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| Harold Ickes (center); Edward Taylor (left) LC |
The federal government once owned all the land in the continental United States, except for the original thirteen colonies and Texas. It disposed of most of the land in the East and Midwest through land sales, overseen by the General Land Office (GLO), an agency within the Department of the Interior. After the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, Americans could obtain title to 160 acres by paying a small fee, making some improvements, and residing on the “homestead” for five years. By the 1890s, most fertile land was in private hands, but most of the land west of the 100th meridian, a line running from North Dakota through Texas, had too little rainfall for crops without irrigation and remained in the public domain. The land was chiefly valuable for grazing, principally beef cattle, run by stockmen in specific ranges, and sheep, herded over great distances. Aside from scattered homesteads (ultimately expanded to 640 acres for ranches), use of the public domain was unregulated, as the GLO’s mission was to distribute land and not to plan its wise use. Range wars between large and small cattle operators and between cattle stockmen and sheep herders abounded. The latter conflicts were particularly intense, because sheep left grass too short for cattle to graze upon, and cattle refused to graze where sheep were pasturing. Cattlemen referred to sheep as “hoofed locusts,” yet, as Farrington Carpenter, a Colorado stockman who will play a large role in our story, once complained, “We had no way of keeping a sheep man off a cow range.”
