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PUBLIC LANDS COUNCIL v. BABBITT

Opinion of the Court

Cattleman 83–113 (1929); W. Webb, The Great Plains 205–
268 (1931).

But more cattle meant more competition for ever-scarcer
water and grass. And that competition was intensiﬁed by
the arrival of sheep in the 1870’s. Many believed that sheep
were destroying the range, killing fragile grass plants by
cropping them too closely. The increased competition for
forage, along with droughts, blizzards, and growth in home-
steading, all aggravated natural forage scarcity. This led, in
turn, to overgrazing, diminished proﬁts, and hostility among
forage competitors—to the point where violence and “wars”
broke out, between cattle and sheep ranchers, between
ranchers and homesteaders, and between those who fenced
and those who cut fences to protect an open range. See
W. Gard, Frontier Justice 81–149 (1949). These circum-
stances led to calls for a law to regulate the land that once
was free.

The calls began as early as 1878 when the legendary south-
western explorer, Major John Wesley Powell, fearing water
monopoly, wrote that ordinary homesteading laws would not
work and pressed Congress to enact “a general law . . . to
provide for the organization of pasturage districts.” Report
on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States,
H. Exec. Doc. No. 73, 45th Cong., 2d Sess., 28 (1878). From
the end of the 19th century on, Members of Congress regu-
larly introduced legislation of this kind, often with Presiden-
tial support.
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt reiter-
ated Powell’s request and urged Congress to pass laws that
would “provide for Government control of the public pasture
lands of the West.” S. Doc. No. 310, 59th Cong., 2d Sess.,
5 (1907). But political opposition to federal regulation was
strong. President Roosevelt attributed that opposition to
“those who do not make their homes on the land, but who
own wandering bands of sheep that are driven hither and
thither to eat out the land and render it worthless for the
real home maker”; along with “the men who have already