Well, I live in Utah and I've lived in Nevada and we hear talk that 

 somehow we should give these lands back to those states. Well, I feel like 

 if we should give them back to anybody, we should give them back to the 

 U.S. -Marine Corps. Why the U.S. Marine Corps? There wasn't a 

 territory or a state of Nevada and Utah when the U.S. Marines marched 

 into Mexico City and pursuaded the Mexican government to deed it's 

 northern territories to the United States. A territory that includes the 

 states of California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico plus part of Colorado 

 and Texas. 



Another myth of the Sagebrush Rebellion is that somehow the West is 

 a colony of the East. And I'd like to spend a little time on that because it 

 is one of the most persistent myths in the West. I've found its historic 

 roots partly in the writings of a noted Texas historian, Walter Prescot 

 Webb. It was also the perception of Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the 

 Forest Service. But the idea that we have an East versus West conflict is 

 a very simplistic impression and it does not apply to public land policy. 

 It may apply to environmental policy when you talk about clean air and 

 clean water, but it does not apply to public lands. Throughout the 20th 

 century the key influence over the public lands has been the House and 

 Senate Interior Committees. And what is the role of the Interior 

 Committee? They filter out a lot of legislation. They concentrate the 

 power of those congressmen and senators on those committees and those 

 members specialize in policy. And it's particularly important in the House 

 where there are so many congressmen. We developed specialists in our 

 congressional committee structure and who has sat on the House and 

 Senate Interior Committees in the 20th century? Those have been 

 dominated by westerners. I mean about 80 to 90 percent of the 

 congressmen who have sat on those committees have been westerners. And 

 that is the key point to understanding public land policy--that committee 

 structure--because they filter out the legislation and they control it. The 

 chairmen of those committees are usually westerners, born and bred. You 

 can start with 1900 and look at the major public land laws that have come 

 out of congress and they have always been dominated by westerners. 

 Western Congress-men have been architects of them and they have 

 controlled their destiny in the United States Congress. The Reclamation 

 Act of 1902 has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the West. It 

 is limited to western lands. That act is usually called by historians "the 

 Newlands Act," not new lands, but for Senator Newlands, the senator from 

 Nevada who was it's major sponsor. What was their major grazing act? 

 Still is The Taylor Grazing Act. Who was Congressman Taylor who guided 

 that bill through Congress? Who was this architect? A Congressman and 

 rancher from Colorado. Early in this century Utah's Senator Reed Smoot 

 served for 28 years on the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys. 

 He was chairman of that committee for more than half that time. He was a 

 very conservative senator, but he also championed the public control of 

 western forests. He championed the creation of national parks. That's 

 one reason Utah has more national parks than any other state. And he 

 was very much concerned with the exploitation of our public resources and 

 it wasn't just in Utah that there were conservation-minded senators 

 throughout the first 30 or 40 years of this century. Francis Warren of 

 Wyoming had similar views to Smoot. Thomas Walsh, the themist 



