simple. It is to plunder those lands. In one of the hearings I was 

 reading the other day, Thomas Walsh, the senator from Montana, was 

 talking to the president of one of the western livestock organizations, and 

 the stockmen were saying, "Yeah, we wanted these lands." And Walsh 

 was saying, "Well, under what conditions do you want them?" And the 

 stockmen said they wanted them but they didn't want to pay the fair 

 market value for them. And Walsh said, "Well, what's the price... $2 an 

 acre, $2.50 an acre? No, the price should be a dollar an acre." So they 

 said "Well, shouldn't this be put up for some sort of bidding?" "No." 

 The ranchers didn't want any bidding at that time. They wanted 

 preferential treatment. They wanted noncompetitive bidding because they 

 had used the land for two or three generations. They had the moral right 

 to buy it at a dollar an acre. Well that proposal didn't go anywhere, but 

 I think that that same mentality is behind the Sagebrush Rebellion today. 

 It would be the same thing if the duck hunter, who has faithfully 

 purchased his duck stamp for year after year... maybe he first went out 

 with his father hunting and he has gone out to the Charles Russell Game 

 Range and he's hunted along the Missouri River for many years... to 

 acquire that land but he doesn't want to pay anything for it. I've never 

 heard any of the western states offer to pay for these lands and they 

 want preferential treatment: noncompetitive bidding for it. Well I think 

 that same argument has been used by the stockmen and the miners in the 

 past, that somehow they deserve special treatment. Well it seems like 

 sportsmen have gone a long way in pushing through legislation and also 

 through public pressure of controlling the game hog. It's not very neat 

 to be a game hog. And they have developed a morality to control game 

 hogs. But in terms of some of the public land users, they have not 

 evolved their morality that high, and what we have is a group of land 

 hogs who would take that land for their own personal use. They would 

 take it from this generation and the next generation simply because 

 they've used it in the past, they feel thev have a right to use it today. I 

 submit that that's not a moral right. I. simply a grand type of larceny. 

 Grand theft of a great public treasure. Perhaps to paraphrase one 

 historian, never in the course of public history have so few tried to take 

 so much from so many. 



Another thing that is my own, I guess personal complaint, is the 

 tactics of the Sagebrush Rebellion advocates. Warren Hatch, the good 

 senator from Utah has certainly emerged as the high priest of the 

 Sagebrush Rebellion. And he is the one that often talks about it being the 

 second American Revolution. He's called BLM employees officious, 

 oppressive agents of Washington's sprawling marching army of clerks and 

 self-appointed experts. And who are these self-appointed experts? Most 

 of them are trained at Utah State University in his own state. He claims 

 that BLM is oppressive. "Where there used to be one BLM man per 

 county, there are now 60 of them, stumbling over each other, acting like 

 little gods." Well who are the stumbling little gods? They are 

 westerners. They are people trained in natural resources. Ninety-nine 

 percent of them have at least a bachelor's degree in natural resources and 

 about 15 percent of them have a master's degree. My personal experience, 

 despite many disagreements, is that they are dedicated to multiple use and 

 they are public servants in the finest sense of the term. 



