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Show [and within] four years nearly 180,000 cattle left the territory." (Walker, UHQ 32:185-6) Utah cattle were driven or shipped northeastward to Nebraska, the Dakotas and Chicago, south to Arizona, and westward to San Francisco. Yet, the success of Utah's nineteenth century cattle industry was not without its drawbacks. Utah's first stockmen were unfamiliar with dry, desert range and it wasn't long before the easily-accessible, tall grasses began to disappear. Just a few years after the arrival of the first group of pioneers, the grazing areas adjacent to Salt Lake City were already showing signs of serious overuse. As Glynn Ben-nion explains, those early Utah herdsmen had all recently come from more humid climates where grass grew green all summer. They had no idea what the carrying capacity of desert ranges might be, nor gave any thought to the harm that might be done to such dry ranges when repeated cropping was permitted during the short season of green growth in the spring.... [The result was that] by 1855, the cowherd had grown so large-as had other herds in the Salt Lake Valley-that the range was becoming noticeably overgrazed. Brigham Young accordingly called on a number of herdsmen to move out to new ranges. (UHQ 34: 316, 318) But moving the larger herds to new rangelands only provided a temporary solution to the constant influx of cattle. New settlers, many with only a few head, continually arrived in the territory and established family operations that often combined farming with limited ranching. This mixed agriculture and livestock production was encouraged by Mormon leaders because it established a pattern of small, intensively farmed holdings that meshed with their general settlement plan. They hoped to populate the territory with as many families as the land would support while encouraging settlement in community groups where cooperation, comradeship and community self-sufficiency could be achieved. The result of this settlement pattern was that most livestock owners had only a few head of cattle which, of necessity, continued to graze on the outskirts of nearly every Mormon village. Simultaneously, the number of cattle that were being imported into the state for large-scale cattle-growing ventures continued to rise. These imported herds, in combination with some of the larger domestic herds, soon put a strain on the next most easily accessible rangelands, those located between Mormon settlements. According to economists Keith Roberts and B. D. Gardner in Livestock and the Public Lands, "by the mid-1880s, all of the accessible range areas of Utah were being grazed [and] the increasingly heavy and uncontrolled usage was soon visibly exhausting nature's capacity to rejuvenate herself each year." (UHQ 32:286, 1964) The answer for established ranchers with large herds, whether domestic or imported, was to acquire the necessary manpower to push into progressively more remote grazing areas. Cattle were soon grazing not only in fields adjacent or be- Cowboy Poetry From Utah |