had different views of how to use this territory. Spain, and then Mexico after gaining independence in 1821, at first saw it as a buffer zone. Spain would ally with the Utes, and the Utes would protect the empire from incursions by the French, English, and Yankees. Indeed, it was Moache Utes who spotted an invader around here in early 1807 and reported Zebulon Pike to the authorities in Santa F.
The other Spanish and Mexican frontier policy was somewhat similar to the American policy of using land to pay soldiers. Spain and Mexico issued land grants off in the northern frontier to private parties.
But the American way conformed to Jefferson's ideal of small farms -- soldiers typically got 160 acres, enough to support a family in places where rain is a regular occurrence, rather than something you take your children outdoors to see.
Spain's grants advanced the ideals of padrones with vast ranchos -- 100,000 or 500,000 acres.
Spain relied on free enterprise. Once the impresario got his grant, everything else was up to him: recruiting colonists, building roads, maintaining postal communications, repelling Indian resistance, and so on.
The United States was supposedly a free-enterprise economy, but we socialized those costs. The federal government built roads and then railroads, maintained postal service, erected military forts and dispatched cavalry.
The difference between these two approaches is reflected in Colorado's oldest town, San Luis. Since the 1830s, Mexican authorities had been trying to settle in the territory north of Taos. But the Mexican government just issued land grants to people like Carlos Beaubian; it didn't build a road or keep soldiers around or maintain communications. Thus these isolated settlements were quickly repelled by the Utes.
After America won that land in the Mexican War, the colonists ventured north from Taos again in 1851. There was now an official government road over Sangre de Cristo Pass (a variant of modern La Veta), and after 1852, a cavalry troop at nearby Fort Massachusetts to protect them and insure that their mail got delivered.
This time around, the settlement stuck. With protection and communications, they were even able to venture into the nearby mountains to build an irrigation ditch in 1852 -- it's the oldest water right in Colorado, and I have waded in it, an experience that seems like baptism to a Coloradan raised on the doctrine of prior appropriation.
St. Louis won the war with Chihuahua. It was in an ideal position to take control of the West and determine how the territory would be organized.
The trouble with St. Louis was that it didn't have a plan. It just traded with the Indians and Hispanics who were already out here; it didn't encourage farmers or miners to develop the resources of the territory.
This attitude struck me about a decade ago, when we were visiting the reconstructed Bent's Fort. There was a blacksmith in his 1846 character, forging a chain, and the fire in his forge was tiny, just a handful of coals. I asked why it was so small.
Because all our coal has to be hauled in from St.
Louis by wagon,
he explained, and so we must use it
sparingly.
Wagons from from that fort toiled regularly over Raton Pass, past some of the finest and richest metallurgical coal deposits in the world. The slightest effort would have found that coal -- but nobody was looking because nobody was thinking about local resources, they were just concerned with trade.
The same held with agriculture; the fort sat in some fertile agricultural country, but never tried to feed itself. Occasionally someone would plant a small garden, but that was the size of it.
With that attitude, that view of the interior West, all
of that unappropriated public domain
could have
stayed that way under the St. Louis system.
But that was about to change. The battle was no longer military, but political, between the American North and South. The issue, which would lead to the bloodiest military conflict in American history, was not slavery per se, but the expansion of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico.
In the 1850s, Jefferson Davis was a senator from Mississippi, and served as Secretary of War during the Pierce administration. Davis knew that transportation would be the key to controlling the West, and that whatever city controlled the transportation could impose its culture and economy on the new territory.
So he commissioned transcontinental railroad surveys --
not from Minneapolis or Chicago, but from St. Louis,
Memphis, and New Orleans. To keep the southernmost route
within U.S., he promoted the Gadsen Purchase, with the U.S.
spending $10 million for 29 million acres of otherwise
worthless desert. To maintain commerce and communication
across the arid southern route, he imported camels -- the
ships of the desert.
While Davis was busy advancing his sectional interests from Washington, a new opposition was developing to oppose the expansion of slavery into the territories. It, too, was sectional.
The Midwest -- called the Old Northwest then, and organized in townships and section lines as proposed by Thomas Jefferson -- was coming into its own as an American political region. The political party that developed to advance Midwestern values and interests was the Republican Party.
The Republican Party was organized, first and foremost, to halt the expansion of slavery into the territories. But then what?
Organize the territory as part of the Midwest. Build a Pacific Railroad from a terminus in the Midwest, rather than the south. Pass a Homestead Act, so that small family farms, as opposed to large plantations, would dominate the countryside. And because they would be near a government-subsidized railroad, these farms could grow for national and international markets, and buy from those markets as well, rather than attempt self-sufficiency. Educate the public in how to occupy this land with new agricultural and mechanical colleges.
These were all part of the Republican program, almost from the time the party was founded in 1854. It wasn't just anti-slavery -- the party had a vision for our part of the world, some social engineering on a continental scale. These federal initiatives were always blocked in Congress by the South.
But the South left the Union in 1861 and recalled its congressmen and senators. That left a lot of Republicans free to advance their goals of converting the West into the Midwest, and the party's leader was a railroad lawyer from Illinois.
The bills that passed Congress in 1862 determined the course of the West -- and consequently the public lands -- for the next century and more. The Pacific Railroad Act, the Homestead Act, and the Morrill Act for land-grant colleges all emerged from Congress that year, and that Midwestern railroad lawyer president, Abraham Lincoln, was ready to sign them.
Little wonder that he sounded pleased when he delivered his annual address to Congress on December 1, 1862. Lincoln was a nationalist -- why else would have struggled so hard to hold the Union together? -- but he was also a man of his region, the Midwest. In that light, let us consider certain portions of that speech:
Lincoln said that The Territories of the United
States, with unimportant exceptions, have remained
undisturbed by the civil war, and they are exhibiting such
evidence of prosperity as justifies an expectation that
some of them will soon be in a condition to be organized as
States and be constitutionally admitted into the Federal
Union.
Just how quickly they got into the federal union depended on how badly that Lincoln's Republican party needed electoral votes. The Union Armies were stalled in the summer of 1864, and Lincoln feared he would not be re-elected. To provide another three sure electoral votes, Nevada was admitted in great haste -- so quickly that its state constitution had to be telegraphed, at great expense, to Washington, and well before it had the requisite 30,000 residents.
Colorado was admitted in 1876, just in time for its three electoral votes to make Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, rather than Democrat Samuel Tilden, president of the U.S.
(That's the first and last time our electoral votes ever made the difference, so if we don't see any major presidential candidates this year, it's because they're getting good advice. Ralph Nader obviously didn't, but I went to hear him in Montrose anyway.)
Lincoln went on to say that The immense mineral
resources of some of these Territories ought to be
developed as rapidly as possible.
Thus the federal government would support surveys like the Hayden expedition that attempted to map mineral resources. Existing practices to convert public land to private land in the form of mining claims were codified in the General Mining Act of 1866, which was reviwed in 1872.
The idea was to tie the West to the Midwestern agricultural and industrial complex, and Lincoln made that specific as he continued.
He defined The great interior region,
and said
that territorially speaking, it is the great body of
republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to
it.
Obviously, Lincoln didn't share the common modern belief
that America consists of two coasts, and the rest of the
nation, like the part we live in, is flyover
country.
He was concerned with keeping the Great Interior Region connected to the rest of the world. That's why we were fighting the Civil War, he told Congress:
As part of one nation, its people now find, and may
forever find, their way to Europe by New York, to South
America and Africa by New Orleans, and to Asia by San
Francisco. But separate our common country into two
nations, as designed by the present rebellion, and every
man of this great interior region is thereby cut off from
one or more of these outlets -- not, perhaps, by a physical
barrier, but by embarrassing and onerous trade
regulations....
These outlets, east, west, and south, are
indispensable to the well-being of the people inhabiting,
and to inhabit, this vast interior region. Which of the
three may be the best, is no proper question. All are
better than either, and all of right belong to that people
and to their successors forever.
So it could be argued that Lincoln pursued the conquest of the South so that the farmers of the Midwest would have three choices as to how to ship their produce to the nations of the world -- east via the Great Lakes and Erie Canal to New York and Europe, west to the Orient via the Pacific Railroad, or south via the Mississippi to New Orleans. That's something that you won't find in many history books, which see Lincoln as a saint rather than as a practicing practical politician looking after the home folks.
But the real effect of the Union victory, on the ground out here, is that the West became a vast hinterland for Chicago -- the major city of Lincoln's home state.
The process is wonderfully explained in a great book, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon.
To recap this briefuly, most of what we think of as the
old west
is really the Chicago West
that
developed after the Civil War. The idea was to populate
the land with farmers and ranchers who would send their
grain and beef to Chicago elevators and slaughterhouses.
They would ship on railroads like the Chicago, Burlington
& Quincy, or the Chicago & Northwestern, or the
Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific. They would in return
buy manufactured goods like cookstoves and pianos, or even
their houses, from places like Montgomery Wards or Sears,
Roebuck & Co., both based in Chicago. Their banks
would maintain correspondent relationships with Chicago
banks, their magazines (the only national media in those
days) would emerge from Chicago publishers, their commerce
and culture would emanate from Chidago.
How does this Chicago attitude affect public land?
To put it bluntly, under the Chicago world-view, public land was there to be put into private hands as quickly as possible.
Thus the General Mining Act of 1872. Other countries kept title to the lands and charged a royalty for any minerals that were extracted; the United States wanted to transfer title by patenting mining claims.
There was the Pacific Railroad Act, which gave thousands of square miles to the railroads. These were in alternate sections. The theory was that the presence of the railroad would increase land values so much that the government's remaining land would more than double in value.
Again, note that the idea was to transfer the land into private hands that would work the land -- either directly by government sales, or indirectly through railroad land agents, who advertised throughout Europe for immigrants to come and farm.
The Homestead Act was another way to put public land into private hands, and when it dawned on the folks in the humid East that 160 acres wouldn't support a family out here in the desert, the act was amended and extended. There was the Timber Culture Act of 1873 and the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which encouraged irrigation -- yet another attempt to convert our public-lands desert into a pleasing facsimile of the humid private-land Midwest.
Somewhere along then, about a century ago, it began to dawn on folks in Washington that a goodly chunk of the public lands in the Mountain West would never become private under the existing Chicago way of looking at the world.
There were whole ranges of mountains that didn't contain any minerals worth mining. There were deserts unfit for pasture, even at 80 acres to a unit. There were slopes too steep to be timbered, and as for the public-domain land that could be logged -- big timber companies and small charcoal operators would just sweep through, leaving nothing but stumps. They weren't interested in acquiring the land; they just wanted to harvest the trees and move on.
This upset a lot of people, among them President
Benjamin Harrison, a Republican who served from 1889 to
1893. During his term, he used an obscure provision in a
public-land law to set aside six forest reserves
--
three of them in Colorado -- that would remain in public
lands. They were reserved
from homesteading and the
like, and they were the ancestors of our national
forests.
Harrison's immediate successors -- Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt -- also used their executive powers to create such reserves.
Today there's an outcry from the West when the president uses the Antiquities Act to declare a National Monument, or issues an order not to build roads on 40 million acres that don't have roads now.
It was the same a century ago. In 1907, Western
politicians gathered in Denver to denounce this federal
land grab, or as they put it, this foolish and
sentimental regard of the forests.
Senator Thomas
Slippery Tom
Carter of Montana called the forest
reserves a contemptuous disregard of the people's
interest,
and Sen. Henry M. Teller of Colorado asked
Are not men better than trees?
They had the old Chicago view -- convert public resources into private property as quickly as possible. The new Chicago view, taking form a century ago, had the same goal as the old one -- managing the land for maximum production.
But the new view was also informed by Midwestern Progressivism, which believed that public enterprise could do some things better than private enterprise, because public enterprise could focus on the long term, while private enterprise had to focus on short-term profits.
In the case of public-land forests, it was in the private company's interest to take the trees and move on, without even acquiring the land and thus the responsibility for it. The public sector, it was believed, could manage for long-term sustainable yield. It could provide some stable work for sawmill towns while protecting downstream water supplies, that sort of thing.
All of this was more or less codified under the new Forest Service, which Theodore Roosevelt organized in 1905 as the Bureau of Forestry under Guifford Pinchot. That removed Forest Service lands from homesteading, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 effectively removed the rest of the public domain -- land administered by the Bureau of Land Management after the 1946 merger of the General Land Office and the Federal Grazing Service.
So for most of the 20th Century, our public lands were operated under the Chicago premise that resources were there to be developed, modified by Scientific Progressivism so that the experts in the Federal Government would manage that development.
The experts would determine the best places for irrigation projects and hydro-electric facilities. They would issue oil and coal leases. They would arrange for timber sales and grazing rights. And along the way, if a few people camped or hunted on the public lands, that was essentially a by-product of all this productive activity on the public lands.
Westerners may not have liked this at first, but we got
used to it, since it generally embraced the Chicago
Midwestern world-view that we grew up with, and it was an
integral part of the extractive-commodity economy that was
the Old West
-- cows, timber, and mining.
This all functioned, more or less, into the 1970s, what
we called our Shining Times,
back when Climax
Molybdenum was hiring 100 men a week in Leadville, and my
lumberjack friends in Kremmling were making enough money to
spend their winters in Mexico, and the ranchers with BLM
leases sat around the Grand Old West bar there playing
liar's poker with $100 bills.
But as we all know, it's not that way now.
The shortest way to put this is that we are no longer a hinterland to Chicago, the Hog Butcher to the World. We are becoming the hinterland of Los Angeles, the City of Dreams: economically, physically, and culturally.
The physical connection to Los Angeles is as close as the Colorado River, which is managed, primarily by federal agencies, to serve Southern California.
It's also represented in the haze in southwestern skies from coal-fired power plants -- L.A. practices NIMBY on an almost continental scale. It needs electricity, but its clean-air laws make it almost impossible to build new power plants. And so the plants are built in the Four Corners region.
Or it's in the L.A. County Dump -- which happens to be in Carbon County, Utah.
But it is the economic and cultural effects that are more powerful. L.A. is the home of Hollywood and Disneyland -- places that create images and sell experiences. That is their economy, and it's becoming our economy.
Think about the last time you watched TV and sat through
an ad. Did you see anything about America's Public
Forests, producing timber and pulp that are important to
our national strength
? Or Public lands grazing --
sure it's subsidized, but our American ranchers have to
compete against Third World beef producers
? Or Coal
from our public lands -- a wonderful national
asset
?
Well, if you did, you were watching some channel I don't get, and I've got one of those dishes that has damn near everything, including porn flicks in Spanish. (Of course, I just look at them to improve my vocabulary.)
What you see are ads for Spewts. That's a word I coined for sport-utility vehicles, and I'm entitled to make fun of them because I drive one. You can think of Spewt as an acronym for Soccer Practice Exceedingly Wasteful Transport.
Those ads for Spewts generally show them roaring around on public lands. People are kayaking, rafting, hang-gliding, rock-climbing, fishing, camping, skiing, mountain-biking -- that's what L.A. says our public lands are for. They're not for mining, logging, or logging -- I guess that's what happens in Marlboro Country, and that place is so politically incorrect that you can't see it on TV any more.
One enlightening moment about this shift in attitude came right here in Westcliffe a few years ago, right after a Wilderness Act was signed into law. Jim Little was going on vacation, and I was going to fill in for him. It's a job that mostly consists of sitting around and drinking coffee and telling other people what to do, which fits my talents perfectly. But I tried to catch up on local news, so I was reading the past month's papers carefully, and there was a story about the Sangre Wilderness.
I expected a lot of angry comments about locking up
our public lands.
But instead, the local Chamber
director sounded happy, because wilderness designation
would triple tourism during the next decade, if previous
studies were correct.
And I thought that if this is the attitude in Westcliffe, which had always struck me as an avatar of cow towns, central Colorado's answer to Kremmling, then the West truly has changed.
And the public-land management agencies are changing,
too. They can't sell much timber any more, but they need
income from forest users
-- so they're charging
user fees
to recreate on public lands.
From a Hollywood entertainment standpoint, that's only fair. If I go to the movie, I spend seven bucks for a couple of hours of entertainment. Shouldn't I be charged a comparable fee to be entertained in the woods? If there isn't a charge for the hiking trail, doesn't that represent an unfair government competition with private enterprise?
That's where most of the value in public lands is now. To put this another way, in 1997, the Forest Service sold about $500 million worth of timber. That's less than Americans spent on just camping equipment that year. It doesn't count Spewts, ATVs, rifles, GPS systems and the thousands of other ways that American commerce has devised to make money off recreating on the public lands.
This transformation isn't just economic. It has an almost religious aspect, too.
When we moved to Kremmling in 1974, BLM land was known
as the land the damn government couldn't even give
away.
In recent years, I've lost count of how many
times I've read the phrase our sacred public
lands.
Whether you like that belief or not (and I don't -- my religious tradition is hard-shell Baptist, which taught us that God was everywhere, and thus no one place was more sacred than any other, and there was also no place to hide), it's a common attitude and it's growing.
It will complicate any efforts at any development of public lands, although it may be cloaked in other language. You had to read between the lines to find it in the objections to a perfectly sensible idea to put some public lands near ski resorts into private hands to build housing, so that resort workers didn't have to risk their lives by commuting two or three hours a day over twisting, icy mountain highways.
That seems like a legitimate public purpose -- but the opponents acted as though Forest Service boundaries had been carved on stone at Mt. Sinai.
Another force that will work against the sale or development of federal lands in Colorado is the most powerful industryy in the state -- the real-estate industry.
Pick up any mountain-town newspaper, or look through the
upscale property ads in the Wall Street Journal. You will
often see phrases like adjoins public land
or
public land on three sides
or surrounded by
public land.
Why do they use this in real-estate promotion? Because it adds value to the property, and it adds value because people assume that the public land will never be developed. Thus they will never have neighbors, let alone neighbors of the wrong color or economic class, and in America, that's a major added value to a piece of property.
So you've got the protect our sacred public lands
crowd on one side of the political spectrum, and the
protect our sacred property values
on the other.
Those two forces -- combined, they pretty well cover
everybody that matters in Colorado -- should pretty well
insure that current public holdings will stay much the same
for the indeterminate future.
But do these public lands have to be administered by the federal government? Could state or local government do the job?
Dan Kemmis, the former Missoula mayor who wrote a fine book, Community and the Politics of Place, once argued that it's time that we grew up and took our responsibilities seriously, and one of those responsibilities was managing public lands around our communities.
He made that pitch at a meeting of Western Colorado Congress about four years ago in Montrose. He was supposed to speak, and then the organizers had a four-member reaction panel that was supposed to respond.
The bombshell that Kemmis dropped was so powerful there that the reaction panel didn't even mention it. I don't even know why they called it a reaction panel -- each member had remarks that were prepared before Kemmis spoke, and they didn't react at all to what he said.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if this proposal can't get a respectful discussion at a meeting like that, I don't think it's ever going to.
At one time, I argued that states and counties could do a better job than the feds, primarily because the local governments didn't have the money to conduct below-cost timber sales, subsidized grazing, and rocket tests, nuclear-bomb tests, and nerve-gas tests. Their intentions might not be noble, but they wouldn't have the resources to foul things up, at least not on the scale that the feds can.
But that was before I bothered to watch the Colorado State Land Board in action. It's supposed to be getting as much money as it reasonably can for our schools, and it was trying to sell prime mountain real-estate development property for $1,560 an acre when nearby parcels were going for $12,500.
And on property that it said was worth $1.3 million, it was getting an income of about $12,000 a year -- less than a 1/10 of 1% return on investment. And when it leases grazing, it essentially leases all surface rights, whereas the feds know how to lease just the grazing rights, so the rest of us can hunt or fish or hike on our own land.
So state management of the public lands would be worse, if this is any indication of how the state would do the job.
Further, the people who really matter in this discussion -- and that isn't us -- prefer that the decisions be made in Washington. Whether it's the Sierra Club or the Federal Timber Purchasers Association, it's cheaper and easier for them to maintain one high-powered lobbyist crew in Washington than to maintain a crew in each statehouse, let alone each county courthouse. It's also cheaper and easier to invest in a few congressional campaigns than in hundreds of smaller contests.
Add all this up, and it's safe to make a few predictions. The public lands will remain in federal hands and under federal management because they are a national heritage and a national concern, and they have held that status since before the constitution was adopted. Their boundaries will be about the same as they are now.
Their goals will continue to change from commodity production to recreational amenity, and there will be increased fees for that recreation.
And what we think about all this won't matter any more than what Senator Teller or the Utes thought about it. The decisions may be made by strong presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevent, and they will be made to advance the culture and economy of a dominant city, but the decisions will definitely be made somewhere else -- perhaps because, as Kemmis observed, it's a responsibility that we really don't want to undertake, no matter what we say.
It's so much easier to blame the feds -- and hey, it's part of our tradition, going back to Bloody Bridles Waite.
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