CHAPTER 1 CHANGING WINDS

• Jurisdiction: United States

Surface Use for Mineral Development in the New West
(Feb 2008)
CHAPTER 1
CHANGING WINDS
Patricia Nelson Limerick
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

I. The clearest and most accurate way to think about Western American history is to think of it as a big process of a) drawing lines and boundaries on the earth and around its resources, and b) stretching and reshaping the idea of "property" to fit a wide variety of resources, ranging from beaver skins to cattle, grass lands to town lots, mining claims to rights of way. This process began two centuries ago, and remains far from complete today; the issue of surface use for mineral development provides one of the most telling case studies in this central theme of regional history.

II. Laws that govern the claiming and developing of resources are our inheritance from our ancestors and predecessors, and those laws have shown varying flexibility in adapting to massive historical changes in American attitudes toward nature and land. One of the most consequential aspects of this change involved the shift from the habit of mind by which many Americans saw semi-arid lands as deserts or "wastelands," to the surprisingly rapid rise of an appreciation for the understated beauty, as well as the biodiversity, of those lands. By the late twentieth century, nearly every square inch of the West had an advocate, a champion, and an enthusiast (or several!). Selecting nearly any Western site for mineral development would, with the rarest exceptions, call into action an energetic and audible team of defenders of that place. The 1916 Stock Raising Homestead Act, in the institutionalizing of the split estate, offers us a prime case study in zones of friction between old laws and new attitudes.

III. In various under-noticed and under-studied episodes in the region's history, competing forms of resource use have collided with each other, usually leading to litigation and sometimes leading to violence. (The episodes of violence remind us not to put much time into complaining about the "litigiousness" of our society; courtrooms are, after all, pretty good alternatives to other arenas of combat.) While attention to conflicts between "preservationists" and "utilitarians" have preoccupied both scholars and the public, conflicts between and among different groups of "utilitarians" have been of equal consequence. Looking at several illustrative case studies of this phenomenon, especially the nineteenth century conflict...