| OWNERSHIP OF A PORTION OF 
THE SWAN RIVER DRAINAGE 
"ZZ Nationa Forest 
MB Stote 
[_] Northern Pacific Railway 
EES other Owners 
Ficure 40. 
Obviously, such scattered holdings represent a very 
difficult management problem. 
East of the Continental Divide a major part of 
the unreserved public domain is subdivided into 
grazing districts handled by the Bureau of Land 
Management. Since many of the grazing districts 
are interlocked with the national forests managed 
by the Forest Service (fig. 41), this creates the 
administratively questionable situation of two Fed- 
eral agencies doing virtually the same job in a single 
locality. 
The handicap created by the ownership pattern 
can, to a large extent, be overcome if action along 
several different lines is successful. Some holdings 
should be consolidated to facilitate their manage- 
ment. There is a particular need to do this in the 
case of the widely scattered State-owned forest lands. 
A consolidation process started several decades ago 
Forest Resources of Montana 
was stopped by an informal ruling of the Attorney 
General that land exchanges for this purpose are 
unconstitutional (/3). This difficulty can appar- 
ently be overcome only by submitting the matter 
to the vote of the people through a referendum. 
The awkwardness arising from intermeshed hold- 
ings can be corrected to some extent by land ex- 
changes between owners. Since 1947 the Northern 
Pacific Railway and the Forest Service have been 
unscrambling their holdings by this means. 
Acting under authority of the Taylor Grazing 
Act of 1934, the President withdrew all public 
domain lands from location, settlement, and entry, 
pending classification. They can no longer be dis- 
posed of unless classified by the Department of the 
Interior as suitable for disposition (/5). A way 
should be found to provide economical administra- 
tion for parcels of public domain not reasonably 
consolidated. Many of them near to or adjoining 
major holdings of other public lands should prob- 
INTERMINGLED GRAZING DISTRICTS 
AND NATIONAL FORESTS 
SOUTH-CENTRAL MONTANA 
eR SCALE - MILES 
National Forest ° 25 
SS) Grazing District : FRET 
FicurE 41. 
Or 
