The assault on public lands has a long, sad history with no end in sight.

So, under pressure from hundreds of thousands of Americans, Utah’s land-grabbing Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his proposal to put the nation’s public domain up for sale. Much justifiable celebration has ensued. Largely lost in the outcry over his provision in the Big Beautiful Bill Act was an announcement by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins: The Department of Agriculture is rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule that has prohibited road construction and timbering on 58.5 million acres of national forest.

Rollins brought her vast experience with federal lands from her home in Texas to Washington, D.C., where she served as a minor functionary in the first Trump administration and later as the co-founder of a D.C. lobbying group, America First Policy Institute. What she knows about the issues surrounding federal land use could be comfortably contained in a thimble. 

Her order was a canny political move, since it’s likely to split the constituency that voiced outrage over the outright sale of federal land. A substantial part of that opposition came from users of ATVs, snowmobiles and other vehicles designed to move people into the backcountry with minimal sweat. Many will be happy to hear a huge swath of federal land is now open to motor vehicles.

Even more will be alarmed. Backpackers and other wilderness aficionados prefer their forests roadless. So do many big game hunters, since elk, mule deer and bighorn sheep shy away from roads, even the seldom-used two-tracks that wind their way through the public domain. The first step in planning a big-game hunt on federal land is to spread out a map and look for the places the roads don’t go — those are the places big game is likely to be found, especially after the opening morning of the season.

I mention this proposal for a couple of reasons. First, if it isn’t quickly rescinded, it will have dire consequences for those of us who prefer to maintain some places only a horse or boot leather can take us. Over decades of debate, we’ve struck a balance between motorized access on national forests and the unique character of true backcountry. I’m not surprised that a president whose idea of wilderness is the rough on a golf course appointed a woman who comes from one of the most fenced-in, jealously guarded, privately held states in the nation to oversee a system of federal lands that is a powerful symbol of freedom for tens of millions of Americans. Not surprised, just deeply disappointed. 

The second reason I raise this matter is to consider the way it fits in the fight over federal land, a fight that started almost as soon as Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, was set aside in 1872. In the years that followed that unprecedented action, powerful economic interests in the West started a campaign to get control of the park, maneuvering to build a rail line in Montana from Gardiner to Cooke City, slicing off the northern and western edges of the park in the process. One of the park’s first superintendents, Robert E. Carpenter, was fired when his part in the scheme came to light.

In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison created America’s first forest reserve, a huge tract of high-country timber east of Yellowstone Park that would eventually become the Shoshone National Forest. At first, residents ignored the regulations intended to protect timber, pasture and watersheds from senseless abuse. Then, as the regulations were enforced, the locals pressed their representatives in Washington, D.C., for relief. Several congressmen from the West took up that cause, which was eventually adopted by Speaker of the House Joe Cannon of Illinois.

In 1907, the western anti-forest coalition managed to attach an amendment to a large agriculture appropriations bill. It appropriated $125,000 for the Forest Service, provided: “that hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any additions be made to one heretofore created within the limits of the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming, except by Act of Congress.” The identities of the authors of this provision are lost in the minutiae of congressional records, but the list of states it was supposed to protect from President Teddy Roosevelt’s ongoing campaign to establish national forests tells us where they lived.

While this contest was simmering in Washington, westerners fought federal authority on the ground. In 1906, rancher Fred Light turned 500 head of cattle loose on the Holy Cross Forest Reserve in Colorado without a permit from the Forest Service. The resulting legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, funded by a special appropriation from the Colorado Legislature. A similar case in California also made its way to the Supreme Court. The ranchers lost their bid to undermine Forest Service regulations — the court supported congressional authority to establish federal reserves and appoint officials to control the ways they’re used.

Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, stockgrowers and settlers near the public domain continued to flout regulations and dodge limited enforcement, and the damage to federal land deepened and widened. In 1923, Aldo Leopold, then an assistant Forest Service supervisor in the department’s Southwest region, reported that, on the forests in his district, “overgrazing is responsible for much more abnormal erosion than all other causes combined.” 

The situation worsened as the region descended into the droughts of the 1930s, which led conservation-minded legislators to impose some sort of reasonable management on federal lands, especially the parts of the public domain that were neither part of the national systems of parks and forests nor owned by private interests. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 allowed the secretary of the interior to organize “grazing districts” on those orphan federal lands, issue permits to control grazing and charge a fee for those permits. Oddly enough, the sponsor of the law, Congressman Edward Taylor of Colorado, was an opponent of federal controls and hoped to give locals control over the new federal grazing bureau.

One of the most entrenched opponents of the Taylor Grazing Act was Pat McCarran, U.S. senator from Nevada. When the act took effect, McCarran set about undermining the new federal Grazing Service. He set standards for the election of local advisory boards that favored the biggest ranchers; he made sure the boards could set grazing fees well below prevailing market prices; he pushed regulatory loopholes that favored ranches controlled by banks and he pressed board members to buy their grazing districts outright. Over the next 20 years, he attacked Grazing Service employees for alleged abuses of authority and fought proposals to increase grazing fees. He was his generation’s leader in a war against federal land that was already 50 years old. 

After World War II, U.S. Sen. Ed Robertson from Wyoming took up the cause, introducing a bill that would have turned over federal grazing lands to the states in which they were found and holding extensive “investigative hearings” across the West to root out instances of Bureau of Land Management (formerly the Grazing Services) employees abusing their authority. He pressured the Department of Agriculture to maintain unsustainable stocking rates for sheep and cattle on national forests and helped strangle BLM efforts by slashing the agency’s budget. Other members of Congress championed laws that expanded assistance to permittees grazing public land and limited BLM and Forest Service professionals’ authority to regulate grazing. Frank Barrett, a Wyoming senator, introduced a bill that would have allowed permittees to sell their permits. Thankfully, it failed. At the same time, timber harvests on federal land expanded drastically, with no attention given to restrictions explicit in the federal laws that were supposed to control the Forest Service. 

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the American public at large reacted to the longstanding hegemony local interests had exercised over federal lands. The Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and other federal laws sought to protect amenities the nation at large valued, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 kept BLM lands in federal hands while mandating management that considered “the long-term needs of future generations for natural scenic, scientific and historical values” as well as “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish.” All of this was to be done “without permanent impairments of the land and the quality of the environment.”

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act was a glove in the face of the traditional masters of the public domain, and it elicited a response that came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, yet another attempt to cede federal land to the states. Prominent in the movement at that moment were candidate Ronald Reagan and Orrin Hatch, U.S. senator from Utah.

This brings us into the realm of living memory. Following the Sagebrush Rebellion, Cliven Bundy and his son, Ammon, dared the federal government to enforce its regulations concerning the use of public land. Ammon was found not guilty of occupying a national wildlife refuge at gunpoint, and, after 10 years, Cliven is still grazing his stock illegally on BLM land. 

And now comes Mike Lee at the head of the most recent insurgent action in a fight that has stretched on for 140 years. Should anyone mistake his intentions after his land sale provision was taken off the table, he said that he “continues to believe the federal government owns far too much land — land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation. Massive swaths of the West are being locked away from the people who live there.” He promised to continue his efforts to “put underutilized federal land to work for American families.” We have a century of abuse of the public domain by a tiny minority of people to help us define what he means by “work” and “American families.” 

Forcing Lee and his cronies to back down was a signal victory, well worth celebrating. So find a friend, face your favorite corner of public land, the place that always brings a smile to your face and raise a libation to success. Then get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow morning, they’ll be at it again.