THE GRASS LANDS 155 



misused these lands as badly as tenant farmers misused farm 

 lands in the East, and for the same reasons they had no per 

 manent stake in the land and got as much out of it as they 

 could while the getting was good. 



THE GENERAL LAND OFFICE AND THE RANGE 



The state and county governments were no worse than the 

 General Land Office of the Department of the Interior so far 

 as the destruction of the range was concerned. The Land Office 

 thought of itself as a department whose sole purpose was to get 

 rid of land. Indeed, that had been its chief purpose since it was 

 founded. Whether or not the land was overgrazed did not 

 concern the Land Office, since protection of the grass was not 

 part of the duty assigned to it by Congress. The Land Office was 

 supposed to stop trespassers, but trespassing on government 

 land had become almost a custom and the Land Office did 

 very little about it. The recent federal law to control gracing 

 on the public domain originated, not in the General Land 

 Office, but through years of pressure by the Forest Service and 

 the Department of Agriculture and through the personal inter 

 est of the Secretary of the Interior. 



Everyone knows the result of this policy of grass destruction. 

 Dry farmers had to give up the land they tried to turn into 

 homesteads with hope and sweat. Ranchers lost their stock and 

 were forced out of business. Counties and states were loaded 

 with tax-delinquent lands. Banks which had lent money to 

 ranchers failed. And all the time grass, the basic resource of the 

 Great Plains, was being destroyed by overgrazing. 



The effects of this destruction were not restricted to only 

 those who used the range. 



EFFECT OF RANGE DESTRUCTION ON WATERSHEDS 



Salt Lake City lies in the crooked arm of the Wasatch Range 

 of mountains that lie to the east and north. In 1846 Brigham 



