732
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 homesteading, 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 circumstances led to calls for a law to regulate the land that once was free.
The calls began as early as 1878 when the legendary southwestern 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 regularly introduced legislation of this kind, often with Presidential support. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt reiterated 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
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