Western
States want to take back their Federal Land. Why the
Government Owns So Much Land in the West,By Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz 1/5/16, NY Times.
How did the federal government get the land?
The United States government owns 47 percent of all land in the
West. In some states, including Oregon, Utah and Nevada, the majority of land
is owned by the federal government. Of course, it used to own nearly all of it.
And that remaining ownership and management of large tracts of
forest and grazing lands is the core of the problem for anti-government
protesters in Oregon. They have taken over a federal building, the latest in a
long history of fights between the government and Western settlers about how
the lands should be used.
The history of federal land ownership has been largely one of
divestiture and public use, not acquisition. As the United States expanded
across the continent, it did so by purchasing or taking the land that became
new states. (Among the groups it took land from were Native Americans.)
Over time, it transferred land to state governments and individuals,
largely through homesteading and land grants, which allowed farmers to procure
parcels of land for agricultural use. The government also tended to allow free
use of unclaimed lands by ranchers and others, though there were skirmishes
over the years when settlers tried to fence in public land or claimed land in
Indian territories.
That strategy worked well in the Midwest, where very little land
remains in federal hands. East of the Mississippi, for example, the federal
government owns only 4 percent of land.
But in the 11 states in the West (including New Mexico,
Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, and not counting Alaska), a combination of
geography and politics slowed things down.
“The whole disposal system sort of hits a speed bump,” said Patricia
Limerick, a history professor and director of the Center of the American West
at the University of Colorado.
The many mountainous, arid and difficult-to-reach tracts of land
in the West simply weren’t attractive to farmers.
Settlers claimed the few
valleys where farming was feasible and built towns. The only thing most of the
remaining land was good for was grazing, but cattle ranchers and sheep herders
needed large tracts of land to feed their livestock, not the smaller parcels
they could claim through homestead policies.
More recently, federal law eliminated
homesteading and set up more formal systems for management of the remaining
land.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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