Come and visit “your public lands”! That sounds great, where is mine? What do you mean, I don’t have any? Lots of history and confusion have preceded the misconception of “your public lands.” I was thinking this is a good time to look at what we think we have, but don’t. When we look at world history over the last 6,000 years, what is one common factor involving man around the entire world? Simply put, it has been the continuing battle over who controls land and its resources.
Here in the good old U. S. of A., we can see the land issue starting in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The first drafts used the words “Pursuit of Land.” The word Happiness was later used because it was broader while including the happiness in having one’s own land. With the Declaration of Independence, the Colonies were declaring themselves sovereign independent states/countries. As such, seven states sought to expand their land base over the previous unappropriated “Crown Lands” west of the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River and north to Canada. That is a large land base for only seven states. The population of all 13 colony/states combined then was 2.5 million. That is less than half the population of Colorado today. That raised a big concern with the six smaller states; if there could ever be a unified Confederation of Sovereign States, with the seven having control over so much more land and resources. The effort to establish the Articles of Confederation was finally resolved and agreed to, when the Congress passed a resolution whereby the now-larger states would cede to the Congress parts of their new claimed lands, and the Congress would create new states from those lands, all with full equal sovereign rights and controls along with the 13. That is a story of its own. The interesting part of this whole scenario is that the new politicians in those days actually followed through with the commitments they had agreed to. Without that unity, commitment and follow through, the revolution would have collapsed, all due to the age-old battle of control over land and resources.
Jumping forward about 80 years to 1860, a lot of change had taken place. A new Constitution had been ratified, after considerable wrangling and guaranteed addition of the first 10 Amendments referred to as the Bill of Rights. Right in the First Article section 8, it dealt with what lands the new general/federal government was being permitted to have control over. As agreed to earlier in the Continental Congress, new states had been created out of the previous crown lands that the seven larger states ceded for that purpose. On behalf of and for the Congress of States, new territories had been acquired for the purpose of creating even more unified equally sovereign states, complete to the western coast. These new territories were essentially held in trust for the people/public to claim and occupy to form new states from. The gold rushes were one of the claiming events to help populate the territories. Events of the 1860s delayed the creation of many new states out of the new territories. Finally in March of 1875, the State Enabling Act to create and admit the State of Colorado into the Union on an equal footing with the original states was enacted and on Aug. 1 of 1876 the admission was granted by Proclamation 230 signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.
The Enabling Act of Colorado defined the exterior boundaries for the state to be removed out of the territory and into the Union “upon an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatsoever.” At that time, the state was sparsely populated and much of the territorial public land had not been claimed and settled upon, and thus no longer open for public settlement. Section 4 of the Enabling Act stated, “the people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.” This was so the federal government could sell and dispose of the territorial land, with a clear deed, on behalf of and for the State, making it complete in its control of all the lands within its boundaries.
Well, that never happened. By 1976, the eastern-controlled Congress enacted the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), where it declared that the “Public Lands” would “be retained in Federal Ownership.” Today, that amounts to 46 percent of all the lands and resources in the 11 contiguous western states that is owned/controlled by the federal government operating as a quasi “federal state” within the boundaries of the constitutional states, and acting under its own laws and regulations. The fears of 1776 with large land-owning states overpowering the smaller have now been realized, even worse, with a federal body that is not authorized to own/control any open “public” land within a state, yet now controlling the most valuable portions. So what is “public land”? Simply put, it is “federal territory land” within a state. Here we have history repeating itself in the age-old battle of “power and control” between people over land and resources. Constitutional compliance has been totally ignored as that requires “voluntary compliance” by a “moral and religious people,” according to John Adams. Well, that explains a lot.
Dexter Gill is a retired forest manager who worked for private industry, three Western state forestry agencies, and the Navajo Nation forestry department. He writes from Lewis, Colo.
