Blue Country Hurt: Overgrazing, Drought, and Flood (PDF)

3 Blue Country Hurt Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Overgrazing, Drought, and Flood During the severe drought which began in ab...

3 Blue Country Hurt Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Overgrazing, Drought, and Flood During the severe drought which began in about 1899 and lasted until about 1903... water dried up and cattle died in great numbers... and all ranchers took a great loss.... [T]here was no way to protect your range from over grazing by others, consequently there was no effort made on the part of the rancher to reduce numbers. A low estimate would be 15 cattle [then] to 1 now (1964).... We all had too many cattle on the range back in those days. There was no incentive to try and save forage, you couldn’t, other cattle moved in on you, consequently the range, especially around permanent waters, was abused.... In addition to the large number of cattle on the range at the turn of the century there were also thousands of goats and large numbers of horses and wild burros. On our particular range there were nine different goat outfits. Most of the goats were gone by 1910 but the scars they made are still here. It was in those early years that the country was hurt [italics in original]. FRED FRITZ JR., Down on the Blue 224) IN THE LAST DECADES of the nineteenth century, a great cattle boom swept out of Texas and over the American West. It was fueled by a number of converging factors: open range with free access to grazing; the elimination of the buffalo and the Indian threat; the extension of railroads to ship cattle to market; and ample finance capital in the eastern U.S. and Great Britain, which in seeking profits allowed ranchers to vastly enlarge their herds. The speculative boom crested in the early 1880s in Texas and the mid-1880s in Arizona. Crashes ensued: overstocking combined with drought or severe winter led to depressed prices as cattlemen were forced to sell on glutted markets. A long-term result of the cattle boom and bust was the gradual closing of the open range and the movement to a more modern form of ranching, one that fenced pastures and provided feed for animals whose numbers were regulated by owner or government to protect land from overstocking. Before this transformation occurred, however, there was significant ecological damage (Abruzzi 1995; Bahre and Shelton 1996; Bentley 1898:5–14; Haskett 1935:25–42; Jordan 1975:238–239; Sayre 1999, 2002:28–54; Sheridan 1995:140–143; Wagoner 1952:45–55; Webb 1931:227–244). The Blue passed through the same process of open land; cattle boom; overstock; drought; price crashes; environmental damage; and transition to a new, more managed form of ranching. Yet its experiences were distinctive in certain ways. The sequence of events started later on the Blue than in most of Arizona—and would continue longer. When drought and crash occurred on the overstocked ranges of southern Arizona, cattle raising was just beginning on the Blue in 1885. None of the personal histories mentions drought at that time; if rainfall was down, it apparently did not affect early ranching there. When the first settlers arrived, grass appeared to be abundant along the Blue River and the surrounding mountains. According to [Aldo] Leopold, “All the old settlers agree that the bottoms of the Blue River, at the time of settlement in about 1885, were stirrup high in gramma grass, and covered with groves of mixed hardwoods and pine, the banks were lined with willows and abundant with trout.” (USDA 1983b, McDonough) Nor is there mention of drought or depression in the 1890s when other parts of Arizona suffered these chronic problems. Toles Cosper made his first, large, profitable sale in 1898. And during the 1890s “many cattle were brought into the country,” perhaps in response to bad conditions in other EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY AN: 1197193 ; Jack Stauder.; The Blue and the Green : A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community Account: s0000075.main.ehost 31 parts of Arizona (Fritz 1978:68). Too many cattle would be brought in. Like ranchers elsewhere in the Southwest, cattlemen on the Blue initially did not fully comprehend the limits of the land or the problem of overstocking and overgrazing. Naturally, they wanted to prosper in the cattle market and provide a good living for their families. But even if they had been restrained in their goals and possessed a knowledge of their environment that could only be learned through hard experience over time, the early ranchers would still have had difficulty in warding off the overstocking and destruction that occurred on the Blue as it did elsewhere. Just as it still occurs in some situations in the world, ecological damage proceeded from a lack of property rights. This was not in cattle, where property rights were enforced with vigilante justice, but lack of property rights in land—or rather, in enough land. Men like Toles Cosper, Hugh McKeen and Fred Fritz came to what they considered wilderness and “squatted” there, as they put it, in full confidence that they had a right to the land they settled on. They were not philosophers but probably would have agreed with John Locke, who wrote in Two Treatises of Government in 1689 that every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.” (Locke 1993:128) The settlers who came to the Blue mixed their labor with nature, with the wild land they found, and believed they owned the product of their labor and whatever lands they had occupied and developed. This outlook already had a long history in America, and had been legally promoted and encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, the main federal law governing the creation of property rights out of the vast public domain of western America. Passed by the Republicans after the secession of the southern states, the Homestead Act embodied what has been called the “Jeffersonian vision” of an agrarian America: that the country should be composed predominantly of small farms owned by the families that worked on them. This vision was opposed to large landholdings, as existed notably in the slave South, which were seen as pernicious to republican virtue and democratic government. “A nation in which each family owned a plot of land—large enough to subsist on but not so large as to give the landowner undue power or influence—would, [Jefferson] hoped, remain virtuous and free” (Hess 1992:65). Lincoln and the “free-soil” Republicans hoped the same. To implement this vision, the Homestead Act offered a quarter section of public land (160 acres) at virtually no cost to those who would settle on it and “improve” it over a five-year period. The Homestead Act accomplished its purpose wherever rainfall or irrigation could support farming. But west of the 100th meridian of the U.S—a line running north to south approximately through the middle of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas—rainfall for farming was inadequate (except in the Pacific Northwest), and possibilities for irrigation were limited. Generous and well intentioned, the idea behind the Homestead Act failed to correspond to the ecological reality of much of the American West. John Wesley Powell, the famed explorer of the Southwest, warned as early as 1878 in a report to the Interior Department that the methods of land distribution and agriculture prevailing in the eastern U.S. would not work in the dry West. Land in the West was generally suitable only for grazing, and quarter sections of 160 acres were not the way to parcel out the land for grazing. Holdings must be much bigger, 2,500 acres or more, to support a single ranching family. Powell’s warning, however, was something the government and politicians back East were either unable to comprehend or unwilling to accept. They preferred to view the West as a fertile garden (Shabecoff 1993:62–63). Therefore, under the Homestead Act—its restrictions as well as its opportunities—the first pioneers on the Blue established property rights to what became their homes and later their privately “patented” quarter sections—none larger. Invariably, the 160-acre section chosen was one with water, in the river bottom or along a tributary creek. Land without water was useless. They could farm on the quarter section, and did, but by itself it was too little land for serious cattle raising. As Powell predicted, many settlers of the West turned to livestock as their best alternative for making a living, and even those farming acquired some cattle, as we have seen on the Blue. And if EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 32 the settlers did not own enough land to graze their cattle, this situation, at least at first, posed no problem. After all, the public domain around them was theirs to use—for free. As land without permanent water was useless for homesteading, the abundant pastures of the uplands remained “open range.” The settlers along the river had unimpeded usufruct of the unoccupied grazing lands around them, and it was theirs in the sense that the land was everybody’s. In the tradition of English law, it was a “commons.” My father filed on the place that is known as the Hale Place today. The first summer we lived in tents. Dad planted a garden and planted the field in corn.... The field was not fenced. We kept the cattle out in the daytime and prayed they would not destroy the crop at night. In those days, there were no fences—it was all open range. I suppose the ranchers had a certain place they tried to keep their herds in, but they could roam at will. Consequently, everyone’s cattle were mixed. (Katie Hale Barnes, Down on the Blue 145) There was open range and nobody was fenced and everybody just let their cattle run. The cattle from all ranches ran together. Everybody worked together in the fall to gather their cattle and get them off to the railroad in Magdalena, NM. They rounded them up and sold them once a year. (Grace Johnson, Down on the Blue 63) The range was open not just to the cattle of the people settled on the Blue, but also to the cattle of neighboring settlements. People who lived in Alpine and Nutrioso in Arizona, and in Luna and across the Blue Range in New Mexico, would drive their herds into the Blue country to winter them. Such sharing of the land could be seen as a virtue. An old-timer muses, the Blue River country was a source of security for winter range for all who had a small bunch of cattle. Those people had no other way to put them through the winter. I have often thought, “What good neighbors we had in the Blue country.” They had that old American spirit that we were free to use that country as well as they. That was the freedom we had in this U.S. in those days. Now you never see any such freedom. In fact, I can’t see any freedom any place, it is all dictatorship on everything. If we have a milk cow we have to keep her in the corral. (Ben R. Tenney, Down on the Blue 55) What Mr. Tenney does not see, or say, however, is that the practice of an open range, free to all, would eventually be untenable on the Blue as elsewhere on the public lands of the West, as experience proved. The quotation from Fred Fritz Jr. at the beginning of this chapter shows that, at least in retrospect, some ranchers did understand the predicament of “free” land. Through its policies, the U.S. government had created a situation that in the environmental literature of today is called “the tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968:1243–48). Common use leads to over-use and eventually environmental degradation. The paradigm is as follows. The first settlers to homestead the federal range find plenty of grass to feed their livestock. As more settlers arrive, however, livestock numbers on the open range grow to exceed the land’s carrying capacity—the amount of livestock that can graze it without damaging future capacity. This overgrazing is predictable if no system exists to regulate the use of the range. In the absence of private ownership of the land, there is no incentive to limit one’s own stock grazing. If you do so, then someone else’s stock will take the available grass, and your restraint will have been for nothing. So your incentive is to graze the land first and completely with as many livestock as possible. There is no incentive to conserve the “free” resource. If each rancher follows this incentive, the result is severe overgrazing. On the other hand, if one did own the land, it would be in one’s long-term interest not to overgraze it but to protect its value and conserve grass for future use. Government policy, however, had eliminated this incentive for the Western ranchers who depended on the public domain for pasture they were not allowed to buy or otherwise acquire as their own property. Ironically, in striving to promote the ascendency of small, family farming and ranching in the arid West, the government created conditions that would frustrate it. Ideologically blinded by the homestead myth and the Jeffersonian vision of America, the federal government in effect promoted not only overgrazing but inevitable conflict over water and forage among its citizens on the frontiers of “free” land. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 33 DROUGHT AND FLOOD By 1900, Blue country was as full of livestock and people as it would ever be. The 245 people counted in the census that year living above the Fritz ranch, plus the number living lower on the Blue, would put the population at about 300—the same estimate an old cowman later gave to Aldo Leopold (Leopold 1921a:270). More than forty ranches or farms lined the Blue valley, and homesteaders were still arriving. No one could accurately estimate the number of livestock there at the time, but all agree the number was extravagantly high compared to later standards. The four biggest outfits had together upward of 10,000 cattle by some estimates, but many others on the Blue and from outside the Blue also ran cattle there. A Forest Service Agent in 1905 gave an estimate of 15,000 cattle, 1,500 horses and 35,000 goats on the lower Blue alone (Hunt 1905:7)! A later Forest Supervisor would comment, “The abundance of grasses was very much over estimated as to carrying capacity. The Blue River and surrounding area was stocked heavily” (USDA, 1983b, McDonough). James Cosper, a son of Toles, concurs: “It doesn’t seem reasonable, but it seems that there was as much grass in those days when it was carrying that many cattle as there is now. They just trampled it out, so many cattle, they just killed the grass out for several years” (Cosper 1982:136). As before in the West, overstocking, when combined with drought, brought disaster. The five years 1899 through 1904 saw precipitation well below normal—“a most severe drought” (Fritz 1978:68; Bahre 1996:2). The damage done to the upland pastures by overgrazing in these conditions, while undocumented, can be imagined. During the late 1890s and around 1900 a drought hit the country and lasted until the feed on the winter range around Springerville and St. John’s were in bad shape. Some of the cattlemen began throwing large herds of cattle into the Blue River. As the drought continued, more cattle were thrown into Blue River until it was heavily grazed. A rancher named Wall was reported to have thrown hundreds of head of cattle into Bush Creek, depleting the range until many of them died, and others had to be removed to prevent a complete loss from starvation. (Pioneer Meeting: n.d.) Cattle that survived concentrated on the river bottom near the remaining water. Competition arose over this prime land and over the water itself. Cattle raisers relied more on growing feed for their stock, which could be done only on irrigated fields along the river bottom. Serious conflict often erupted over poorly defined land and water rights. With the coming of feed raising on Blue River, fences became a necessity, which at first, was a bone of contention for the range riders, that brought about range feuds, quarrels, and killings, over boundary lines, cut fences, and water holes, and furnished what some of them took as an excuse to “shoot out” many other disagreements. (Cosper 1940:9) Several such killings occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century—with no one brought to justice. In addition to cattle overgrazing there was goat overgrazing. And in addition to grazing, there was large-scale timber cutting to serve the mines downstream around Clifton. How these factors contributed to erosion are more fully discussed in the next chapter. The climax to disaster was the floods. Heavy rains replaced drought conditions, and a series of floods occurred in December 1904 and January 1905 and again in December 1905. James (“Little Jim”) Cosper, and his father Toles were in Clifton not long before Christmas 1904, delivering cattle and buying groceries and “Christmas things,” when it started raining. They loaded their mules and headed towards the Blue overland, camping because the San Francisco River had flooded out the wagon road. When they reached Pigeon Creek, normally a small stream, it was an uncrossable river. We walked on down toward the mouth of the canyon and looked off in the Blue, and you could see lots of cottonwood trees and sycamore and all kinds of trees—great big old trees—going down end over end. There was a lot of timber on this creek then. We stayed there three days. It rained day and night. [After two more EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 34 days walking and camping out] the next day we packed up and went into the [Cosper] ranch. It didn’t look like the same place, at all. Out in front of the creek was a big bottom with timber on it—a pretty stream down there. There wasn’t a tree left on that flat; it took them all. Dad had some big corrals there—there was no sign of a corral or nothing.... Q: That changed the character of Blue River forever, I guess? A: Yes, it did. It will never be the same again. It was a good road all the way down there.... My dad would hook up the buggy and leave the ranch up there and trot down to Clifton in forty-five minutes or an hour. The only place you slowed down was going off the bank, crossing that creek channel. (Cosper 1982:139–40) The wagon road from Clifton up the San Francisco and Blue rivers, which connected all the Blue watershed and went as far as Alpine and Luna, was wiped out. It was rebuilt during the summer but again destroyed by the floods of December 1905. It was never subsequently rebuilt. A report by W.W.R. Hunt, the Forest Service agent who surveyed the area right after the December 1905 flood, says that the earlier floods destroyed “75% of the little farms along the San Francisco and the Blue.” They washed away the northern end of the town of Clifton, and damaged the plant of the Arizona Copper Company. But the flood of December 1905 was worse and “completed the ruin of the agricultural lands along the rivers” (Hunt: 1905:5). Floods recurred in 1906 and 1907. Fred Fritz Jr. recounts that the flood of 1906 washed the barns away and came up to the door of Uncle Dick and Aunt Theresa’s house. They became disgusted and father bought their interest in the ranch and they moved back to Fredericksburg with their five children.... After the high floods of 1905–06 and 07, many people left Blue River. Many of the small farms were washed away. The Blue River Road, north and south in Eastern Arizona between Safford and Duncan Valleys to Alpine and Springerville, was gone. The post office at Benton... closed. Mr. Balke was the postmaster.... After the big floods, the Balke and McKeen families moved to Alma, New Mexico and the school at Benton ceased to exist. Also in those early days there was a post office, store, saloon and school at the mouth of the Blue. The post office was called Boyles. Today, no one lives there. (Fritz 1978:68, 71) The next large flood hit the area in 1916, with others intermittently up to the present. Like droughts, floods would be a continuing, if sporadic, feature of life on the Blue. In addition to erosion and flooding, another process, less dramatic and unnoticed at the time, began to alter the Blue. In fact, the development occurred widely over the Southwest. Overgrazing led to gradual displacement of grasses by piñon, juniper, and other woody species. The process was reinforced by the Forest Service’s historic program of fire suppression—now understood to be badly misguided—which allowed woody species to spread unchecked at the expense of open grassland (Abruzzi 1995:88; Bahre 1991:118–120; Herbel 1986:8–9; Hirt 1989:178; Leopold 1924; Wood 1988:34). Three consequences ensued. First, the grazing potential of the land was reduced. Second, without grassy cover to hold it back, heavy rain could erode the soil and flow more swiftly into the canyons, increasing the incidence and damage of floods. But third, the expansion of woody species also meant that rainwater that did penetrate the soil would more likely be sucked up by the trees and transpired, rather than left to percolate slowly towards the river. So, a diminishment of the normal flow of the Blue occurred over time, together with an increase in the ferocity of floods. The settlers eventually noticed these signs. Many people who grew up on the Blue remember it running more water. Grace Johnson, who moved to the Blue in 1913 when she was eighteen years old, remembered in 1986, there used to be a lot more water in the Blue than there is now. There was enough water that at one time the miners in Clifton floated their logs down the river to Clifton from the Blue. They cut the logs up above the Box and floated them clear to Clifton. Not only was there more water, but it wasn’t so rocky. There are a lot more boulders now. There used to be lots more land. Willows grew along the banks, not so much any cottonwoods and big trees the way it is now.... I guess that’s what happened to the water. In fact it dries up sometimes in the summer lots of places. It didn’t used to ever, ever do that. We used to have plenty of water in the ditches for our cattle, for our farming, and for everything. We just took the irrigation water into the ditches out of the river.... There used to be lots of ranches on Blue River; good sized ranches with quite a few cattle. There used to EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 35 be lots more land. Now the floods have taken all the dirt away until it’s just a rocky boulder bed. There were lots of fields and lots of orchards. (Down on the Blue 62–63) EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 36