In the mid-1950s, a new ranger on the Leadore District penned a scathing memo to the files after he discovered a permittee dumping salt blocks in the middle of the road: just testing out the new guy. In the late 1980s, I discovered, most permittees still placed salt blocks next to streams or watering troughs, on the theory that the cows wouldn't have to walk as far that way.

From Lewis and Clark Ate Lunch Here, a memoir in progress
by Louise Wagenknecht

After an excerpt from my book, White Poplar, Black Locust, appeared in this newsletter, several people wrote to ask me what I was working on next.

In true Gemini fashion, I find myself working on three manuscripts at once. The third memoir (working title: Lewis and Clark Ate Lunch Here) picks up in 1988, as I began to learn about the basin and range country of eastern Idaho near the Continental Divide.

Here's an excerpt from the manuscript, in which I try to figure out what's really been going on in Idaho's Lemhi River country for the past 78 years or so-a chronicle of public lands management all too familiar in the American West:

"In the winter, the world around Leadore settled in to a vast greyness. Color vanished from the valley. Snow blew horizontally down Highway 28 in front of the houses on the Forest Service compound, and the view out the big window in our living room offered no relief: the snow was white, the sagebrush was grey, the hills were tan, the trees on the mountains behind the hills were black under coats of snow. I began to understand why housewives in Leadore spent their afternoons crocheting comforters and baby clothes in violent shades of purple and pink and green and yellow, while watching talk shows and soap operas on their color televisions. It kept them from going totally bonkers in a colorless world."

"I was laid off from my range technician job in November, but no one objected if I walked over to the office at ten o'clock to chat and drink coffee and see what messages had accumulated in my computer inbox. When I discovered the old range allotment files, dating back to 1910, in the basement, and began dragging them out and reading them on the big table in the conference room, my boss's looks as she walked by the door told me that she thought I was crazy. But she didn't tell me to stop, so I kept going, unfolding the delicate old maps and turning the yellowed pages that Forest Service rangers had written and long- suffering clerks had typed during other endless winters. I was carried back into another world, where the rhythms of the seasons masked the issues of the decades."

"Each decade, it seemed, had its own set of problems. Before World War I, migrating flocks of domestic sheep, their herders innocent of grazing permits, entered the area every spring, driving local cattle ranchers, desperate to protect "their" grazing grounds, into the arms of the Forest Service. Even so, some ranchers angrily rejected the idea of paying 10 cents per month per cow to graze on the Forest, and declared that they would not abide by Forest Service rules, and would instead "take their cattle out onto the free range and herd them." From about 1914 to the early 1920s, the roaming livestock of homesteaders was a major issue for Forest Service rangers. Homesteaders were given "on-off permits", but it proved nearly impossible to control the amount of time the work horses and milk cows actually spent on the Forest. The problem went away when most of the homesteaders starved out, after the lead mines at Gilmore closed down in the depression of the 1920s."

"In the 1920s, Forest rangers spent much time nagging range permittees to place salt up on the high ridges, to get better distribution of cattle and consume the grass that was "going to waste" on the uplands. This nagging had about the same effect as telling a teenager to clean up his room. And like high school kids faced with a new substitute teacher, whenever a new ranger came, the permittees abandoned everything the previous ranger had cajoled them into doing. In the mid1 950s, a new ranger on the Leadore District penned a scathing memo to the files after he discovered a permittee dumping salt blocks in the middle of the road: just testing out the new guy. In the late 1980s, I discovered, most permittees still placed salt blocks next to streams or watering troughs, on the theory that the cows wouldn't have to walk as far that way."

"Sometimes I came upon the bleached skulls of horses on the hillsides, a reminder that one of the most persistent management problems, until the late 1940s, was the presence of bands of mares, each with a stallion, on the Forest. Unpermitted but not wild, their presence was, ironically, the result of the Remount Program, which allowed ranchers to obtain purebred stallions and keep them for breeding, if they would make the resulting offspring available for purchase by the Army. The stallions were mostly Morgans, American Saddlebreds, and Thoroughbreds - some of the latter were stakes winners. The ranchers got a guaranteed market for colts that met the Army's standards, and the half-bred mares upgraded the grade working stock of the area."

"By 1920 the Forest Service considered the ranges of the Lemhi country to be fully stocked, and did not look kindly on the extra horses. But for over twenty years more, they would struggle to remove them. As a last resort, horses were periodically rounded up, penned, their brands noted, and the owners notified by letter and public notice. The owners came and cursed and paid their fines, but somehow in a little while there were horses running on the ridgetops once again."

"This lovely game ended when the Army mechanized and the Remount Program was abandoned after World War II. Post-war prosperity completed the mechanization of farm work and road construction and logging. Teams of horses were almost obsolete, and only a few ranchers kept a team or two to feed cattle in the winter. The Forest officers woke up one day to find that another problem had Gone Away."

Someone once wrote that a great army never looks so invincible as on the morning of the battle that will defeat it. In the arid lands of the West, arithmetic is gnawing away the foundations of public lands ranching. Politicians are propping up the structure with subsidies while ignoring the larger economic forces that will bring the building crashing down. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Bet on arithmetic."

"Some problems solve themselves."