The Past and Present Ranching Frontier

Question for Discussion: What are the central
issues in the heated debate over ranching on
the Public Land in the West? Is the Ranchers
and Cowboy's place in the West threatened?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 155-159;
Worster, "Cowboy Ecology"; Robbins, "Ranching in the Mountain West" ; Abbey, "The Cowboy and his Cow"; Zakin, "Grazing"; Vacariu, "Fenced in by the Open Range"; Ring, The New West Collides with
Open-range Laws

Video: The New Range Wars: Grazing on
the Public Lands

Public Land in the West

Western Land owned by the Government ( in-class)
Federal Landlords in the West (in-class)
Ghost Homes in the West (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations in the West
(in-class)
The Extent of Public Lands Grazing:
BLM Land in Acres in Western States (in-class)
Forest Service Lands (in-class)
Areas with no Roads: Roadless Areas Map (in-class)
Public Lands managed by the BLM (in-class)
Maps of American Population 2006 ( in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West ( in-class)
The West from Space at Night ( in-class)

THE BLM and Ranching in the West
Public Lands managed by the BLM
BLM and Forest Service Leasing
Permitees (in-class)
Acres of BLM Land and other Government
Land managed in the West (in-class)
The Extent of Public Lands Grazing
BLM Land in Acres in Western States (in-class)
Public Land Grazing Declining Economic
Factor (in-class)
BLM Grazing Land in the West
The Federal Public Lands Grazing System (in-class)
Grazing Permits to use BLM land
in the West (in-class)
BLM Public Land Statistics for 1998 (in-class)
BLM Facts (in-class)
Grazing in the National Park System

Public Land Ranching in the West
History of Grazing on Public Lands (in-class)
1934 Taylor Grazing Act (in-class)
Myths about Public Lands Ranching (in-class)
The Public Lands Grazing Activist
The Trouble with Livestock Grazing (in-class)
The Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching
(in-class)
Waste of the West: Environmental Effects
of Public Lands Grazing(in-class)
Waste of the West: History of Ranching
on Public Lands
Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching Today
Waste of the West: Welfare Ranching (in-class)
Cattle Grazing on Public Lands: A Report (in-class)

The Debate over Ranching in the West
National Public Lands Grazing Campaign
Sierra Club Club on Public Lands Grazing (in-class)
Rangenet: Western Public Lands
Grazing
National Public Lands Grazing
Campaign
The Trouble with Livestock Grazing (in-class)
Ranching and Livestock Myths

Cowboys and Ranching in the West
The Old West Lives: Rodeos in the West (in-class)
Cowboys.com
American Cowboy Magazine
The Dude Ranchers' Association
A History of Dude Ranches
Buckaroos in Paradise: Nevada
Ranching
The South Texas Border: Ranching in Texas

Western Land owned by the Government ( in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations in the West
( in-class)
Federal Landlords in the West (in-class)
Public Lands managed by the BLM
and the Forest Service in the West (in-class)
BLM Land in the West (in-class)
Open Range Road Sign (in-class)
Vacariu, Fenced in by the Open Range
The New West Collides with
Open-range Laws (in-class)
Animal Damage Control Program
kills native species for BLM
History of ranching on public lands
Different Opinions on Public Land Ranching
in the West (in-class)
Economic Subsides to Public Land
Ranching in the West (in-class)
Economic Facts on Public Land Ranching (in-class)
Employment for Federal Grazing in
the West (in-class)
Public Land Grazing Declining Economic
Factor (in-class)
Frei, Range Law in the West
Robbins, Ranching in the West (in-class)
Abbey, The Cowboy and his Cow (in-class)
Zakin, The Impact of Grazing (in-class)
Ghost Homes in the West (in-class)
The Extent of Public Lands Grazing:
BLM Land in Acres in Western States (in-class)
The West from Space at Night
BLM and Forest Service Leasing
Permitees
The BLM Today: Its Mission (in-class)
The Federal Public Lands Grazing System (in-class)
Grazing Permits to use BLM land
in the West (in-class)
Slideshow of Public Lands Ranching
(Start with Slide 22)
Myths about Public Lands Ranching (in-class)
Myth: Ranching is the Foundation of
the Rural Economies (in-class)
The Trouble with Livestock Grazing (in-class)
The Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching
Waste of the West: Environmental Effects
of Public Lands Grazing
Waste of the West: Welfare Ranching
Cattle Grazing on Public Lands: A Report
Sierra Club Club on Public Lands Grazing
The Working Wilderness: A Call for a
Land Health Movement -- Doing
Sustainable Ranching in the West (in-class)

Public Land Ranching in the West

"In the 1880s, overstocking and overgrazing had led to the diaster of 1887, in which the cattle already weakened by drought, died in massive numbers during a severe winter."
...Limerick (156)

The Secretary of the Interior, through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), manages approximately 264 million acres of public rangelands throughout the western United States. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 guide BLM's management of livestock grazing on public lands. Recent changes to BLM's rangeland management regulations are designed to speed restoration of public rangelands while improving the delivery of services to public land users.
......BLM History of Public Lands Management

"Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out."
Edward Abbey

Economic Subsidies to Public Land Ranching

Three hundred million acres. That is what is at stake. In round figures, some 300 million acres of public lands--federal, state, and county--are currently leased for livestock production. This figure includes some 90 percent of all Bureau of Land Management holdings, 69 percent of the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, plus national wildlife refuges, national parks, and other nature preserves. The combined area is as large as the entire eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida, with Missouri thrown in! And 300 million acres is what potentially could be restored if public lands livestock production were eliminated. Nowhere else in the United States is there such potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration at so little cost -- and ultimately affecting so few people -- as in the termination of domestic livestock production on our public lands.

Permittees currently pay $1.35 per animal unit month to graze federal public lands, covering only a fraction of the cost to administer the grazing program. Grazing fees are often much higher on adjacent state ($2.18-$15.50 per AUM) and private lands ($6.50-$12.00 per AUM). The federal grazing program costs at least $5.76 per AUM. Congress should increase the grazing fee to eliminate the government subsidy to public land graziers.

In 17 Western states, livestock grazing is allowed on 254 million acres of national forests and BLM land -- an area equal to California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. On that vast expanse, about 26,300 ranchers graze 3.2 million cattle.

Last year, the forest service and the BLM lost more than twice as much money on grazing programs as they spent to restore endangered species. Together, the agencies lost $94 million on grazing, spending $116 million and taking in only $22 million in fees.

The fee ranchers pay to graze livestock on federal land is lower than at any time since 1975, set at $1.35 per cow per month, far below the current market average of $11.10 on private land in the 11 western-most states

Athearn, How the Old West was Lost

"So great was the influence of the horsemen on that last frontier--the seemingly endless empire of grass stretching northward from Texas to the Canadian line--that this region became known internationally as Cow Country. It followed that the passing of the cowboy of the open range, and his replacement by less romantic types, convinced many that the Old West at last was gone for good."

"The cattlemen who dominated the plains country during the last years of the nineteenth century left a mark far deeper than their numbers suggested, and therefore, when newcomers arrived to take possession, the change seemed dramatic and even violent. These men--and it was largely a male society--were more than romantic figures wearing spurs that went jingle, jangle, jingle; they directed the social, economic, and political scene for about forty years and, in some areas -- Wyoming, the "Cowboy State, " for example -- much longer than that."

"This sagebrush nobility, proud, arrogant, and cocksure, ruled the region through its ownership of governors and Iegislators, resorting to force of arms only when the peasantry became restless or stepped out of bounds. As viewed from horseback, the tillers of the soil were regarded as lesser beings because they boarded a saddle horse as if they were climbing a ladder, settled for small pieces of land, milked cows, pitched hay, and, worst of all, saved their money. Not only were they clods, they were invading, unwelcome clods, who had wandered off the agricultural reservation and were tearing up the turf. The
"sodbusters," as they were contemptuously dismissed, were regarded as constituting as great a threat to the cattle kingdom as the coming of railroads and cowboys had posed to the original tenants, the Indians. And the society they brought along was just as unacceptable to the cowpuncher as his had been to the tribesmen. But in both cases the old gave place to the new, and at about the same time. "

"As the new rush of homesteaders flooded the high plains and beyond, their numbers grew until the limit of profitable farm land had not only been reached but surpassed. In the process, the cowboy frontier was diluted, then flushed away, and the countryside was claimed by the plowmen who peopled the limitless squares of land that were either parceled out by the government or sold by the railroads.

This was not accomplished without a certain amount of sentimentalizing by the fans of the horsemen. Viewing from their distant perch, they saw a nameless, faceless, colorless species of lesser beings taking over God's country, driving off his favored children, and despoiling the landscape. Another chapter in the western legend had been written."

Worster, Cowboy Ecology
"Ask almost any group of people the world over, from Peoria to Perth, and they will say that the American West is about the cowboy and his life of chasing cows on the range.* They may add, without much encouragement, that the West has come to symbolize the whole national identity of the United States. Instead of seeing in that response a measure of truth, historians have tended to dismiss it as popular myth-making, a fashion of mass culture, essentially false and insignificant. Those who write the history of the nation have more or less ignored the life on the range (as they have life in the Trans-Mississippi West generally).
A survey of fourteen popular American history textbooks shows that the range industry, cowboy, and ranch receive, on the average, less than two pages' worth of attention out of almost a thousand pages of text.' The historians say one thing about what is important in our past, popular intuition says another. In this case, I believe, popular intuition is worth heeding, though not for all the popular reasons. "

"But out on the western range human relations have always seemed a lot more open, sunny, non-repressive, and therefore forgettable. True, every ranch required, somewhere in the past, a dispossession of native peoples.... All the same, compared with chattel slavery, the work relationships there seem to be rather ordinary and even benign, more egalitarian than exploitative. The system was one of wage laborers selling their services freely, sometimes for only a season or two, then moving on. With the job necessarily went a lot of autonomy. Since chasing after steers often took one far away from the scrutiny of a foreman, since in fact the work demanded a great deal of self-directedness and initiative, and since the hired men were allowed to ride big horses and carry big guns across a big space, there was relatively more personal freedom for workers in the ranching industry than in, say, the textile factory or the cotton field."

Zakin, The Impact of Grazing

"Belsky and a number of her colleagues, including Robert Ohmart of Arizona State University, now predict that if livestock grazing in the West isn't severely cut back, restoration will become impossible. They estimate that this will happen within thirty to fifty years.

Consider the facts: Already, 80 percent of the streams and riparian ecosystems in arid regions of the western United States have been damaged by livestock grazing. That 's from the U.S. Department of interior, circa 1994. This damage isn't just from way back in frontier days. A 1990 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on grazing based on extensive field observations in the late 1980s revealed that riparian areas throughout much of the 'West are in "their worst condition in history. "

"Given this data, it's easy to understand why the overwhelming majority of western salmon and trout are threatened or endangered and why native and neo-tropical migratory birds are losing ground almost as fast. Yet Belsky's paper also cites statistics indicating that the number of cattle in the West has more than doubled since 1940."

Robbins, Ranching in the Mountain West

"Once known as "the forgotten lands," the public's acreage is being remembered. The real world is catching up. More and more people are coming to Catron County to hunt elk. Or to backpack and camp and swing in a hammock outside their summer cabin. They don't want cows in the campground or cowpies along the river. People want to see elk, deer and antelope, and because there is only so much plant-generated carbohydrates, or biomass, more cows usually means less wildlife"
"Conservationists are also bitter about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Damage Control (ADC) they've dubbed "All the Dead Critters." In 1990, ADC agents, by their own count, gunned down, trapped and poisoned 91,221 coyotes, 12,818 beavers, 8,349 skunks, 7,015 raccoons, 170 snapping turtles, 5 musk turtles, 6 wild turkeys, 255 mountain lions, 95 gray wolves and 247 black bears, among others, to protect crops and livestock. More than 600 pet dogs and 100 feral housecats were killed. In southern Arizona , at least 37 mountain lions were killed to protect one rancher's 135 cows. Hundreds of thousands of birds of many different kinds were killed.
Steve Johnson, a longtime anti-grazing activist in Tucson, Arizona, calls the ADC a "dark little irony." "The American taxpayer owns this land, and he 's paying the government to destroy its native wildlife -- all so ranchers can lease it back from him and reap private profits."

"Where environmentalists have been most successful is in their attack on the economics of cattle grazing. They have targeted the fee ranchers pay to graze cattle on federal lands --at present, $1.91 to graze a cow and a calf for one month -- what is called an animal unit month (AUM). The rate is a fourth or less of what ranchers who lease private land have to pay.
Cowboys argue that even though private leases are $8 to $12 per AUM, $1.91 per AUM is not really a subsidy."

"Ranchers predict widespread doom for an already troubled industry if substantial changes are made in grazing on public lands. "It's fixing to be diminished considerably," says Bud Eppers, a New Mexico cattle grower. "Ranchers are fearful," says Karen Budd, a rancher and attorney in Cheyenne , Wyoming , who represents ranchers who hold grazing permits. "They say, 'If I'm so bad, how could I have survived for five generations? "

"For years it went without saying that ranchers were making things better, forcing the land to give up a living for them, their families, their community. Fat cattle on the land or a whining sawmill is a sign of progress, inroads against harsh, sometimes brutal country. Now ranchers are being told they have been making things worse, and they feel they are being pushed off the land so white-collar workers from Albuquerque or Tucson can come down and hunt on weekends. "All environmentalists do is fatten lawyers," McCarty says, sourly.

The cowboys aren't resigned to becoming ghostriders just yet. They represent a still-powerful political force on the national and state levels, and are fighting range cuts. This assault is not only a strike against cattle, but an attack on the whole cowboy myth, the image of cattlemen as rugged individualists who go one-on-one with the elements and make their own way in the world. No one believes more devoutly in the Cowboy Way than cattlemen. They hate being called welfare ranchers.

"One of the great ironies of ranch country is that the cowboy is getting wiped out, in part by the very people who are moving in to drink in the myth of the cattlemen. The New West. The Cowboy Way is dying, riding quietly off into the sunset, while the myth, the cowboy's vapor trail, seems immortal. Museums and galleries brim with cowboy art; Ralph Lauren and others sell "authentic" denim jackets and other western duds at prices few real cowboys can afford; and real estate developers slice the range up into twenty- or forty-acre plots called "ranchettes." The Wild West has become the Mild West."

"On his 130,000 acre ranch, Turner sold off all the cows and introduced bison, claiming that as an indigenous species they do less damage to riparian areas. He also made the statement that "buffalo are better looking than cows. They
don 't have fat all over their butts" That statement, among others, did not go over well in ranch country, where part of the unwritten code is that you don't criticize a man's livestock. Republican U.S. senator Conrad Burns returned fire and claimed that Turner had ruined a good ranch with his bison, and shouldn't have been allowed to buy land in the state."

"What happens when a herd of celebrities or corporate executives swarm into a valley is that land prices shoot up because the people buying aren 't worried about paying their bills with profits from ranching. In places like Jackson Hole, Sante Fe and a host of other resort towns, many of the real ranchers are gone, victims of their own myth. "

Abbey, The Cowboy and his Cow

You may have guessed by now that I ' m thinking of criticizing the livestock industry. And you are correct. I 've been thinking about cows and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They've been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor of putting the public-lands livestock grazers out of business."

"Since such a small percentage of cows (about 2 percent) are produced on public lands in the West, eliminating that part of the industry should not raise supermarket beef prices very much. Furthermore, we'd save money in the taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public-lands cattlemen. Subsidies for things like "range improvement"--tree chaining, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control, predator trapping, fencing, wells, stockponds, roads. Then there are the salaries of those who work for government agencies like the BLM and the Forest Service. You could probably also count in a big part of the salaries of the overpaid professors engaged in range-management research at the Western land-grant colleges. "

"Moreover, the cattle have done, and are doing, intolerable damage to our public lands -- our national forests, state lands, BLM --administered lands, wildlife preserves, even some of our national parks and monuments. In Utah 's Capital Reef National Park , for example, grazing is still allowed. In fact, it's recently been extended for another ten years, and Utah politicians are trying to make the arrangement permanent. They probably won 't get away with it. But there we have at least one case where cattle are still tramping about in a national park, transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds."

"Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs...."

"I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of them will not give reliable testimony."

"Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows it. the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like stripmining or clear-cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already looks like Mexico or southern Italy or North Africa : a cowburnt wasteland. As we destroy our land, we destroy our agricultural economy and the basis of modern society. If we keep it up, we'll gradually degrade American life to the status of life in places like Mexico...."

"In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management, which was required by Congress to report on its stewardship of our rangelands -- the property of all Americans, remember
-- confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was in "good condition, " and 60 percent in "poor condition. " And it reported that only 18 percent of the rangelands were improving, while 68 percent were "stable " and 14 percent were getting worse. If the BLM said that, we can safely assume that range conditions are actually much worse."

"I've suggested that the beef industry's abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowboy as natural nobleman. I'd like to conclude this diatribe with a few remarks about this most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work.... As such, they do not merit any special consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000 ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That's less than the population of Missoula, Montana ."

"Is a cowboy's work socially useful? No. As I've already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quit tomorrow, we'd never even notice. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more valuable work than the cowboy or rancher.... We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We 've carried them on our backs long enough."

"A rancher, after all, is only a farmer, cropping the public rangelands with his four-legged lawnmowers, stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand trying to make an honest living. Nothing special."

"I have no quarrel with these people as fellow humans. All I want to do is get their cows off our property. Let those cowboys and ranchers find some harder way to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There's no good reason why we should subsidize them forever. They've had their free ride. It's time they learned to support themselves."

Vacariu, Fenced in by the Open Range

"All that ended with the final twist of my fencing pliers. I had complied, reluctantly, with the ageless "open range " law of the West, which mandates a rancher's right to graze cattle on any rural property that isn't fenced."

"Under the law, owners of large tracts can split up their ranches, collect profits on the sale of lots, and then continue to reap the benefits of free grazing on the same parcels. Even if fences are established, they must be maintained. If a fence breaks (or mysteriously comes down) and cows get in, it is the property owner's problem, not the rancher's."