Introduction

The recent designation and subsequent downsizing of the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah has brought heightened awareness to public lands politics. At the time of this writing, ongoing political and legal cross swords over the status of the monument and its boundaries expose fissures in our land politics as deep as—and in some ways aligned with—the political divisions confronting our country. Divisions over what public lands are, what they should be, and how they are to be managed have perplexed our culture for generations. The contested question boils down to the meaning of public in public lands: to whom do these lands belong and for what purpose, how are they to be managed, what criteria decides who benefits from them, and who is excluded. Bears Ears is part of the approximately 640 million acres federally managed in the United States, larger in land mass than Alaska and Texas combined. That these lands are owned by all Americans seems simple enough, but that reality obscures thorny legal, political, managerial, cultural, geographical, and ecological issues part and parcel to any serious discussion of the vast real estate owned in common.

We intend this special issue to contribute to the serious discussion swirling in the political and policy realm—even as we hope it also appeals to the public. Although public lands history appears at first glance a tedious subject, the topic could not be more pressing to anyone who cares about Utah and the West. Most readers of this journal will know of public lands from personal experience: we live close to them, extract resources from them, recreate on them. Drive any distance in the western states and you will notice that they dominate the skyline. These tangible associations run deeper still for many in our communities. Far from being uninhabited, these lands sustained generation after generation of Indigenous peoples who lived and died on them; Native Americans today rely on them still for economic, cultural, and religious purposes. The sweep of the general term public lands belies these intimate connections. Collectively they may take an amorphous form in our minds, but specific landscapes, landforms, features, and place names hold particular meanings to the people who know and love them.

A challenge of public lands history is to represent the range of individual stories in the context of the whole. The stunning diversity of the places and landscapes gives public lands no easy characterization, and any attempt to do so borders on the bland. These lands make up diverse ecosystems, biomes, and habitats, from the frigid tundra of northern Alaska to the southwestern Sonoran borderlands. Utah, with its alpine mountainous terrain, riparian canyons, and arid deserts, represents a kind of microcosm of the diversity found in the western states. These ecological classifications may be mapped, in a general sense, onto designated lands. At the federal level, legislative designations of large, landscape-scale places include national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, national conservation lands, national monuments, national heritage areas, national recreation areas, wild and scenic rivers, and wilderness. Beyond the federal are state and local designations. Within large-scale categories, land-managing agencies create various administrative designations based on applicable laws and statutes that dictate how lands are to be used and for what purposes. Rather than organizations locked in time, these agencies are driven by the mandates directing them, the personalities running them, and the forces acting upon them. Over time their priorities change, as do their organizational coherence and public acceptance.

Prior to 1891, when Congress set aside reserves to prevent proliferate stripping of the nation’s forests, the federal policy was almost exclusively to give away or sell off public lands. Its raisons d’être was to settle the West, driven by the Jeffersonian ideology to shape American settlers into farmers, the backbone of the nation’s citizenry. As historians have pointed out, that policy did damage to Indigenous and other non-white peoples; the history of public lands disposal is in lock step with dispossession of Native people who long had occupied the land. It also often ran headlong against the geographic realities of a largely arid region with limited prospects of agricultural productivity— although into the second half of the twentieth century federal laws and promotors continued to push homesteading, or at least the hope of homesteading, on public lands.

Snake Valley, White Pine County, Nevada. Snake Valley, stretching along the Utah-Nevada border, overlaps or borders several federal land designations, including BLM, national forest, national park, and national heritage area. Photo by Leisl Carr Childers.

From the late nineteenth century, the federal government gradually moved from a policy of disposal to one of retention as permanent caretakers of vast tracts of land. The program of land management would be undertaken by scientists, engineers, and planners committed to efficiency and control in the utilization of natural resources. Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service, and other Progressive-era conservationists advanced the notion of “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run,” and—in theory, at least—brought forest management in line with this reasoning. On federal grasslands, range lands, and forested areas on what was then known as the unappropriated federal domain, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 provided for federal regulation of grazing lands in a way similar to the Forest Service’s regulation of the nation’s public forests. Although these measures were meant to curtail abuses of public land use, they also ensured continued economic gain of lumber companies and ranchers benefiting from the nation’s natural resources.

Since midcentury, a flurry of new laws, statutes, and cultural priorities have expanded the voices clamoring for a place at the table. Traditional uses of these lands continue—timber production, ranching, and mining among them—but in current decades recreation-based activities seem to be eclipsing all others in terms of economic and cultural import. Increasingly, policy makers and land managers must consider mandates and priorities that acknowledge the aboriginal presence on public lands, the care of ancient and Indigenous remains and artifacts, and the protection of ecosystems independently of how they may be used to serve humans. That is, land managers no longer think merely about maximizing economic yield; they seek to embrace ecosystem management, work to restore damaged landscapes, and value plant and wildlife for their own sakes. Beyond the priorities, the processes have also become more democratic—and messy. Federal and state land agencies must now manage for these diverse interests, ofttimes navigating management within a very public framework.

The forum at the heart of this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly digs into this most recent period. We begin with a thoughtful piece on the role of narrative and empathy in the histories we tell of public lands. Leisl Carr Childers picks a polarizing figure—Cliven Bundy—and asks how using the concept of empathy as a tool can change the narratives we tell about, yes, a heroic figure in some camps but, perhaps more commonly, a villain. Her answers point not only to new ways of telling public lands history but of understanding individuals with whom we may disagree. We start here because the preconceived ideas we have about public lands, or in this case a polarizing figure, can become disorienting but also illuminating when considered through a different lens. We pair Carr Childers’s essay with one by James R. Skillen, who, by showing the persistent iterations of anti-government sentiment among groups over the last four decades, places the Bundy experience in perspective. The contribution here is to show how western animosity over public lands has variously taken on forms of regional and national identity.

Yvette Towersap Tuell’s essay on her peoples’ “inherent and treaty rights” to off-reservation lands gives measured consideration to the question of how Indigenous rights differ from the “rights” of other groups on public lands. A member of the sovereign Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Tuell blends tribal traditions and history to show the spiritual and survival connections well beyond what passes for multiple-use recreation by today’s campers and rock climbers. These are the living traditions; also important is the recognition and protection of ancient ones. The next essay introduces readers to remarkable Great Basin and Great Salt Lake Fremont–style rock art on BLM and state-owned lands at Lake Mountain near Utah Lake. The archaeologists Elizabeth Hora and Chris Merritt show what happens when concerned citizens, coordinating with public officials, land managers, and other individuals, take initiative to protect irreplaceable, centuries-old rock art from recreational shooters’ aim. The case study at Lake Mountain implies that nimble management structures are best able to respond to the pressure-cooker issues that are bound to arise on public lands.

A core challenge of public lands management is the imbalance between national and local interests—a theme tacitly addressed in our next two essays. Eleanor Mahoney details a relatively new phenomenon in rural corners of the West: the designation of national heritage areas (NHAs). As with some national parks or monuments, local residents and officials sometimes resist NHAs for fear of land-use restrictions and the impact on private property, but unlike most other federal designations, these are locally driven. Mahoney describes the process of getting locals to buy in; for the proposed Mormon Pioneer Heritage NHA, the keys were outreach, partnerships, and the promise of community revitalization. The next essay, centered on a legal dispute over public lands access in New Mexico, also demonstrates the virtues of local knowledge and decision-making. Maria E. Montoya analyzes a contemporary example of state and local governments providing a structure for locals to demonstrate their historical connection to public lands. As some other essays in this issue also demonstrate, these lands are often at the center of cultural and economic life for the local peoples and communities reliant upon them.

The next essays offer new insights into shifting priorities and challenges of range and forest management spanning the twentieth century. Matthew Pearce’s discussion of Frederick Coville, chief botanist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, offers a look at the intersection between policy, management, and science at the turn of the twentieth century. Coville’s field research and prescriptions for public domain range management during this era epitomized the Progressive era conservation notion of serving the interests of all and foreshadowed later federal regulations. We see in Thomas G. Alexander’s essay—an analysis of Forest Service management in the Intermountain region—how management priorities changed in the second half of the century. Quite different from their predecessors, managers engaged in landscape restoration and ecological management on the basis of forest health separate from human needs. They increasingly addressed recreation in their forest plans and focused on planning and public hearings to engage with a diverse constituency.

We conclude the forum with an insightful meditation on the divergence between perception and reality. Framing her piece by chronicling recent fires in her home state of California, Laura Alice Watt argues that the predictability that people come to expect of nature generally and public lands in particular is a chimera. Nature’s unpredictability is about as predictable as anything, and the laws and regulatory structure built around public lands management do not adequately consider this. Watt’s essay highlights how prevailing conventions, based on dated assumptions about how nature works, are not adequate to address the changes happening on public lands throughout the western states.

Utah Historical Quarterly readers will notice that the forum essays are, for the most part, shorter than our standard research articles. We make no attempt at comprehensiveness. The perspectives represent those of the authors, who were encouraged to consider new approaches or insights based on a synthesis of their own or others’ research. The result is a collection of themes unexamined in the existing literature. In combination they present a regional portrait of the divergent issues facing public lands in recent decades.

We close the issue with an important article that can help us think differently about the persistent tussle over federal–state ownership of public lands. Nearly a century ago prominent Utahns called for federal management of the unappropriated domain (later under BLM management). Concerned about the relationship between overgrazing and severe flood events in the Wasatch Range, Governor George Dern, William Peterson, John M. Macfarlane, and others rejected the Hoover administration’s offer to grant the unappropriated public domain to western states and instead lobbied for increased federal oversight. This position may be surprising given that Dern often argued for “state’s rights,” but as Benjamin Kiser adroitly shows in his article, Dern and other prominent Utahns distinguished between deriving benefits from public lands and owning title to them. This insight provides needed perspective into current wrangling over federal–state land ownership, tying neatly to how we began this issue showing the anti-government brand of public lands politics.

The historian Adam Sowards recently justified historical attention to public lands. “Any successful approach to public lands management requires that we consider people and place over time, a perspective historically lacking,” he contends. “Instead, these lands have been treated, by the public, by managers, by Congress, as almost endlessly malleable, regardless of the nature or culture that occupied specific locales.” 1 This specificity is one justification for the issue you hold in your hands. The individual histories of these places can teach us something about our own time. Since public lands have increasingly become a kind of incubator where national competing values play out in a very public process, historians can inform all who take part.

Sometimes it seems few outside the American West, and even few within it, think much about public lands. These lands often do not rise to the level of our collective and individual consciousness. The Bears Ears debate has changed this, at least for a time. Perhaps the sheer scale of the lands contribute to this inattention. Consequently, what happens—or happened—there is out of sight, out of mind. We hope this issue not only introduces readers to something new, even surprising, but that it gives you more reason to care. The discourse on public lands is usually policy-dominated, driven by politicians, managers, and user groups. But historians also have something to contribute to the conversation, and many of the essays here distinctly link past and present. On a topic that operates in the public discourse as us–them, we need deep historical perspective, if for no other reason than to exhibit the empathy and understanding that we desire for ourselves.

Jedediah S. Rogers

Notes

1 Adam M. Sowards, “Sometimes, It Takes a Table,” Environmental History 23 (January 2018): 143–51, https://doi .org/10.1093/envhis/emx122.