Ep. 22: New West, Modern West, Public Lands West | The American West

The Frontier and the freedom it afforded was the shaping influence of the 19th century American West, but life in the Modern West has been formed just as powerfully by the presence of a public lands system American visionaries established a century ago. This is why they did it. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  While its historical story is what creates the West in the eyes of the world, for residents and most visitors today, it's the public lands that now define Western life. I'm Dan Flores and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  New West, modern West, public lands West.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  For 18 years of my life, I lived full-time in the state of Texas. I'm not a Texan by birth, but rather from old Louisiana families. And living in Texas made me understand that you very likely do need to be born and raised in that state to fully embrace Lone Star life. Native-born Texans accept at face value things about their history and modern existence there that don't necessarily resonate if you're from somewhere else. I spent the majority of my Texas years in West Texas, but not the Big Bend country or the Trans-Pecos as it's known. I lived in the Southern High Plains, most of those years in a canyon incised into the

• 2:42Speaker 02

  state plain or Yanowest Dakota, a giant plateau spreading from the Texas Panhandle across into eastern New Mexico. Was I living in the West in those years? Is Texas part of the West? Is West Texas part of the West? Historically, Texas is as much deep south as west. It was Southerners who largely settled it, even West Texas, bringing their culture, religions, and a drawl. Geographically and ecologically, the High Plains certainly appear as western, though. As the celebrated writer Joseph Wood Crouch put it in his book The Desert Year as he described

• 3:27Speaker 02

  driving the Texas Panhandle, "The red-eroded sandstone and the cactus declare that this is New Mexico a good many miles before the mapmakers have recognized the fact." So in High Plains, Texas, there are canyons and cactus, ranches and rodeos, and index finger waves on the highway. But is this region the full-on, modern, American West? It never seems so to me, and I'll tell you why.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  We all should admit that the West's modern story is as important as its past in terms of what it's like to visit or to live in such a celebrated region. But is the West merely a place with a frontier history and the enduring symbols of it? If the presence of cowboy hats and pickup trucks as a replacement for horses is enough to muster the West, then Texas is in, but so is Tennessee. If that's all you need, then Austin and Nashville are both Western cities. On the other hand, when today's historians identify what makes the West as a region

• 4:40Speaker 02

  different from the rest of America, they put up a Venn diagram that includes a list like this. Number one, with a few exceptions like the Pacific coast, the West is defined by aridity, a dryness that exposes geology and opens up views to far distances. Which means that compared to the rest of America, the West is ecologically different or unique. Beyond the 98th meridian of longitude, America is forested only on its high mountain ranges or in deep canyons. Otherwise, sparse moisture produces grassy prairies and plains, cactus, creosote, and

• 5:25Speaker 02

  sagebrush deserts, scattered and dwarfed tree cover of pinion and limber pines and junipers. Aridity also produces dry, clear air, sparkling nights of polished stars, and oceans of sunshine. Despite the cowboy hats, Nashville fades out rapidly as this kind of Western place.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Number two, the West is often thought of as wide open spaces, but it has featured cities like the great rock buildings of the Chacoan civilization as far back as a thousand years ago. Yet unlike much of the rest of the country, the West's cities tend to be widely scattered in what geographers call an oasis settlement pattern with vast open lands between. That's still true along both sides of the Rockies and even along the densely populated Pacific coast today. Number three, the most western of American places tend to be those that still retain the continent's

• 6:31Speaker 02

  original diagnostic wild animals and the ecologies they've long shaped. With wolf and grizzly bear recovery in particular, the West is the part of the country that retains more of its wild keynote species than the rest of the country. Number four, the West is still the home of most of America's native people, whose presence is a notable feature of the region's cultural imprint and human diversity. Number five, and finally, the West is the primary region of America's public lands. Whether they're national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, national forests or national grasslands,

• 7:16Speaker 02

  or Bureau of Land Management holdings, the vast majority of the country's public lands, wilderness areas, and wild and scenic rivers are in the West. Most importantly of all, the presence of the West's public lands provides residents and visitors an ability to access the natural world to an extent that's rarely a feature of modern life in other American regions.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  So as for the high plains of west Texas, it is arid, and in the places where its nature is still intact, it is ecologically western. It has cowboys and pickups and a frontier history. But it lacks the other three characteristics that make up today's American West. The wild bison and wolves and wild horses that made up its keystone animals are almost completely gone, as are its native peoples entirely, long since banished to Oklahoma. And the vast percentage of its landscape is not publicly accessible but privately owned

• 8:24Speaker 02

  and often jealously decorated with those symbols of the not-quite-West: angry and belligerent no trespassing signs. Next door to Texas, however, in New Mexico, 21 native tribes live in the state. Mexican wolf numbers are at nearly 300 animals and increasing yearly. And compared to Texas's 1%, in New Mexico, 42% of the state is federally managed, the vast bulk of that, all but Indian reservations and military installations, in public and accessible form. Federally managed lands in nearby Colorado make up 37% of that state.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  In Wyoming, the figure is 52%, and in Montana, 33%. Arizona's figure is 72%, Utah's 64%, and Nevada's 80%. Idaho's is at 62%, California's 45%, Oregon's 54%, Washington State's 35%, and Alaska's public lands are at 89%. Texas's federal lands, public or not, as a reminder, make up 1% of that state.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  The east and the Midwest, there their percentage of accessible nature ranges from 1% to 9%. The larger figure, a result of later transplanting of the public lands idea from the west to destroyed, cut over forest lands in the east. Texas has about as much publicly accessible landscape as Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, all at 1% or less. Recently, an editor of Outside Magazine, long based in Santa Fe, left the magazine and moved to Austin, thinking he was going to a progressive, urban part of the west.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  In a state with almost no way to access the natural world, he didn't last six months before moving back to New Mexico. Even among the Great Plains states, which like west Texas, have western aridity and frontier history going for them, and often do retain native populations, only South Dakota, with 18% of its lands federally managed, can claim to be fully a part of the modern American west. How did this happen? With respect to the public lands, whose presence or absence plays such a role in how one gets to live in the world, it's time for me to tell you their creation story.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  From the time of the very first homestead acts, designed by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, the former Indian lands that made up the public domain the US was adding to the country in the 19th century, all went into the coffers of the General Land Office, or GLO. The GLO offered land for sale, or later in history as free homesteads or grants, to citizens, non-citizens, and to infrastructure building entities like railroads or canal builders. In the tradition of the Western European countries, general land office holdings intended destiny was to become private property.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Through purchases, Louisiana, Alaska, the Gadsden Purchase, diplomatic agreements with Britain for the Northwest, for example, treaties for Indian lands or for ending the Mexican War and incorporating the Southwest, and finally annexations like Texas and Hawaii, the US acquired an enormous amount of real estate between 1803 and 1898.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  As various federal expeditions explored those lands and reported on them, a prescient handful of Americans began to wonder about privatization as a blanket policy aimed so bluntly at such an ecologically diverse range of landscapes. Even as they did so, evolving homestead laws continued to survey, partition, and sell or grant lands to advancing settlement. Very frequently, that settlement took place on lands the Indians, who had long owned the ground, had barely left. During and after the Civil War, two influential Americans in particular worried about this privatization tradition

• 13:04Speaker 02

  in widely read influential volumes. One of those volumes became a bestseller, the other one a widely discussed congressional report. The author of the bestseller was an American diplomat named George Perkins Marsh. A polymath New Englander who read twenty languages, and as a result received diplomatic appointments all over the globe, Marsh wrote a book in 1864 he called "Man and Nature."

• 13:37Speaker 02

  In effect, this was the first modern history of the environment any writer had ever attempted.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Although Marsh took on a huge range of topics relating to humanity's relationship with the natural world, man and nature became most famous for its description of a pattern the author had observed in places as disparate as France, Turkey, and China. Rivers had always been crucial to human civilization, he wrote, and almost everywhere their origins were in mountains. But privatizing mountains, the wellsprings of water that were so critical to human development, had been a disaster almost everywhere countries had let it happen. Private interests that logged and grazed mountains had destroyed their watersheds and

• 14:29Speaker 02

  created landscapes that Marsh said looked like the surface of the moon, ruining the possibilities to settle inhabitable valleys below. As a brand-new country, the US still had time to avoid such a mistake, Marsh believed. The solution was to remove its mountain landscapes from private settlement that would invite overlogging and overgrazing, to retain them instead as public preserves to protect the West's snow fountain watersheds, critical for providing water to the surrounding arid country. Marsh's book went through eight printings and appeared in a new edition in 1871, and

• 15:12Speaker 02

  its success brought his argument to the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, which in 1873 endorsed Marsh's new policy recommendation. The other author was a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the most famous American explorer of the post-war era, and eventually the most powerful bureaucrat in government in the late century. John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, but that couldn't prevent him from leading the first party to take on the dangerous and unknown descent of the Grand Canyon, which he did not once but twice, even serializing

• 15:55Speaker 02

  the account of his adventures in the most popular magazines of the day. Then in 1878, the year before he became the director of the new U.S. Geological Survey, Powell laid before Congress his masterpiece for rethinking public domain policies in America. The lands of the arid region of the United States didn't exactly endorse Marsh's plan. Powell focused more on the diversity of public domain landscapes and why Congress should tailor different settlement plans for valleys, foothills, and mountains. He even offered up a map of the West, projecting a bioregional future for it, with settlement

• 16:39Speaker 02

  and governments organized around rivers and watersheds. Yet by emphasizing the special difficulties settlers were facing in a West that was far more desert-like than any place Americans had ever tried to homestead, Powell added yet another layer of reasoning why protecting the mountain sources of Western water was so crucial. Powell did point out that precedents were already in place for public lands in the West. From its beginnings in the early 1600s, Spanish colonization in New Mexico had made land grants in the high-elevation mountains to communities settling the valleys below them.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  These land grants, known as "ahitos," were used in common for firewood, stock grazing, hunting, and irrigation of mountain rains and snow packs by all of the residents of the valley towns. Powell also admired a different pattern of public lands Mormon settlers in Utah were trying. The Mormon approach involved communal sharing of high-mountain resources carried out through church-sanctioned monopolies, like the one granted to Parley Pratt in the Salt Lake Highlands that still today is known as Parley's Canyon. Those managers then made the public use of grass, timber, and water available in the uplands.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  When the Interior Department proclaimed US forest reserves in the New Mexico and Utah mountain ranges, both those precedents ended up abandoned, although not without a fight in New Mexico. Spanish land grants had passed intact to the Republic of Mexico during the 27 years that Mexico controlled the Southwest. And Article 8 of the treaty that ended the Mexican War with the US promised full protection for those land grants, which by 1848 blanketed almost 80% of New Mexico. But American law, with its elaborate protections for individual property rights, had little experience with the property rights of communities.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  In the 1897 Sandoval decision, the US Supreme Court decided that land grants to communities implied such public use that the lands granted had actually remained in legal possession of the Spanish and Mexican governments. Thus were now part of the public domain of the United States. The 12 million acres of land grants the US did approve in New Mexico were those that had gone exclusively to individual grantees. Hence, the Southern Rockies was cleared for the designation of the Pecos and Santa Fe Forest Reserves as part of America's public lands.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Pecos Forest Reserve, in fact, was already designated before the Sandoval case even went before the court. Here's how all this public lands happened. In 1891, Republican President Benjamin Harrison's administration passed an appropriations bill for the General Land Office that included a rider that by 1893 would place 13 million acres of the West's mountains off limits to homesteaders and privatization.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  As has been the case for a great many conservation and environmental policies, the idea was embraced by both political parties. Before he left office in 1897, Democrat Grover Cleveland added another 21 million acres to the West's forest reserves. By this point, 20 forest reserves lay across the forested mountains of every western state except Nevada and stretched from the Rockies to the Pacific coast. While private homesteading continued on the Great Plains and in the western valleys, these new high elevation public lands, designed originally to protect the West's snow fountain

• 20:45Speaker 02

  sources of water, now included a total of 34 million acres. This was the beginning, in the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, the Rockies, and numerous detached island mountains in the desert west of what evolved into America's national forest system.

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• 23:13Speaker 02

  There were still steps remaining in establishing the full foundation. Appointed chief forester of the reserves in 1898, Yaley Gifford Pincho began work on what became the multiple use principle. These lands of many uses, as Pincho told audiences all over the West, wouldn't simply be locked away. Planning both for the future and for democratic use, Pincho underlined that the Forest Service would regulate the reserves, but they would not be closed off. Instead, they would be used for watershed protection, for grazing, for logging, for recreation, and since many of the West's remaining animals

• 23:57Speaker 02

  had fled to the mountains for wildlife habitat. To emphasize that these lands now belong to the American citizens, no matter where in the country they live, in 1907, Pincho and President Roosevelt decided to rename them the National Forest. This conversion of so much of the American landscape from potential private entry to public ownership and federal management had already shocked conservatives, who began calling the new policy pink tea socialism.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  So maybe the new national forest designation lubricated the hit somewhat when Roosevelt stunned conservatives by dramatically adding 125 million more acres to the system, bringing the totals by the time he left office to 51 national forests, covering a whopping 159 million acres, all of it in the West. And Roosevelt wasn't done. The public lands system for the West and increasingly for small parts of the rest of the country, included a new designation made possible by the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect archaeological sites and those unusual geologic features like the Grand Canyon.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Unlike the more complicated creation of national parks, this act allowed the president to make designations out of the public domain. So Roosevelt himself proclaimed 18 of these new national monuments, several of which, like the Grand Canyon, went on eventually to become national parks.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  While the United States had pioneered the idea and reality of the national park, we had never created a National Park Service. Whether the existing national parks were intended to last was called into question when, with Theodore Roosevelt's blessing, the Hetch Hetchy Valley of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park became the destination of a dam and reservoir to provide water for San Francisco. That led to calls for the creation of a National Park Service to manage the parks, which Congress finally created in 1916.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  By 1932, the Park Service was administering 22 national parks and 36 national monuments. Focused on America's most monumental and most vertical scenery, the overwhelming number of the so-called Crown Jewels, parks like Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Sequoia, Rocky Mountain, Grand Canyon, Zion, Mount McKinley, were in the American West. The same was true of the monuments, the wildlife refuges, the national forests.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  This was the public land system that has made life in the modern West distinctive from life elsewhere in America. It was the system that provided the habitat possible to retain most of the historic bestiary of the West's original animals, particularly its big predators. And it was the system that made access to the natural world a reality for Western citizens, and in the 1960s would make setting aside vast wilderness areas and scenic wild rivers possible. There would be farms, ranches, and towns located around the borders of all these vast expanses of public forests and parks, but not within them.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Despite roads, trails, campgrounds, tourists, within them, big nature prevailed. Instead of replicating the East with the public land settlement in the western third of the country, we had angled off on a new historical trajectory. Of course, into the 1930s, homesteading and private entry continued in some places in the West. In fact, there were more Western homesteads taken up after 1900 than before that year. But with most of the West's mountains and canyons now public lands, private lands were largely at low elevation, and a great many were out in the open plains country of states like Colorado and Montana.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Many of the counties on the great plains reached their highest all-time populations with homesteading in the 1920s. But when agricultural prices dropped precipitously after the Great War, followed by wind and drought across country now plowed and stripped of its protecting grasslands, the policy of continuing to privatize the Western public domain began to seem like a bad bet and an open invitation for human disaster. As the Dust Bowl raged from west Texas and Oklahoma all the way to eastern Montana, and hundreds of thousands of people abandoned their homesteads, in the words of the Woody

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Guthrie song of the time, "So long, it's been good to know ya," in 1933, the Franklin Roosevelt administration elected to call an end to homesteading.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  It was the end of a grand American tradition that was almost 150 years old. Whatever further privatization of the Western public domain happened was now limited to irrigation developments around some of the new Western dams and reservoirs. In fact, the US went so far as to turn back the clock on a Western ownership society. The Fed actually resettled thousands of people elsewhere and bought back homesteads in a few of the worst wind whipped and eroded areas, then laboriously replanted them and incorporated them back into the public domain in the form of the National Grasslands.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  As for all the unsettled, leftover low elevation country in the West, 245 million acres of it, in fact, much of it was true desert that the Fed retained in ownership to be administered by a new agency called the Grazing Service, which by mid-century had become yet another of the West's public land agencies, the Bureau of Land Management. Like many of us who grew up in other regions, and when we got to live in the public lands West, decided we'd died and gone to heaven, I've done my best to take advantage of my unprecedented access to the West's natural world.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  I've done three-week float trips down the Grand Canyon, week-long backpacks through the Tuolumne Canyon in Yosemite, packed across Montana's Glacier Park from its Western boundary to its Eastern one, and traversed the wilderness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming in the opposite direction, east to west. I've done a 12-day raft trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, canoed the wild and scenic Missouri River, climbed Santa Fe Baldi in the Southern Rockies and the National Forest there, and watched wolves and grizzlies in Yellowstone Park's Lamar Valley. Had history turned out differently, I guess I could have had experiences like that on

• 31:32Speaker 02

  the Texas High Plains too. The truth is, I did do such things when I lived in Texas, but I had to trespass and outlaw hike to do them. Why that was the case requires a story, and I'll close here by telling it.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  The reasons the Texas high plains fall short of being a part of the modern West have to do with things that happened in Texas long ago. Unlike much of America, prior to US annexation in 1845, Texas existed as an independent country for nearly a decade. The 1830s was the time when Indian removal from the South and East was US policy, and the Texas population was almost wholly from the Deep South. What followed is the kind of history that just doesn't remain in the past.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  The Republic of Texas committed itself to the entire removal of its native population. That's a step we'd call ethnic cleansing today. Doing so required considerable military effort, which cost money, Texas ended up borrowing from Britain and France. So Texas's annexation brought into the US a state that had largely banished its Indians and owed so much money for doing so that the United States refused to take on the debt. The only solution to that was to permit Texas to retain title to its lands and privatize virtually every acre to raise revenue.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  This history is why the Texas high plains has no Comanches, Kiows, Cheyans, or Apaches, all long ago removed to Oklahoma. It's why ranches and farms protected by no trespassing signs occupy almost every parcel of ground, why there was little or no habitat for buffalo, and none at all for wolves. And it's a powerful reason why the Texas high plains missed out on its one grand chance to join the public lands west, and it did have a chance.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  In the 1930s, National Park Personnel looking for new parks began to pay attention to ecologists’ interest in the overlooked Great Plains. No landscapes on the Great Plains measured up to the monumental scenery of a Yosemite or a Grand Canyon, and most of the plains was now in private hands, but the Park Service hoped to overcome those obstacles. And Palo Duro Canyon, a 60-mile-long, 1,000-foot-deep roar of color where the Red River carved through the high plains plateau, was historically a famous western landscape. A Comanche hideaway and home to legendary Texas Ranger Charles Goodnight’s ranch,

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Tommy Lee Jones’s Captain Call in Lonesome Dove is a portrayal of Goodnight, by the way. Palo Duro seemed a perfect locale for a large Great Plains park. The emerging artist Georgia O’Keeffe exhibited paintings of it in New York in 1917, and when one of its ranches opened its gates to the public, 14,000 people showed up to see the canyon. Texas was planning a small state park there, and Palo Duro as a national park had champions in Texas and beyond, one of which was Enos Mills, the so-called John Muir of the Rockies.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  In the 1930s, a man named Roger Toll was a kind of one-man-make-it-or-break-it investigator for the National Park Service, and in 1933 and 34, he was touring Texas to assess potential national parks. Now, the Park Service had no acquisition budget to acquire private lands to create parks. All the existing parks had been created from the public lands, but it hoped that, as had happened back east for Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, and Shenandoah Parks, locals would raise the money to acquire the land. As Toll journeyed to Texas, in Washington, park personnel were assembling maps and materials

• 35:56Speaker 02

  for the creation of a million-acre National Park of the Plains around Palo Duro, a huge park half the size of Yellowstone. But after spending four days in the canyon, including visiting its most scenic and dramatic side gorge, the Tule Narrows, Toll decided that Palo Duro would rate below the present scenic national parks. He was also concerned about real estate values in Texas and whether Texans would come up with the money to acquire the canyon. The West Texas Canyon had now caught the eye of the National Park Service, though, and

• 36:35Speaker 02

  the new idea was for a national monument based on Palo Duro's geological uniqueness, a kind of first chapter of Genesis national monument for tourists heading west on the Mother Road Route 66. So in October of 1938 and 39, the Park Service initiated a second review of Palo Duro. This time, the idea was for a more modest Southern High Plains National Monument of roughly 135,000 acres. The final report included an estimate of the acquisition cost, some $294,000 plus

• 37:16Speaker 02

  another $264,000 to fold in the 15,000-acre state park. The monument boundaries excluded Tule Canyon and its spectacular gorge, but hopes for future expansion were already eyeing that section. As the report that hoped to make the Texas High Plains part of the Public Lands West put it, "From the standpoint of geology and scenery, Palo Duro is well worthy of being made into a national monument. It's the most spectacular canyon carved by erosion anywhere on the Great Plains of North America." When word of the proposal got out, there was public support, all right, but it was

• 37:59Speaker 02

  mostly from Denver, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma City. Texans seemed oddly ambivalent. No wealthy oil visionary from the Lone Star State stepped forward the way the Rockefellers were then doing in Jackson Hole to create Grand Teton National Park. So ambivalence or apathy are more likely ideological opposition to public lands in a state unfamiliar with that idea killed this main chance. Texas's State Park Division has since doubled Palo Duro State Park to 30,000 acres, although without making the wilder parts of it accessible with trails and camps.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  And it's created a second 16,000 acre park, Cap Rock Canyonlands, 35 miles to the south. Cap Rock is beautiful and wild and has a free roaming bison herd, but these state parks just aren't extensive enough to make the Texas high plains a public lands region. In our time, the passion for life in the modern public lands west is powerfully evident. When the Trump administration in 2025 tried to insert a partial dissolution of the western public lands as part of the so-called big beautiful bill, the outcry in the west was deafening. It came from both the left and the right, from hunters, environmentalists, ecologists,

• 39:27Speaker 02

  and day hikers. In Santa Fe, where the Western Governors Conference was held in June 2025, a pro-public-lands protest of thousands filled the streets and drowned out the conference in this western capital city for hours. The conclusion from events like this is inescapable. A century of western lifestyles formed by and built around public lands has now entirely transformed this American region and made it distinctive in the United States and the world. It turns out the public lands have created the American west just as much as its frontier history ever did.

• 40:18Speaker 00

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• 42:39Speaker 04

  I wanted to kick this off with a little personal anecdote. When I was in college and finishing up, I wanted to go bear hunting. And I looked online and I saw I could buy a bear tag in Montana for like $200. And I thought, where do you go hunting once you get out to Montana? And when I was growing up, you know, we'd done all the national parks trips and been to Glacier and Yellowstone and everything like that. But I very distinctly have a moment of looking at a map and thinking, I wonder if I can hunt in these national forests and going online. And this is before the days of, you know, podcasts and online research tools for hunters and everything.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  And I looked up, can you hunt in national forests? And I got the answer, yes. And then I started looking at all the national forests across the West. And it was like, you know, the scales came off my eyes or whatever biblical metaphor is appropriate because I was just thinking, holy shit, there's a whole world out there that I can just go to and check out, you know, having come from a place where we deer hunted on 10 acre chunks and 20 acre chunks. And in this, in this chapter, you talk about how that shapes a person, knowing that they have access to these spaces and that they can go out and sort of discover things and

• 44:07Speaker 04

  discover things about themselves on these landscapes. So I wonder if you could just talk about your first moment where you sort of realized what the implications of these public lands had for your life.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Well, I grew up in Louisiana, as you know, and

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Began at some point, and again, it was it was out of the same sort of experiences where once family takes you off to the west and and see to see national parks and things like that, but I was four years old when I went off on a trip like that. So I wasn't really able to comprehend much about the world, other than wow, the west sure seems to be sunny and beautiful compared to Louisiana, which is so green and close in. But I basically, when I got to the west, when I first started going, and it was in my late teens and early twenties, because I was fascinated with the west, and as soon as I could drive a

• 45:13Speaker 02

  car, and my parents would let me take a car overnight, I mean, I immediately drove off towards New Mexico and Colorado to go see the country, and then made that kind of a summer road trip every summer from then on, all through my twenties and thirties. What I began to realize is that, you know, and I remember there was a line from an Aldo Leopold passage, I think it was probably from a San County Almanac, where he said, "Of what use are forty freedoms if you don't have a world to get into?" And what I recognized about that statement was that he was describing this situation I had grown up in, where so

• 45:55Speaker 02

  much of the world is off limits, it's fenced, it's posted, you can't get at it. And suddenly, here's a part of America, and it seemed like in some respects, the best part of America, the grandest mountains, the deepest canyons, the most extensive plains, the most starlit skies at night, that was open to the world. And so it was kind of, it was one of those moments, one of those those precious moments in life, when I suddenly realized, holy cow, here is an opportunity and a place in the country I grew up in, to be able to get at the world in a way I've never been able to do so. So that was provided by the

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Public lands of the West and that made me really intrigued by this topic. And one of the things I did in my career as a writer who was interested in environmental issues was to try to figure out how that happened. How did the West get these public lands? And what does that mean? Because obviously it produces a different kind of lifestyle where you have access to the world than when you don't. And so that's what this this particular episode and script are about is to explain how this happened. And it's the kind of thing that didn't happen everywhere. I mean, one of the reasons I use Texas where I lived for

• 47:25Speaker 02

  for a number of years as an example is Texas was a piece of America that had a different history and a different trajectory than the rest of the American West did. And it ended up in a very different situation.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  And you point out early on that public lands or something, the story of public lands sort of bends back against what the founding fathers envisioned, right? And when you when you think about Jefferson and his vision for the future, this is something that was just a blind spot, not to not to, you know, be a historical here, but there's sort of a blind spot. It's not something that the founders would ever have dreamed of, right? And it and it almost runs counter to their values. And yet, there's this moment at which

• 48:23Speaker 04

  sort of a utilitarian, there's, there's like two forces at work here that combine to really create this system of public land. And there's a utilitarian lens. And then there's also sort of this more idealistic.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  Conservation or preservationist lens as well.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, which produces the national parks on the one hand, the latter.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  And the, something like the Bureau of Land Management tracks and National Forests. On the other hand, yeah, I think that's a good way to think of it. Randall, from the beginning, of course, Jefferson, who designed the first homestead acts with the, you know, the 1785 and 1787 declarations about how we're going to survey land and we're going to offer it for sale to the public. He envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers, as he said, who would sweep across the continent and do this from shore to shore. What, what circumvented that from playing out to its logical conclusion where everything

• 49:32Speaker 02

  gets privatized was the realization when people, unlike Jefferson, who never saw the West, actually were there and began looking at the landscape west of the 100th meridian, which was so completely different from the landscapes east of that, that line, is that this may not be a smart thing to do. It may not be a good idea to put somebody on a homestead, for example, out in the sagebrush deserts of what becomes Nevada. And what really sort of sparked the whole idea was the insight of people like George

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Perkins Marsh, who had traveled the world and realized in most of the world, because rivers are so important, especially in arid countries.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Their origins in mountains have to be protected. You have to make sure that mountains don't end up overgrazed, overlogged, torn up, because that makes it impossible, really, to regulate the water that can function to provide for towns and cities in the valleys below them. So it was George Perkins Marsh with his, I mean, it's a monument. book that all Americans ought to know about. It's called Man in Nature, published in 1864 during the Civil War. It's the first book that really engages with the kind of topics that one would think of as being the history of people and the environment. And one of the arguments that he makes in that book is that while America still has

• 51:09Speaker 02

  the opportunity, and we still do, because settlement is just now proceeding to the Rockies, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevadas, we should stop and think about whether or not we want to privatize that part of the world. We should probably try to hold on to it as in public ownership and manage it for water, because water is so critical in the arid west, and that'll make it possible to settle all these valley lands at lower elevation. And of course, along with, along with George Perkins Marsh, there was John Wesley Powell, who was intimately becoming familiar with the west, floating the Grand Canyon and taking

• 51:50Speaker 02

  students all over the west, from Colorado to Montana and Idaho, and who was putting together, as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, these kinds of plans where here's how we ought to be settling an arid region. The east is not arid, this country is arid, and here's how we ought to do it. I mean, one of the things, of course, that he comes up with, which we didn't implement, but, I mean, a lot of people have looked at those maps that Powell drew in 1878 and 1879 for a kind of a bioregional west where everything political is evaluated and based on water. I mean, you have what

• 52:32Speaker 02

  he sort of put together as little commonwealths on the Arkansas River, on the Platte River, on the Missouri River. I mean, it was a remarkable kind of way to, and what you realized out of it is, wow, this is a brand new opportunity to do something completely different from what has prevailed in the rest of the United States. And so we ended up with, you know, with a more George Perkins Marsh kind of plan. But I think Powell's input into it was really critical. And that, of course, as you said at the outset, this is all a very different plan than what the founders had in mind, where they thought that we were just going to privatize all

• 53:16Speaker 02

  the pieces of land that we got from wars, from annexation, from treaties with native people. We were just going to privatize it all and turn it over to settlement. Instead, we ended up with something very different.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you used the word "plan" a couple of times there, but I think one of the more interesting aspects of this story is how sort of piecemeal and fitfully developed our public land system is. You know, it's like, you look at it in aggregate and you're like, God, the foresight to have all this together. But really, you know, you're reading along and these people aren't thinking more than five or 10 years ahead of themselves in terms of institutionally, how does this work? And legally, how does this work? And so, you know, I wonder if you could speak to that.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Like, the Park Service isn't established till 1916, but obviously Yellowstone predates that by, you know, 45 years or so, 40 years or so.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, so, one of the things you have to recognize about the public lands is that they constitute a lot of different kinds of parcels. I mean, we've been talking about in the George Perkins Marsh angle is what becomes the national forest, which are in the mountains of the West and are designed to protect stream flow and water in the beginning. And as you mentioned, it's a piecemeal way of doing it. We start with 13 million acres and about a dozen forest reserves is their first call under the Benjamin Harrison administration. And then we run the number up to about 34 million before the turn of the century.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  And then Teddy Roosevelt comes in, of course, and he just dramatically expands that system. But that's just one version. And that becomes kind of, in a way, the poster public lands because the national forests are managed for multiple uses. As Gifford Pinchot, that forester, comes in and develops the idea of multiple use. We're going to use the national forests for, we're going to log some and we're going to use, we're going to have regulated grazing and we're going to have a variety of different uses. Of course, wildlife habitat and recreation become the ones that are really important for the modern West. But that's just one form of public lands because you have the national parks, which

• 55:45Speaker 02

  had existed before we end up with a National Park Act and a National Park System. You have, in 1906, the Antiquities Act produces what's called the opportunity for the president by presidential edict to create national monuments. And the national monument system, which is managed by the Park Service ultimately, is going to be another one of these dramatic pieces of, of public lands in the West. Out of the Dust Bowl from the 1930s, when a lot of the homesteads end up being bought back from homesteaders as failures by the federal government, you get a kind of public lands out on the plains called the national grasslands.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  And then, of course, when you get to the 1930s and we've determined after the Dust Bowl has hit, that it's really a kind of a crime and a tragedy to allow people to continue to try to settle some of these really arid plains and desert regions of the West. During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, we end homesteading. There's still 245 million acres of public domain left and that land ultimately ends up as Bureau of Land Management tracks. So it's a bunch of, obviously, there are a bunch of different kinds of public lands in that mix, but the whole of it ends up.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  As I was writing this particular script, and I don't think this had ever occurred to me before, but it did when I was writing this script, and I think it's one of the last lines I use in the script itself, it seems to me that the existence of the public lands in the West is as important, maybe more important than the existence of a frontier history that sort of defines what the West is. One is obviously more a 19th century phenomenon, the other 21st and more modernist kind of phenomenon, but I think the public lands may be more important for the West than even the frontier.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's also, as you mentioned earlier, there's the Texas story where it has a very different history, and then if we look east across the Mississippi, there's a very different story there, but in the West, we think of public lands as these places that were left behind, whereas in the East, they had to sort of, after the fact, assemble national forests.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  And you have the Weeks Act, and it's a very deliberate model of construction that had to be sort of invented to reconstitute what once was.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the Weeks Act of 1910 basically takes the idea of the public lands in the West and applies them when possible to the East, particularly the mountains of the East, and in this case, it's the kind of phenomenon where you're taking lands that had usually been ruined by timber companies and had been cut over, and the government will then acquire those lands and create national forests around them. So that's how we get the national forests, for example, up and down the Appalachian Crest, the Shenandoah, into upstate New York, obviously, and the Adirondacks, along with

• 59:12Speaker 02

  a state park in the Adirondacks. And then there, of course, are some parks that, because the Park Service did not have an acquisition budget, it was creating these national parks and national monuments out of free public domain land. Park Service didn't have a budget to acquire lands that had already been sold to somebody.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  What you got in parts of the east, and this is what I told the story of in Texas, in West Texas, that was a failure to do, is the public got behind the idea of producing the money to buy up lands to create Acadia National Park in Maine, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah. In West Texas, though, we had this wonderful opportunity to take a landscape that was western in its ecology, frontier in its history. I mean, to be sure, in Texas, all the Indians had been driven out, so you didn't have that

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  opportunity for a modern West. But there was the opportunity for creating a big public lands on the high plains of West Texas, but it didn't happen. And it's an interesting kind of miss to me in American history. You know, I don't, I can't speak to how the people of the southern high plains feel about that miss, if they even know about it or remember it. And I suspect a lot of people don't even know about it. But when I was living there, I mean, I thought it was one of the great historical misses that had ever taken place in that, that particular world.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think we've talked about how if you look at the public lands as they exist now, it's almost like this perfect system. It's hard not to celebrate it, but it is controversial, and it has always been controversial. And it's a product of power struggle between competing interests. And so I think, you know, that's another aspect of the story that, that you touch on at points, and I think the Texas case brings it up again. It's like Roosevelt had his critics, just as today we have the, the Mike Lees of the

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  world and those who don't see value in the public lands. So I wonder if you can speak to how conflict has shaped this story?

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Well, from the very beginning, as you mentioned, Randall.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Public lands were controversial. I mean conservatives in the time of Teddy Roosevelt called the creation of new national forests, pink tea socialism. And their idea was you had, and I think Texas actually, when George Bush was President of the United States, Texas and George Bush used this term. We believe in an ownership society. And that of course is kind of the ultimate capitalist idea is everything is owned by individuals and the idea of a kind of a communal shared resource is foreign to that particular ideology.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  So from the very beginning, there was a constituency of people who thought creating public lands for the public to have access to, this is just not right. So there's been a battle over that for a very long time. I mean, the so-called sagebrush rebellions. I didn't talk about that in this particular episode, but from the 1920s through the 1950s, and in fact, even as late as the 1980s, we have had these kind of many revolts on the part of some people in the West who want the public lands, as they often say, returned to the states. And of course, the problem with that, for one thing, is in the language, the public lands never belonged to the states to start with.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  The states were created out of those lands. But, so those lands had always been federal from the beginning. But there's always been controversy around it. And of course, in the instance here in the last six or eight months, as I describe at the end of this episode, and in the big beautiful bill of last spring, Mike Lee of Utah wanted to start

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Disassembling the public lands in states like Utah and, I mean, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico now, we have something like 33 million acres of public lands in New Mexico. Mike Lee's plan wanted to privatize 14 million acres of that, like 40% of the public lands in New Mexico. And so, one of the things that I mentioned at the end of this particular script, and certainly provided some images of, as well as when the Western Governors met in Santa Fe in June, I mean, there was a gigantic street protest on behalf of saving

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  the public lands and retaining them, of which my wife Sarah and I were certainly in the midst of, which lasted literally all day long and drowned out the Governors' conference. In fact, they had to call off most of the afternoon because they couldn't hear inside the hotel where they were. But that particular protest, and it's one of the things that struck me about it, looking at the signs, looking at the people, it had no political kind of definition. There were people from the left, there were people from the right, there were signs that said "Tree Huggers and Rednecks Unite," everybody from every side, because we have grown up with the public lands and we know what it's like to have

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  this wonderful access to the world, everybody from every side who lives in the West did not want the public lands dissolved.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, I mean, I think that gets to another point you made. It's not, they're not some abstract thing. It's part of daily life.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  It's like, everybody wants, you know, cheaper food and everybody wants public lands. You don't, they're not, you might disagree on how to get there, or how they should be managed, or what, you know, whatever the disagreement might be, but in the West, it's just, it's part of life.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  It's part of life, and, and we love it. And, as I said, if you grew up somewhere else and you come to the West and realize what kind of access you have to the world, it's like you've died and gone to heaven.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Couldn't end it at a better spot than that.

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