I’m reading some of Teddy Roosevelt’s memoirs about owning a cattle ranch in the Badlands in the 1880s, and I’m astonished at how llittle regulation there was of grazing land. From what he writes, ranches themseves were small–a ranch house or two, a vegetable garden, a stable and some acreage for personal use, but the cattle basically lived off the land, public land.
Now I may be just another pointy-headed easterner (who went to grad school in the Rockies) but I was under the impression that these days cattle roam the ranch-land that a rancher owns. If this is so, when did this change? If it did change, I imagine that ranchers put up quite a fuss, being compelled to own maybe 1000 times as much acreage as they’d been able to get by owning before.
The whole idea of how public lands were used in TR’s time is pretty amazing–hunting anywhere he liked, in any season–and the racial comments he makes about Mexicans, Indians, etc.–are eyebrow singing too, but for now I’m just asking about ranch sizes and when it became common for a rancher to hold title to the land his cattle grazed.
I don’t see what is so shocking about it. You say you are from the East. I live in the Boston area which most people would be far from that type of thing. People used to graze their own cattle in Boston Common as it was considered common property.
One thing that would shock you is if you went back to before say 1900 in New England. It will be all quaint and pretty like today right? Nope. It was mostly clear-cut for the paper industries, lumber, and the side benefit was that livestock could roam free. My house was built in 1760 and my inlaws farm was built in 1790. We have pictures from the late 1800’s early 1900’s. Today it is picture-perfect New England, then it looked like Kansas.
The big problem was the land just that fertile or managed well back then. They had to raise more of their own livestock, and machinery to make things like hay were poor or non-existent.
Another problem was fencing. They didn’t have the manpower to build hundreds of acres of nice wooden fences. Stone walls were extremely labor intensive and the big one, barbed wire, had not been invented yet.
Now think about branding. Branding was invented so that people could pick out their own livestock on communal grazing lands. It was effective enough and the only real way to sort them out at the time. Cows are very dumb, generally slow moving, herd animals that will segregate into their proper groups most of the time and just wander and feed.
The system worked Ok for the most part. There wasn’t any legislation that could affect any real change on that until technology caught up.
If it’s any worth to you, I think federal and state lands are still open to public grazing. Don’t ask me the mechanics of it, but I can verify three things:
I went to school in Northern AZ. My school was surrounded by state lands.
Every now and then, there was a different herd of cattle on that same land. IIRC, different brands = different herds.
Routinely, some of these cattle would wind up wandering through campus.
So I’m fairly certain it’s still a current practice. Now the rancher may own the 40 acres his house, garden, and shop are on, but the rest is just open prairie.
Tripler
Man, I miss the range, where the deer an’ th’ antelope play.
Oh, yeah, TR writes a lot about branding and the purpose it serves. But have ranch sizes (the land a rancher owns) grown as much as I’m supposing? If grazing on public land is still common, then the ranchers really wouldn’t need much more land to live on now than they did then. Also, I assume most cattle these days are fed some sort of grain that the ranchers must purchase–in TR’s day, the cattle basically were scavengers eating for free. When did that change?
I’m trying to write a book about TR in the badlands, which is going to require some real research because I’'ve never been on a ranch in my life, so if you have , feel free to astonish me with the depths of my ignorance.
First, read books on the subject. It can’t be covered by a paragraph of two on a web site. The west was a big area, and the process covered decades. Saying anything about a particular place or time may be misleading about events elsewhere.
Having said that, you might want to start by looking at books about the JohnsonCountyWar. This was the incident that brought all the forces together into one giant explosion.
Conflict over livestock grazing is about as old as civilization. In the eastern United States, where farms and herds were small, the conflict played out in controversy over fence laws. Was it the responsibility of a farmer growing crops to fence livestock out, or was it the responsibility of the stock owner to fence his stock in?
Small land owners and renters favored fence-out, so that a farmer who couldn’t afford enough land to set aside as pasture could own at least a few animals. He or she would turn them out to graze on public land–lanes between farms, nearby forests, a neighbor’s unfenced pasture–and build a small wooden fence to protect the cropland.
Large land owners favored fence-in: if you want to have stock, keep it under control, and keep it off of my land and the public’s land.
When agriculture moved to the Great Plains–railroads, refrigeration, lots of land, and huge herds farmed for market–fence-out at first prevailed for technological reasons. There wasn’t much wood on the Plains, and a rancher couldn’t afford to fence off the huge area necessary to sustain hundreds of head of cattle. By default, cattle grazed on common areas and were rounded up and driven to market.
Then, barbed wire was invented.
You’re darn tootin’ they did. Why do you think cowboys called barbed wire “the devil’s rope” and tried to sabotage barbed-wire fences wherever they found them and fought range wars? As Exapno said, you need a book to do justice to the subject, and you’ll need to be steeped in that culture if you intend to write about TR. (Although TR pretty much abandoned the badlands after the winter of 1886-87, before the transition to closed-range ranching.)
Well, as far as I know from my reading on the subject, barbed wire was invented in 1876 by a guy named Glidden–since TR didn’t move out to the Badlands until 1883 or '84, barbed wire could have been in use, at least in part by then. Or was there a long period where the invention, for whatever reason, wasn’t actually used? Or in a very crude form or something? It’s kind of odd that the concept of fencing in one’s land doesn’t appear anywhere in TR’s memoirs, so I’m thinking it took a while to gain acceptance, even after barbed wire was invented.
Was this battle, as Exapno Mapcase implies, fought over and over in a variety of places? With the same results eventually, or did open range grazing linger in some areas for any reason? I’ll look up the books referenced in those sites he gave, and thanks. If anyone has other sites or books (or films) that explicate this stuff, I’ll be glad to learn about them.
Like any invention, it required time to be perfected, to become mass produced, to prove its utility to at-first skeptical ranchers, and to gain general acceptance.
Another factor is “critical mass”–if nobody is fencing off their land, there isn’t as much reason to fence off yours. Turn out your cattle and let 'em graze. Once people start fencing, the land owners with the lushest pasture fence off their land first. Pretty soon you’ve got too many unfenced cattle trying to graze too much marginal unfenced land, and eventually you’ve got to cut down your herd and fence your land, too.
Yes, the battle was fought many times, over a period of years, and provided grist for many a Western. I’m no expert, but I think barbed wire reached the Dakotas in the late 1880’s or early 1890’s, shortly after TR left. I’m sure in some places open-range grazing lingered into the Twentieth Century, and I suppose it still exists today if you count Brokeback Mountain-type things like ranchers moving their stock onto Forest Service land during the summer. (The government will charge you to do that, but not very much.)
Extremely large percentages of land in the western US is owned by the US government. For grazing use, BLM land is number one but there is also National Forest Service land and such. The ranchers bid on leases for the land. Due to various historical policies, some families have been leasing the same land for generations. The is a far greater chance that a rancher is leasing rather than owning the land in the Intermountain area. (Which unfortunately has lead to extremely poor land use due to overgrazing. But even some landowners are idiots. My g-grandfather’s old ranch is now an ecological disaster due to extreme overgrazing.)
In addition to grazing, there are still fairly lenient rules on allowing livestock to be driven from place to place. When I was a kid, on occasion our little town would be flooded by immense herds of sheep when the Basques would need to move them to different grazing areas or to market. There would be sheep everywhere.
Here’s a map of BLM lands, and here is a map of National Forests . The BLM manages about 1/8 of the land in the US, including most of Nevada and huge chunks of most other western states. As has been said, much of the BLM lands are and large areas of National Forests are leased for grazing.
