homes on the range: COOPERATIVE CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE ON CALIFORNIA'S PRIVATELY OWNED HARDWOOD RANGELANDS

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Alagona, Peter S

RANGE IMPROVEMENT

BETWEEN THE BEGINNING of the Spanish Mission Era, in 1769, and the end of the Progressive Era, around 1920, California's hardwood rangelands underwent dramatic ecological changes. Native American land use practices, including periodic burning and acorn collection, all but disappeared, exotic annual forage plants replaced native perennial bunchgrasses, domestic livestock flourished, and feral ungulates reworked the soil in their endless search for food. In the two frenzied decades that followed the Gold Rush of 1849, the landscape changed even further. A series of booms and busts in the cattle industry left large areas of California's rangelands degraded, and by the 1870s the belief in limitless resources had given way to a sense of inexorable decline.9

When environmental historians write about the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they often focus on the creation of public lands and new federal agencies to manage them. Yet, between 1870 and 1920 a new geography of rural land tenure took shape in California that redefined both public and private space. Before 1870 most cattlemen and shepherds moved their livestock on a seasonal cycle, spending winter in the valley grasslands, spring and fall in the foothill woodlands, and summer in the high elevation coniferous forests and alpine meadows. During the 1870s and 1880s, however, a few powerful agribusiness corporations based in San Francisco used new transportation networks, barbed wire, and laws favoring crops over cattle to consolidate their control over the state's most fertile agricultural valleys.10 In the 18905, the federal government squeezed the livestock industry even further when it established more than 30 million acres of new national parks and forest reservations in the Sierra Nevada, Coast, Transverse, Peninsular, and Cascades mountain ranges.

Nineteenth-century government surveyors imposed a Cartesian grid on the fluid and wild terrain of the American West, dividing the region into square sections and townships with no apparent relation to the physical landscape. A less well-known chapter in this story unfolded decades later, during the Progressive Era, when the federal government used these same maps to establish the boundaries of its new forest reservations. The reservations were created mainly to conserve timber and water, two resources that occur together in California at higher elevations where plentiful winter snowfall nourishes stout coniferous forests. The hardwood rangelands fall below the conifer belt, in a space characterized by long summer droughts, brushy slopes, and slow-growing broadleaved trees. When it came time to reserve and purchase land for the new forest reservations, federal officials used the biogeographic boundary zone dividing the upper elevation coniferous forests from the lower elevation woodlands as a rough guide. The hardwood rangelands fell outside the borders of the forest reservations, and today more than three quarters remain in private ownership.11