“That the people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands…”
A common thread among some state’s rights activists is that Nevada’s land mass should revert back to control of state government. Current public land management in Nevada is about 85 percent under federal control by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and, to a lesser degree, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Federally managed lands amount to the bulk of Nevada’s land mass, and these lands are designated for multiple uses – mining, grazing, energy development, recreation and so on.
It’s understandable there is debate over HOW these lands are managed, and there is a proposal in the Legislature for the state to usurp control from the feds. Through time, livestock numbers have diminished dramatically, and there’s evidence that the dire invasion of weeds, particularly cheatgrass, and the encroachment of pinyon juniper into sagebrush lands at lower elevations, can be best managed with smarter livestock grazing at a landscape level.
There are swaths of public lands that are dangerous cheatgrass monocultures with little major movement in sight to make landscape-level improvements.
But that says nothing about ownership.
While there are valid reasons for wanting more local control of lands, and certainly federal agencies can aim to work more collaboratively with locals on local issues, Nevada’s lands have never been state-controlled. This was covered already in the Reno Gazette-Journal, but the current legislation has seen a rehashing of already discredited beliefs.
Nevada as a territory evolved into federal control because of its arid nature and its lack of population. A history of public lands in Nevada, below, reasonably spells how this process evolved.
Nevada, like other western states, is a public land state; that is much of our land is owned and managed by public agencies. Only about thirteen percent of Nevada’s land is in private ownership, less than any other state. The reasons for this lie, for the most part, in the past.
The State had never seen white men until the late 1700’s, when a few Spanish explorers are thought to have penetrated the edges of the area. The earliest known exploration by Anglo-Americans was made by a party led by Jedediah Smith as they passed through the area on a journey from southern California to the Great Salt Lake in 1826. No substantial numbers of pioneers reached Nevada until the California gold rush in 1849 and, later, the discovery of gold and silver on the Comstock in 1859. Yet Nevada became a separate territory in 1861 and a state in 1864. At the time of statehood Nevada had a population of only about 30,000 persons, most of whom lived in the northwestern portion of the state. The remainder of the state was sparsely settled and virtually unexplored.
This rapid move to statehood and sparse population meant that very little land had been claimed for private ownership at the time of statehood. Most of the land was
unappropriated public domain, vast stretches of sagebrush desert and rugged mountains. It appears that the disposition of these open lands was not a controversial issue at the time of statehood. The state accepted from Congress the stipulation in its enabling act that “the Constitutional Convention must disclaim all rights to unappropriated public land in Nevada.” The state constitution accordingly ordained: “That the people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands . . . ” This provision set the stage for years of controversy, continuing to the present day.In the years that followed, the federal government shifted parts of the public domain to state and private ownership under a variety of programs. The state qualified for several land grants upon statehood, including primarily the grant of the 16th and 36th sections for the support of the public schools. Even here, however, the state’s arid climate and sparse population worked to decrease the acreage received. There was insufficient population pressure to drive any significant number of people out onto scattered and hard-to-find desert parcels. In the late 1870’s Nevada approached Congress with a request to exchange the 3.9 million acre school land grant of 16th and 36th sections in each township for a grant of lands to be selected by the state. The state intended to select lands in the river valleys and near the existing population centers, where there would be interest in acquisition and settlement. In 1880 Congress agreed and passed the Exchange Act of 1880, specifying that the 3.9 million acres (less 63,249 acres of land already patented) could be exchanged for two million acres of land to be selected by the State. The State thus consented to a reduction of almost half its grant lands. These grant lands were subsequently virtually all patented to private owners.
Federal lands were also available directly to the public. Mining claims could be patented. Soldiers were often paid in scrip that could be exchanged for land. There were a succession of homestead and desert entry acts that made lands available for farms. However, due to the arid climate, relatively few lands were transferred to private ownership through these mechanisms.
Many lands in river valleys that might have qualified as farmsteads had already been secured as state grant selections. In order to encourage the construction of railroads across the nation, the federal government offered “checkerboard” land grants to railroad companies, consisting of alternate sections for twenty miles on each side of the railroad right-of-way. This checkerboard land ownership pattern, established in the 1870’s, still stretches across the northern portion of the state in a broad band on each side of the Southern Pacific Railroad. In other states, the alternate sections moved into private ownership as time passed and the state developed. However, in Nevada, arid conditions, topography, soils, sparse population and other factors contributed to the lack of demand for the alternate sections. Some of the five million acres granted to the railroad have been sold to other private parties (the railroad retains about 3.5 million acres today), but the lands retained by the federal government still remain, for the most part, federal lands today.
