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Show Chapter XXI Administration of Public Grazing Lands The failure of Congress to adopt legislation to halt the destructive use of the public rangelands and to prevent the continued breakup of natural grazing areas by home-steading, which was taking the land with access to water and leaving useful grasslands without any water, brought about an increasingly critical situation by 1933. Overgrazing, destruction of the better grasses and survival of poisonous plants, erosion of steep hillsides and silting up of reservoirs, all emphasized the need for control. Furthermore, the catastrophic decline in livestock prices, which fell by 50 percent between 1931 and 1933, forced cattlemen to make greater use of the free range on the already depleted public lands.1 Probably half the sheep and a sixth of the cattle of the 11 Intermountain and Pacific Coast States were partly or wholly dependent on grazing on the unappropriated and unreserved public lands. Successful management of the ranges in the national forests and in the recently established Mizpah-Pumpkin Creek District of Montana caused some leading stockmen 1 The average value of cattle in the 11 states fell from $58.49 in 1929 to $40.75 in 1931, $20.11 in 1933, and $17.29 in 1934; the average value of sheep in these states fell from $11.12 in 1929 to $5.68 in 1931, $2.99 in 1933 and rose to $4.01 in 1934. Taken from Department of Agriculture, Yearbooks, 1929-34. to see the advantage of a government leasing program, but they did not want the public range to be administered by the Forest Service or by the Department of Agriculture, whose officials had shown a marked tendency to charge the economic value of the forage cattle and sheep used. In its zeal to prevent overgrazing and to protect the range, the Forest Service had found it necessary in some instances to reduce the number of stock permitted on forest ranges. At the same time it was commonly conceded that the Forest Service had brought the forest ranges to a much better condition than the uncontrolled public A Bureau of Land Management range manager examines a forage plant on public land used for grazing in New Mexico. Bureau of Land Management 607 |
