Excerpt from Hoof Prints on Forest Ranges: The Early Years of National Forest Range Administration

Early during each of the years shortly following the turn of the century, patrons of the old Albany Hotel of Denver, Colorado, as they lay in their beds, could hear an ominous rumble, almost a roar, of voices welling up from the glass dome which then covered a portion of the hotel lobby. To the initiated it meant that the cowmen of the West, in annual convention assembled, again were discussing the various proposals Gifford Pinchot had made to govern the graz ing of domestic livestock on the public lands which had been, or were to be, withdrawn from the public domain as forest re serves. The conversations were tinged with salt and sulphur, and the rich idiom of the Old West poured out less often in prose than in blank verse.

Some of the speakers were men who themselves had helped to win the West, many more the sons of such men. Some were men of erudition and high statesmanship, owners or managers of large interests with established records of objective management, but there were many who themselves performed the arduous duties of round-up, calf branding, line-riding and bog-pulling, and who personally uncocked the broncos in their remudas, but made no pretense of diplomatic procedure. The chief concern of all was that the order to which they had shaped their lives faced drastic changes; so they were apprehensive if not fearful. Uncle Sam had been cozened out of enough superlative timber to keep the saws whining for many years to come, and irrigation ists regarded the withdrawal of their watersheds as advantageous rather than detrimental. But, at best, the supply of lush, well watered, insect-free, cool summer ranges of the intermediate or higher elevations was not enough for all, and if part of it wereclosed to livestock the industry would be just that much worse off.

The previous order of the western livestock industry had been more Opportunistic and expedient than systematic. Losses often were heavy, prices often low, so why waste time main taining precise and meticulous records in the conduct of what closely resembled a high-card gamble. Probably no other single factor did more to revolutionize the business procedures of the western livestock growers than did the requirements prescribed by the Forest Service for the establishment of permanent grazing preferences on national forest lands.

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