Utah Centennial County History Series - Grand County 1996

permitted number of animals by securing additional permits for their kin even though the herds were not separately managed. Charles Peterson documents the abuse of the system by area ranchers, and the details need not be repeated here. He does defend some against the charges leveled by John Riis, but he concedes that "there is no doubt that certain individuals who regarded themselves as scrupulously honest found n o inconsistency in fictitious arrangements which had the effect of negating the essence of permit regulation.""

The number of animals on the range consistently exceeded the number of permits issued. Some of this, especially in Grand County, was justified by stockmen who attempted to graze as many cattle in the forest areas of the mountains as they wintered on the desert ranges to the north, which, nothwithstanding the fact that it was considered desert, was able to support more animals than could the mountain range. This put additional pressure on the forest range, a pressure exacerbated by those who miscounted and trespassed on the range with unpermitted animals.

Counts were notoriously difficult to make, for ranchers as well as for forest service personnel, but tax records and sales of animals furnish evidence that some ran many more animals than they were permitted-up to 500 percent more, it was claimed, in one extreme case.22Stockmen felt that they were the best judges of the situation and, moreover, that the land was their stewardship-an argument that has not changed in the succeeding century-though the public domain continued to deteriorate. Ranchers, however, though conceding that fact, tended to blame it on drought rather than overgrazing. They did not agree, however, on when the droughts occurred."

Soon after the La Sal Forest Reserve was created in 1906, the Southeastern Utah Stockmen's Association was founded in Moab. It reported that 2,000 cattle without permits grazed in the north division of the forest reserve (primarily Grand County) in 1909, but it attempted to excuse the area ranchers by maintaining that strays drifted in and that no one knew how many cattle they had: "No general count of the cattle has been made for years and the stockmen cannot without a count estimate within 20% of the actual number of range cattle that they have."24There was most likely much truth in all this; but the stockmen never seemed to over-estimate-there were