Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions.

• Author: Harper-Fender, Ann

By William L. Graf. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1990. Pp. xviii, 329. $38.50.

Geographer William Graf's Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions spans the century from 1880 to the 1980s in its chronicle of western revolts against increasingly restrictive federal regulation of the use of the area's public domain. The futility of the sagebrush rebellions against federal control becomes clear, as public policy moves from surveying and rationalizing use of western lands of conservation to wilderness preservation. Indeed, the term rebellion to denote the generally unorganized and ineffective periodic efforts to reverse federal control over western resources seems a bit strong to describe what Graf's narrative reveals. He considers four major regional reactions to federal land policy: the first involves reaction to federal irrigation surveys of the intermountain region, in the late 1880s; the second, hostility to federal forest preservation plans from the late 1980s to about 1910; the third, dispute over grazing regulations on public lands from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s; and the fourth, concern over wilderness preserves that began in the late 1970s.

Graf combines political and social history with an appreciation of the physical attributes of this region, which stretches from the western prairies to eastern Washington and Oregon and the California border and centers on Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, but involves Montana and Wyoming as well. Upon acquisition of these lands, the federal government faced the question of whether and how to distribute them; Graf's text focuses on how the specific arid and often unknown conditions of the sagebrush region complicated the answers to the question. He illuminates how political maneuvering and orchestration of public opinion played important roles in the outcomes of the various debates. Thus, though Graf's expertise as a geographer influences the book, its main emphasis seems more political than scientifically analytical, with the main scientific contributions coming through his grasp of the history of science and the (mis)understanding that political decision-makers and their advisors likely had of the topography, climate, geology, soil, and geography of the region. For example, the first rebellion resulted from attempts to survey the west for possible irrigation sites, with lands being withheld from settlement until the survey was completed and...