The two things I’ve always liked best about America are our Bill of Rights and our public lands. And almost every morning when I read the paper, one or the other is under attack by the current administration. If it isn’t some new claim of presidential power in the interest of national security when there’s a war on terror, then there’s some proposal for public-private partnerships to manage national parks or an announcement of yet another reduction in personnel at the Forest Service or Park Service.
Or the administration’s silence about a piece of legislation by Rep. Richard Pombo, a California Republican, which would sell mining claims to their holders for $1,000 an acre.
What is it with these people? I wonder. What do they have against public land? I think it’s wonderful that more than 80 percent of Chaffee County is public land, where I can wander around whenever the mood strikes me. Our local economy is based on tourism, and many of those tourists are attracted by the public lands here. Why this assault on public lands?
I grew up taking them for granted, and didn’t really think about it until the early 1970s. My brother Kurt was going to trade school in Dallas to learn to be a diesel mechanic. He came home on a break and brought a Texas friend.
We went for a ride in the mountains west of Longmont, saw something interesting a few hundred yards off the road, and got out and started to walk over there. “You mean you can just do that?” the Texas visitor asked. “That’s so cool. You can just wander around. You can’t do that in Texas.”
Our president is from Texas, where there’s precious little public land – only 1.4 percent of the state. No state west of the Mississippi River has a lower percentage. In Colorado, 36.3 percent of the land is public, and in the Interior West, the public portion ranges from 34.2 percent in New Mexico to 83 percent in Nevada.
California is a big state like Texas, and it came into the Union at about the same time, and the Golden State is 47.8 percent public land. So what makes Texas so different in this regard?
Texas may be the only polity in history which seceded twice from bigger countries in order to preserve slavery, and it’s the first secession – the Alamo and Goliad and San Jacinto which led to independence from Mexico in 1836 – that’s relevant here.
Texas became an independent nation with its own army, navy, foreign policy, currency and the like. But the Lone Star republic was not a financial success. It went into debt, and its paper money lost most of its value.
So some adjustments were necessary after Texas joined the United States in 1845. Tensions were also building between North and South, and in the hope of averting national disunion, Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky cobbled together a compromise.
The relevant part here is that Texas abandoned some of its more extravagant territorial claims, including a strip through the middle of Colorado up into Wyoming. In return, the state got $10 million in federal money to pay its debts. And the state retained title to the public lands of the Republic of Texas – they did not become federal land.
The Texas legislature did not create “forest reserves” or the like to keep the land in public hands. As historian T.R. Fehrenbach wrote, Texas “gave its land away freely,” so that in theory anyway, “it was virtually impossible for a Texas family to be landless.”
Thus there’s no tradition of preserving public land in Texas. The state did its best to put every acre into private ownership, most notably when it financed construction of its capitol building in 1879 by selling 3 million acres that became the XIT Ranch.
And now, we’ve got a Texan leading an administration and a party that talks seriously of selling off public lands to enhance the federal treasury. Maybe it’s time to start paying more attention to “cultural geography” and its influence on modern politics.
After all, there are a few of us who would prefer that Texas remain “a whole ‘nother country,” a pleasant place to visit on occasion, rather than a model for all the other states.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
