The Mountains Closed: Stockmen Fight the Cascade Forest Reserve
Eastern Washington's cattle and sheep men warn that locking up the Cascades as a federal forest reserve would beggar every valley town — and train their anger on the Yakama Reservation boundary, which they want opened to their herds.
The setting aside of that immense area of the Cascade range which divides the State of Washington as a forest reserve will work great hardship upon our live-stock industry, as it will, if the statute is enforced, deprive hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle of their summer grazing ground. The natural result of this exclusion will be the wholesale emigration of the flocks and droves to other parts. British Columbia will welcome most of them to her verdant hillsides, for her statesmen have not yet reserved them as a playground for the gilded sports and scions of degenerate aristocracy.
This is one of the gravest questions that has ever confronted the people of Eastern Washington. The prosperity of the country largely depends upon our live-stock interests. The income of the merchants of our towns will be greatly curtailed, the value of our valleys as winter feeding grounds will be destroyed, the immense revenue received from feeding and pasturing will be gone, and the stacks of alfalfa will stand unconsumed the winter through. The army of herders, packers, shearers, drivers and other employees who now throw their money so freely upon our counters of trade will be only a memory. No more will our railroads busy themselves with the wool crop, nor will they haul long trains of stock to the far east and to the coast out of our valleys. In short, the whole thing will settle as a blight upon every class.
We see the papers of the Sound are stirred to action in the matter and are making quite a hubbub because the development of mining interests in the reserved territory is suspended. We are glad to see them at it, and believe once their attention is called to it they will champion equally as vigorously the rights of the stockmen.
We have already a part of the Cascades blocked out in the Yakima reservation, which is forbidden ground to our stockmen, the frontier of which is zealously guarded by Indian riders, jealous lest their herds of worthless cayuses be robbed of a blade of grass. Then there is the government reserve which takes in Mt. Rainier, and stretching over the heart of the range of Kittitas and Upper Yakima counties. While stockmen have not yet been barred out, the power of the law may be brought into play at any time. At the beck of the rod and gun clubs the stock may be driven out.
The mountain ranges of this country should be ever open to stock. Let the timber be reserved for future generations, but give the perpetual right to the shepherd and the cattleman to graze their herds upon the grasses that Nature has so providently and generously provided for that purpose.
“The mountain ranges of this country should be ever open to stock. Let the timber be reserved for future generations, but give the perpetual right to the shepherd and the cattleman to graze their herds upon the grasses that Nature has so providently and generously provided.”
This is the original Northwest public-lands fight: ranchers, miners and boosters against federal reservation of the mountains, argued in exactly the terms we still use — 'the economy will collapse' versus 'save the timber for future generations.' The editorial also shows plainly how the Yakama were cast as an obstacle to be removed: the reservation is called 'forbidden ground' whose boundary ought to be opened to stock, its people mocked in the casual racism of the day. That same land-and-treaty argument is still being litigated in Yakima today.
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