lands within the state boundary. Since 1976 controls have been tightened 

 on land use and the West has begun to feel the impact of federal 

 intervention in private and state matters. In the area of gas and oil 

 exploration and range improvements, commitments by the government to 

 preserve land was expressed in RARE I and RARE II studies. 

 Explorations of oil and gas, timber processing and grazing were held in 

 abeyance. By that I mean that improvements were held up and attempts at 

 management plans were held back and a lot of rule changing and 

 management decisions were switched without very much notice. BLM has 

 money for range improvements, but they had to wait until RARE II studies 

 were completed and EIS statements were written. When a piece of land is 

 being studied for wilderness, you can't go out and do any improvement 

 work because you might change the basic nature of the land and it 

 wouldn't be wilderness anymore. This and a growing maze of federal rules 

 and regulations implemented by the BLM and restricted access to federal 

 lands and to ranchers, loggers and miners that along with nonmanagement 

 of wild horses and burros is what triggered the Sagebrush Rebellion. The 

 wild horse population is increasing at the rate of about twenty percent 

 annually. There were some wild horses southwest of here by Bannack and 

 they couldn't be captured because the people that were in love with the 

 wild horse had restrictions on what BLM could do with them. They 

 captured one and they had somebody adopt it and a lot of money was 

 spent on checking on the horse afterwards. And last year those horses 

 were all of a sudden captured and removed from this land. It wasn't any 

 big issue or anything. The BLM decided it was time to take care of them. 

 That's one of the things that Frank was talking about that we've probably 

 already won the war. The lack of control of predators is one thing that is 

 still an issue that's unsolved. You're not supposed to control any coyotes 

 except the ones that are proven to be bad guys. It's kind of hard to tell 

 which coyote that is. By the time you find out which one is the bad one, 

 you've had some losses. One way of referring to the Sagebrush Rebellion 

 is that the Mason Dixon line now runs north and south rather than east 

 and west. But as this topic is discussed further, you find people in the 

 East are concerned about historic trails and parks and historic landmarks 

 and government taking more private land into government management and 

 control. So when some people in the East start getting a historic trail 

 through their property they will probably think about joining up with us 

 in this project. The federal government was to manage... I'll back up a 

 little bit. Other western states now claim they were blackmailed into 

 surrendering control of management of their non-deeded lands by the 

 Union when they became states. The federal government was to manage 

 these lands until the states could do it. It was not required of eastern 

 states to give up their public land. But when the western states or the 

 western territories became states, of course there was such vast areas of 

 this land that the federal government said we'll have to manage it for you 

 until you are able to. The federal government manages today over 50 

 percent of the land in the West. Ranging from 22 percent in Washington 

 state to 87 percent in Nevada and 96 percent in Alaska. Thirty percent of 

 the state of Montana is federally controlled, plus five percent is owned by 

 the Indians and five percent by the state of Montana. The State Land 

 Board manages around 6,000,000 acres of land and some of that is in large 

 blocks in the state and the livestock industry feels that the state's done a 

 good job of managing this. It's not required a large staff of people. I 



