Over 100 years ago, when what are
now called national forests were first formed, the very
first thing federal land managers did was attack the
range rights of Westerners. In its
first official policy statement on April 14, 1894, the
Department of Agriculture announced a total curtailment
of grazing on the forest reserves (later to be named
'national forests'). Prohibited was the "driving,
feeding, grazing, pasturing, or herding of cattle, sheep,
or other livestock" on the forest lands, as were
lumbering and mining and all forms of
"trespass." Whatever property rights the western
states thought they had on their resource lands were, for
the next several years, summarily denied them, notes
rancher-author Wayne Hage. Hage, who began studying the history
of the range-rights conflict that has raged over the West
for the last 130 years when he himself began running into
problems with Forest Service
administrators in Nevada, eventually, in 1989, wrote
a book on the topic. Titled Storm Over Rangelands,
the study relies on earlier work by sectionalist
historians to chronicle the post-Civil War domination of
the American West and South by a newly powerful bloc of
Northeast financiers and industrialists. Wielding great financial and
political clout, the alliance used its dominion over
national government to not only impose exploitive tariffs
and railroad fees on the people of the West and South,
but also to try to block grazing on
the western lands, says Hage. "Grazing was the single use
that could block eastern dominance" over western
resources, he says. That was because, under the prior
appropriation doctrine upheld in 1891 by the Supreme
Court (Buford V. Houtz), it was through grazing
that ranchers could establish private property rights on
the public domain land of the West. It was at that point that Eastern
capitalists stumbled upon a strange charismatic genius
who, because of his personal history in Scotland, had an
antipathy for grazing even exceeding theirs. John Muir, who would later cofound
the Sierra Club, had spent years in the Yosemite area as
sheepherder, guide and sawmill operator. "His memory of large sheep
corporations disenfranchising the small sheep owners of
their grazing lands in his native Scotland left him with
little sympathy for large corporate interests, especially
if they were sheep graziers," wrote Hage. Add to that Muir's ability to
"speak and write in glowing poetic phrases about the
wonders of the natural world," and the Scottish
immigrant "was an ideal candidate to help promote
anti-grazing rhetoric." After just two articles in Robert
Underwood Johnson's Century magazine, celebrating
Yosemite and promoting it for a park, Muir's usefulness
in drowning out the objections of people who held prior
appropriation rights in the West had been demonstrated. "A sidelight of the Yosemite
campaign has been lost to those who regard Muir as a folk
hero," writes Hage. "He was allied with and in
the pay of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman" who
"obtained a monopoly for the railroad route to
Yosemite." Harriman, of New York, and of the
Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was one of
the preeminent capitalists of the day. "He provided Muir with
extensive prepaid scientific expeditions, free rail fare
throughout the nation and in 1902, a free round-the-world
trip," says Hage. "Harriman and his northern core
political interests kept Muir in their service by
generous red carpet treatment. Muir's obvious and
sometimes embarrassing eccentricities were explained away
as the mark of genius." After 1902, however, when the newly
instituted forest reserves had escaped repeal for 11
years, says Hage, Muir and the Sierra Club were of
decreasing importance to the bloc of Northeast financiers
and industrialists. Western rage over the forest
reserves and the denial of rancher range rights had
forced Gifford Pinchot, federal forests chief from 1898
to 1910, to spend most of his federal career trying to
save the reserves from repeal. Pinchot, jettisoning Muir,
succeeding in saving the reserves by defusing the
potentially disastrous opposition of western ranchers. He
granted grazing permits based on pre-existing rancher
range rights and started a policy of employing westerners
to oversee the new grazing program on the forest
reserves. But the long-term alliance between
Northeast financial interests and the Muir/Sierra 
Club/preservationist side of the conservation
movement, still exists today, says Hage.
When the more radical environmental
movement began to arise in the 1960s and '70s, again
pursuing the elimination of private rights on western
rangelands, much of the major money behind the movement
again came from old allies in America's Northeast, firms
and foundations derived from the same 19th Century
robber-baron interests that had fought western range
rights in the 1890-1910 period.
Tony Lesperance, an animal and range
science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno from
1959 to 1984, says the newer, hostile-to-grazing
environmentalist attitudes didn't start reviving in the
Forest Service until the Nixon and Carter presidencies,
and then it was specifically fostered from on high in the
federal government.
"I've been to many, many
seminars, with many, many Forest Service people and BLM
people, and I know that the [new] philosophy was [only]
starting to surface in the early 70s," he says.
"And it still was not reaching
the ground level. The people out here regulating
livestock grazing, were having to deal with some of this,
as it was coming down from an administrative standpoint,
but basically things were still pretty good."
"But you began to see that
erosion from the top down, and then all of a sudden, you
began to see a change in hiring policy."
The new "range cons," or
range conservationists -- the beginning position for new
Forest Service employees -- were suddenly, said
Lesperance, much more often individuals without
land-grant institution training.
"If you were trained in a
land-grant institution for range management, you had a
very basic concept of livestock grazing," he said.
But high-level Forest Service
administrators had decided that they could circumvent
that traditional orientation by seeking people without
that training.
The new attitude, he said, was,
"we won't hire people that have that kind of
training; we'll go to the liberal arts colleges and hire
people with a basic biology training," who
"receive an entirely different academic approach to
this whole thing.
"You started to see this
approach coming out in the 70s, you started to see these
people hired in the late 70s, early 80s, and you have a
preponderance of them today."
The new Forest Service, both in
Nevada and in Washington, is predominantly made of
individuals highly influenced by the environmentalist
movement -- a movement often quite explicit about its
desire to destroy ranching in the West.
Hage noted in his 1989 book the
enviromentalist goal for the rangelands was reflected in
a slogan current at that time: "Cattle Free in
'93."
And he notes that National Wildlife
Federation lawyer and Oregon Fish & Game official Roy
Elicker taught a seminar at a 1991 environmentalist law
conference on how ruin ranchers.
"What everyone likes is the big
victory," said Elicker. "You load them cattle
trucks for the last time and they go driving off into the
sunset and they never come back.
Elicker went on to explain that
"you can win a lot more victories" by
"making it so expensive in his [the rancher's]
operation and making so many changes for him to continue
to run his cattle on the public lands that he goes broke,
he can't do it..."
Hage also points out that the modern
Forest Service works hand-in-glove with such
enviromentalist organizations.
During a discovery phase of Hage's takings suit against the Forest
Service, Hage's attorney found records of intimate
communications between the Forest Service District Ranger
Eric Grider, who canceled livestock grazing on Hage's
allotment, and National Wildlife Federation lawyer Roy
Elicker. Grider also sent to Elicker a copy of the letter
canceling the Hage permit.
Discovery also turned up a letter
from one Waive Staiger, a Forest Service employee working
under Grider, informing CIGNA Corp., the holder of the
mortgage on Hage's Pine Creek Ranch, that Hage's grazing
permit had been canceled.
Also found was a letter from James
C. Overbay, the Forest Service's deputy chief, telling
forest rangers to support environmental group goals,
because the groups would then help support larger Forest
Service budgets.
Next week: The Forest Service
Bids for State of Nevada Water