TREASURE OF LA SIERRA.

• Author: Hess, Karl
• Position: Management of Taylor Ranch near San Luis, Colorado

Colorado's embattled Taylor Ranch is the West writ small. Here's how capitalism may conserve it.

One night in 1975, a hail of lead tore through Jack Taylor's home on his ranch on the Rio Culebra, near the town of San Luis, just north of the Colorado - New Mexico border. One bullet shattered his ankle. Years later, arsonists set fire to his house; only a scorched chimney remains today. More recently, protesters chained themselves to the Taylor Ranch's gates and proclaimed a new war against logging on private land. And earlier this year, Costilla County unsuccessfully attempted to enjoin Jack's son Zack from logging even one more tree.

For a generation, the Taylor Ranch has been embroiled in what The New York Times calls "the hottest environmental dispute in the Rockies." It is a war for the ranch's resources, a battle between outsiders from North Carolina and a long-established Hispanic community. The stakes are high: herds of elk and bighorn sheep, millions of board-feet of spruce and fir, and enough water to irrigate hundreds of square miles.

This isn't the only struggle over natural resources in the West. But the Taylor Ranch is different: It's privately owned. While nearby federal lands become the battlegrounds of intense wars over a shrinking resource pie, the Taylors' innovative ranch is trying to use property rights to make the resource pie bigger. If it succeeds, its owners will be wealthier, its wildlife will be enriched, and its San Luis neighbors will enjoy a windfall in forage, wood, elk, and water.

Taylor Ranch is the West writ small. It is a story about a beautiful landscape: 77,500 acres of rampart-like alpine peaks, fields awash in a rainbow of flowered colors, fingers of spruce-fir forests inching into slopes of yellow and orange quaking aspen, and a lower fringe dressed in pine and sagebrush. It's a tale made for re-thinking the role of property in conservation, set in a Lockean landscape where rights are up for grabs. It turns on a partial truth that Calvin Trillin stumbled on in an unfriendly New Yorker piece he wrote about Taylor in 1976: A man sometimes owns only the land his neighbors acknowledge he owns.

The story stretches back to 1843. Before then, the San Luis Valley was home only to Indian tribes that constantly fought among themselves. The valley was then part of Mexico, and this continual conflict suited Mexican interests: It created a buffer zone between that country and the region's other imperial aspirants. But in the 1840s, the Texans were getting belligerent, and the Mexicans were getting nervous. To protect its northern fringe, Mexico encouraged settlers to move from its northernmost outpost - today's Taos, New Mexico - into the upper reaches of the vast valley.

Charles Beaubien was a Frenchman and former fur trapper who became a Mexican citizen and, in 1843, landlord of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, over a million acres of unsurveyed land. The grant had a proviso: Mexican law required it to be settled within two years. With Beaubien's blessing, a few desperate pioneers started the fortified town of San Luis de Culebra - and quickly abandoned it in the face of Indian attacks. The grant thus remained unoccupied, casting the first of many clouds on its title.

War reversed Beaubien's fortunes. The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and declared war on Mexico in 1846. In 1848, Mexico accepted the lower Rio Grande as its boundary. The United States took over Mexico's northern provinces; in return, Mexico received $15 million and was relieved of all claims against it by American citizens. The United States also agreed to honor Mexican citizens' claims.

Against this background, the ever-opportunistic Beaubien became an American citizen. With the U.S. Army available to maintain order, he reestablished San Luis in 1851; with Fort Massachusetts at the grant's northern end, the settlement became permanent. Overnight, a market appeared for San Luis' farmers and hunters, the fort got the food it needed to survive, and a viable village was born. Hungry for a piece of the new market, each Hispanic family in San Luis obtained title from Beaubien to a small tract of irrigable land along the Rio Culebra. As part of the deal, they assumed they had the customary communal right to graze their herds, hunt, and cut wood in the ejido, the nearby hills and mountains of the Rio Culebra watershed - an area that their descendants would argue included the future Taylor Ranch.

In 1861, President Lincoln appointed William Gilpin as Colorado's first territorial governor. Gilpin bought Beaubien's widow's share of the grant, promising to honor title to the irrigated parcels given earlier to the settlers at San Luis. Throughout the Civil War, Gilpin sold chunks of the ejido to investors betting on a Union victory. He then split what remained of the grant at the watershed boundary of the Rio Culebra, calling the northern part (the part that lay outside the watershed) Trinchera. The southern part went by the local name La Sierra - "the mountain tract."

Gilpin tried to sell La Sierra, but met staunch resistance from San Luisans long dependent on free use of its land and resources. Buyers were reluctant to invest in land whose title was colored by community claims to its forage, water, wildlife, and wood. That title would remain clouded for the next century. Trinchera was different: It had no history of communal rights. It sold to a series of buyers, and in 1969 was purchased by Malcolm Forbes.

By that time, Jack Taylor - former Golden Gloves champion, WWII fighter pilot, and self-taught real...