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| Harold Ickes (center); Edward Taylor (left) LC |
[Longtime LHB readers will recall that for the exam in my legal history course I write an essay about some regulatory regime I did not cover in class and ask students to compare it with the ones we did. The topics of previous essays include
motor carrier regulation,
meat inspection, and the
US Commerce Court. This year’s essay, on federal grazing policy, follows. Dan Ernst.]
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.”
