My first appointment, going back to Austin1—there were two people on the district, myself and the ranger, who were field-going personnel, and we had a million acres scattered a hundred miles in either direction on four different mountain ranges. So, you can gather that’s an impossible task. If you think someone’s looking after your public land—.

From there it just descended into worse situations every year, because the budget was always crunched. There were fewer personnel to do the fieldwork. Congress passed new laws, it seemed like every year, that we were supposed to comply with, but there weren’t field people to verify anything that was happening

So it was just like that for my whole career. The year-and-a-half I spent on the Ochoco,3 I was totally doing budget. We did it one way. And they changed their mind. And we did it a second way. And they changed their mind. And we did a third way. And it still doesn’t give the Forest Service the bottom line of functional monetary effectiveness. It’s all blown up into paperwork, rather than on-the-ground work.

You kind of get weaned at an early stage of trying to attack the grazing vagrancies that occur. In my career they occurred constantly. I couldn’t go to the field without finding something that needed action. And I’m sure that’s the way it is with every range con that deals in the West.

What really started the boomtown activity is that we did a surprise cow count at the ranchers’ gathering place way down on the South Hills.7 We just showed up there, 4 o’clock in the morning, and said, “We’d like to count your cows.” And we had a couple of state brand inspectors to sort out the brands and what not. I was working for Don Oman as one of his range conservationists, and actually I stayed back in an airplane with a pilot. And we went out and flew the area to try to count cows that had not been gathered.

Anyway, that was blown into a story by the ranchers that we had shown up with a paddy wagon, and we had a gunship in the air.

We had a law enforcement officer there who did have his sidearm on. So that was the “armed guard”—it was just blown up into that kind of a story.

The regional office didn’t ask us if that was true or not. They didn’t ask any of us what had actually happened. They just bought the story as it had been passed on by the ranchers.

We’d actually sat on the fence. I drove out to the site after I had made the flight. And I sat on the fence with the kids and the women and visited and everything seemed cool.

And then later they were just terrified because our law enforcement officer had a sidearm on, even through in the back of their pickups hangs their carbines visible.

That was pretty disappointing on behalf of all of us on the district that the regional office was so distant.

So, we go through all these millions of dollars preparing what Congress has directed the land management resource plans at millions of dollars of cost. And they’re supposed to be updated every ten years, but if you actually try to put in place what we say in those plans, you become the “deer in the headlights.” And that’s a direct quote from the people in the regional office.

Well, each permittee, when they sign their grazing permit, agrees to these same things. And because of the budget, which had come in for the future year, it indicated that there wasn’t money for range conservationists, or “range specialists,” as they changed the name to.

So, he wrote this uniform action guide and a letter to the permittees saying it’s up to you. You have to follow the guidelines. And if you don’t then I’ll have to impose these penalties.

It was as simple as that. And from that simple action on his part, he was at a “command performance”9 drafted back into Washington, DC, by Helen Chenoweth,10 the then congressman from Idaho. I don’t really know what they said or did to him, but he was very bitter, and we had no more range program that took action against the grazing permittees.11