"There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said "private property"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing
This land was made for you and me"- Woody Guthrie
KCET Los Angeles
Re wild
by Chris Clarke January 12, 2016 7:00 PM
"It's been over a week since a group of armed far-right militiamen started to occupy the headquarters building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. In that time, hundreds of articles have been published analyzing the actions, the intentions, the history and the character of the gang who's forced the closure of the 187,757-acre wildlife refuge, first protected by President Theodore Roosevelt in August 1908.
Some of the articles do a great job of delving into the group's loathing of science, or individual members' accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in government handouts while decrying government intrusion into their lives, or the notable lack of support the group is getting from the constituency it claims to represent.
But as cogent and informative as some of those essays have been, you don't really need to read them to get a sense of what the Malheur occupiers are after. Nor do you need to analyze the words coming from the group itself. Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and in this case the group's action says it all. They seized land that belongs to you, and now you can't go there. And they say they're just getting started…
Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government's.
And the ultraconservatives of the 19th Century -- Bundy's predecessors -- opposed the Homestead Act. They had in mind an aristocratic West, where slaveholders could greatly expand their existing empires. A grassroots system of land distribution would have impeded their visions of plantations on the Colorado, the Arkansas, the San Joaquin and the Rio Grande. It wasn't until Secession, and the departure of pro-slavery senators from Washington, that the Homestead Act was able to make it to Lincoln's desk.
The Homestead Act wasn't without its major flaws. It contributed to the further displacement of Native people by encouraging massive settlement. It was designed by politicians accustomed to less-arid environments, where a family could support itself in some comfort on a quarter section. In Utah? Not so much.
And there's this: Since the feds did little to verify that homesteaders actually lived and farmed on the land in question, the Act was abused by ranchers. By strategically filing homestead claims on the West's sparse water sources, sometimes using their ranch hands as proxies, ranches were able to gain de facto exclusive control over broad swathes of public lands. If they denied other ranchers access to those water sources, they could essentially lock up thousands of acres of surrounding grazing lands for their own private use.
Tensions between struggling homesteaders and the often-wealthy cattle barons whose livestock surrounded them was so prevalent, and so entrenched, as to have become a standard Hollywood trope."
MUCH MORE AT:
KCET Los Angeles
Re wild
by Chris Clarke January 12, 2016 7:00 PM
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