I was doing a bit of reading on Yucca Mountain and according to Wikopedia, “There is also general resentment felt by many Nevada residents over the fact that 87% of the land in Nevada is federal property.”
What? What are the feds doing with 87% of Nevada? How are they using it, and how did they get it in the first place?
Article:
Also from Wikipedia:
When what is now Nevada became US territory, almost no one lived there (except for Indians who were ignored, dispossessed or annihilated in the usual way of the time). Nearly all of the land that is now federally owned has been federally owned from that time foward.
Some of the land is military bases and reservations, national forests, and even a national park. A good deal of it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior.
The grazing rights for most of the national forest and BLM land are leased out to local ranches. Many of these leases have remained in the same family for 100+ years, so people feel that the land should belong to them. Some people feel that the rents for these leases are so low that the government is subsidizing the cattle industry. Others feel that the environmental damage from cattle grazing is such that the grazing rights should no longer be sold. In either case, cattle ranching in Nevada is labor intensive and a hard way to make a living; cattle must be allowed to roam over large areas since the aridity of the region limits the growth of vegetation.
The federal government also owns a large percentage of Utah, and it’s a sore point there as well. When Clinton created the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument in southern Utah, it was popular with conservationists and environmentalists nationwide, but it sure pissed off the locals. They feel that despite promises to the contrary, grazing rights on what is now monument land are becoming more restrictive. There’s also a large coal seam under the eastern part of the monument, and there was some kind of effort underway to begin mining it at the time the monument was declared. This would have been a boon to the local economy: many locals feel that the monument was declared as a reaction to the possibility of mining.
The percentage of federal land ownership in other western states is also quite high, though not as high as in Nevada. A political movement called the Sagebrush Rebellion was organized in the 70’s to fight federal landownership in the west, especially in wilderness areas – though the movement has antecedents reaching back into the 1870’s. They thought they had an ally in Reagan, and it was after his election that I first heard of the Sagebrush Rebellion from a Utah friend. However, Reagan didn’t change any of the policies to which the SR was objecting. James Watt’s resignation as Secretary of the Interior ended the hopes of the SR for the time being.
They bought it from Mexico via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Or, if one prefers to recognize the purchase as a fig leaf for military conqest, they conquered it by force of arms during the Mexican War.
There was some recognition of land titles held by private individuals under Mexican rule (this was often a source of litigation), but few if any Mexicans held title to any land in Nevada. And there was some recognition of native American rights to the land, although the Indians were invariably forced to cede their claims in return for small subsidies and relatively small parcels that they reserved to themselves (“reservations”).
With those two exceptions, land purchased by the federal governement by treaty belongs to the federal government until it sells it or gives it away. And, for reasons detailed by other posters, it never did either with most of Nevada.
