Change comes slowly to Escalante country

In the BLM’s showcase monument, local grudges and national politics create a nasty quagmire

by Michelle Nijhuis
High Country News


GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — Kate Cannon looks like she was born to work here. The spacious deputy superintendent’s office, the trim Park Service uniform, the low-watt glow of self-assurance; she’s got all the trappings of an accomplished bureaucrat. She’s got the experience, too. She speaks nostalgically of long-ago summers spent at Isle Royale and Canyonlands, and of the fistful of parks she left behind during her climb up the agency ladder. This post at the Grand Canyon could easily be the high point of a successful career.

Cannon, though, has already had her dream job, and it wasn’t with the National Park Service. Little more than a year ago, she was the proud manager of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah — the first national monument overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

The job demanded much more than a change of uniform. The almost 1.9 million-acre monument was intended not only for sightseeing and backpacking and scientific research, but also for limited grazing and oil and gas development. The monument aimed to manage all these uses carefully, for the long-term health of the land. Grand Staircase-Escalante also had a larger mission: Its staff was to lead the way for 14 other, smaller BLM national monuments established during the Clinton administration. Together, the new monuments cover nearly 5 million acres, a small but significant share of the more than 260 million acres managed by the BLM.

It was a huge, high-stakes experiment for the BLM, and success required changing the very culture of the agency. For Cannon, it was a plum of a job. The redrock canyons were staggeringly beautiful, the research possibilities were endless, and the potential for a new, more conservation-oriented sort of multiple-use management was real and immediate. It was, she says, the most complex challenge of her career. The challenge was short-lived. In late 2001, after about three years in the manager’s office, Cannon was offered a choice by her superiors: Take a post with the Park Service at the Grand Canyon, or move to Washington, D.C., and oversee an environmental impact statement for energy development on BLM lands.

The decision wasn’t difficult. By the end of the year, Cannon had packed up and moved south.

Cannon’s abrupt departure, many say, has been chilling for the colleagues she left behind, and that fear has slowed the agency’s massive effort to transform itself. How the Bureau of Land Management lost this highly qualified staffer, and also the momentum she and others brought with them, is a peculiar story of local grudges, presidential politics, and the nasty collision between them.

THOSE WHO LIVE NEAR THE ESCALANTE canyons call their home “the country,” as if the canyon rims on the eastern horizon are the shores of an independent republic. “My family has always ranched in this country, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” some say. Or, “Before I got to the country, I was just a climbing bum.” Or, “Him? He just hasn’t been in this country long enough to understand it.”

The most common expression, though, goes something like this: “I came to the country, and I fell in love at first sight.”
No wonder. The canyons’ smooth red rocks and green cottonwood oases and crooked slices of blue sky have an overpowering, almost narcotic beauty. Sometimes, in some places, this land doesn’t just look like another country. It looks like another galaxy.

So it’s hard to find a neutral person around here. Loyalties are cherished for generations, and memories are as long and deep as nearby Glen Canyon. Nearly everyone loves the land, knows it well, and is dead sure what should and shouldn’t be done with it.

Maybe that’s why the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the state’s most aggressive and influential environmental group, got its start here a couple of decades ago, and why these small towns have also produced some of the region’s most reactionary county commissioners. The generation-long struggle between environmentalists and their foes in Escalante country has been nothing less than a holy war. Though it’s been mostly a battle of words, casualties have included cows (shot), cabins (burned), bulldozers (sabotaged) and the Burr Trail, known as one of the most spectacular backcountry drives in the world (paved). On Sept. 18, 1996, then-President Clinton forced this complicated, contentious little nation to face the rest of the world. By establishing the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Clinton opened the debate over the Escalante country’s future to a national constituency (HCN, 4/14/97: Beauty and the Beast: The president’s new monument forces southern Utah to face its tourism future).

The surprise proclamation was a gigantic victory for environmentalists, who had been trying for years to block a proposed coal mine on the Kaiparowits Plateau. The monument, which prevented new mineral leases on its lands, effectively squelched the project.
Others in Escalante country were less than pleased. Remember the high school students who released dozens of black balloons, the residents who grimly set fire to an effigy of Clinton? These were the folks who’d grown up angry at the government, infuriated by the gradual tightening of grazing and logging restrictions on the surrounding public land. To them, the monument was just another example of federal meddling.

“The land wasn’t ours, but we felt like it was,” says former Kanab Mayor Karen Alvey. “It was as if we’d adopted a child, then been told we were no longer needed.”

Frustration about the monument has flared up regularly in recent years, and its expression has often been personal and threatening. In the town of Escalante, some tied effigies of backpackers to the hoods of their pickup trucks, then lined up their vehicles on the town’s main drag. When a couple of outspoken environmental activists from Berkeley, Calif., moved to town, their support of wilderness and opposition to a local reservoir project earned them repeated visits from vandals (HCN, 5/24/99: Greens not welcome in Escalante).

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS BOILING STEW OF RESENTMENTS sat the Bureau of Land Management, freshly anointed by Clinton as a manager of national monuments. The agency, and the monument staff in particular, faced massive pressures from above, below, inside and out. Opponents in the local communities were mired in their own fury.

Environmentalists, though pleased about the president’s proclamation, were wary of the BLM’s livestock-and-mining past. High-level Park Service staffers felt they should have been the ones to manage world-class piece of land. And though many within the BLM were flattered and excited by the new responsibility, some of its old guard resented the exhortation to change.

The Clinton administration did its best to shore up the monument and the near-friendless agency. Kate Cannon’s predecessor, Jerry Meredith, got a $5 million budget in 1997 and a “dream team” of about 20 high-powered planners from the BLM and other state and federal agencies.
By the end of 1999, the team had come up with a management plan that emphasized scientific research and the primitive, “frontier” nature of the land (HCN, 11/22/99: Go tell it on the mountain). There would be no Park Service-style visitor center inside monument boundaries, no parking lots, no new paved roads.

Though grazing, recreation and most other uses would be more closely watched than they had been, any additional restrictions would be based on existing law.

The management plan got mostly good reviews from environmentalists. “They did a very good job of developing a management plan that was true to the (presidential) proclamation,” says Pam Eaton of The Wilderness Society’s Four Corners office.

Even local critics started to unbend a little. The monument had begun hiring a steady stream of local high-school interns, and town and county politicians started to talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Kane County Commissioner Joe Judd, who had been outraged by the proclamation, realized the monument could and should benefit his county. He began traveling to Washington, D.C., to stump for federal funds, and he even became friendly with the likes of Clinton’s Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt.

Judd says he’s done his best to forget his initial anger: “I tell people that if I try really hard, I can remember the monument (proclamation). But I don’t choose to.”
Dell LeFevre, one of the Garfield County commissioners who championed the paving of the Burr Trail, isn’t quite so sanguine. “It was a chickenshit trick, as underhanded as you can get,” he says without hesitation. But the monument has, at least indirectly, helped make his life a little bit easier.

Long before Clinton’s proclamation, the BLM had been gradually restricting LeFevre’s grazing allotment along the Escalante River. Fewer cattle on the riverbanks meant thicker willows, and the canyon was becoming tougher to navigate on horseback. One day, miles from home, LeFevre’s horse punched through the roof of a beaver den, fell, and pinned him firmly to the ground. His horse was unable to right itself, so LeFevre lay there for four or five hours, staring up at the blue sky and racking his brain for an escape.

LeFevre had just resigned himself to shooting and butchering the horse when he remembered the long-ago advice of a muleskinner acquaintance. He rummaged in his bag, pulled out a warm can of Pepsi, and carefully poured a few drops into the horse’s ear. The horse started, shifting just enough for LeFevre to scramble out and start extricating his horse.

“After that,” he says, “I thought, ‘What am I doing in this river?’” LeFevre called Bill Hedden, the director of the Grand Canyon Trust’s Moab, Utah, office. Since 1998, Hedden had been quietly negotiating with interested ranchers, offering to buy out and eventually retire their permits along the Escalante River (HCN, 2/1/99: Fun-hogs to replace cows in a Utah monument). LeFevre traded his permit in the river for part of an allotment on the Kaiparowits Plateau, a decision he says was good for both his business and his disposition.

LeFevre is a larger-than-life figure: a veteran county commissioner, the father of 14 adopted kids, and one of only two or three people in the entire county to make a full-time living off his cattle. His unexpected decision helped dampen the community’s wrath about the monument.

Just as things were looking — well, not peaceful, but more or less quietly resigned — a stack of butterfly ballots in Florida were counted and recounted, and national politics landed on the shores of Escalante country once again.

“I’LL BET THEY TOLD YOU they were making lemonade out of lemons,” says Mike Noel sarcastically, speaking of LeFevre, Judd and others. Noel is a recently elected Republican state legislator and a former BLM staffer; he spent 22 years working in the Kanab field office, the last of them as project director for the Kaiparowits coal mine proposal. He hates the monument, and he can’t stand the locals who have started to come to terms with it. Of all the people in Escalante country, monument supporters and opponents alike, Noel is one of a handful who still thinks the monument can be overturned.
Noel is one of the leaders of the Canyon Country Rural Alliance, a group formed from a defunct chapter of People for the USA. Though few of the leaders of the group are full-time cattlemen, they’re determined to keep the sinking industry afloat — even if it means bashing the ranchers who choose to deal with the Grand Canyon Trust.

“It doesn’t matter if the ranchers want to do it,” says Noel. “It just doesn’t matter. They’re selling their heritage for a mess of pottage.” LeFevre has heard such arguments more than a few times. “I’ve caught hell for this,” he says of his decision to work with the Grand Canyon Trust. “Not from ranchers, but from those who are going to save the world.” For once, he’s not talking about environmentalists.

Many residents, like LeFevre, consider the Canyon Country Rural Alliance extremist. But just before the 2000 presidential election, alliance leaders got an unexpectedly dramatic boost from Mother Nature.

The summer of 2000 was the third summer of severe drought in Escalante country; in the monument, even the sagebrush was dying. Kate Cannon, who had stepped into the manager’s job in 1998, took the advice of her range staff and warned all the ranchers on the monument that they might have to pull their cows off early. By mid-August, 80 to 90 percent of the forage was gone, and most ranchers had taken their cows off the land. Cannon ordered the remaining three ranchers to remove their cows by Sept. 1.

Ranchers Gene Griffin, Quinn Griffin, and Mary Bulloch refused to budge. In October, Cannon sent agency wranglers and a helicopter to find and impound the mostly wild cattle, and the ranchers became immediate heroes of the wise-use movement. Followed by a crew of supporters, the trio traveled to Salina, Utah, where the BLM had taken the cattle for sale. It’s not clear what happened next, but by the end of the day the local county sheriff had allowed the Griffins and Bulloch to open the sale-lot gate, load the animals into their trucks, and take off down the freeway for Arizona.

Mary Bulloch, who lives in a cramped trailer just south of the Utah state line, remembers the showdown fondly. “It was real Western around here for a while,” she says with a smile. “I got calls from all over the place, telling me congratulations, and I said, ‘Yep, there’s nothing like being a cowboy in the middle of society, is there?’”

The cattle dustup, combined with the results of the 2000 election, got Kane County feeling feisty all over again. “I saw that map with all the red squares,” says Noel, referring to the Republican sweep in the Rocky Mountains, “and I thought, ‘Finally, rural America is going to have a voice.’”

In spite of the Canyon Country Rural Alliance’s high hopes, and the swell of local encouragement they got after the presidential election, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument didn’t disappear along with President Clinton.

So Noel and his allies started in on Kate Cannon. Her enforcement of agency regulations — crystallized during the confrontation with the renegade ranchers — represented everything they disliked about the BLM’s new attitude. They complained loudly to the Utah congressional delegation, and some even traveled to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2001 to meet with then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tom Fulton.
“There was a drumbeat of criticism directed at her by Mike Noel and others,” says David Alberswerth, a former Interior staffer who now directs The Wilderness Society’s Bureau of Land Management program. “She was clearly singled out by disaffected local people, and they definitely had a great deal of influence.”

By December 2001, the disaffected had gotten their way. Fulton says he doesn’t recall a discussion of Cannon during the meeting in Washington, and says Cannon’s transfer was “an internal BLM decision.” Others inside and outside government offices, however, say the transfer order came from a high level in the Interior Department. The administration, some say privately, was eager to placate the monument opponents they’d wooed during the presidential campaign.

IN THE MONUMENT OFFICES, housed in an old middle school in Kanab, new monument manager Dave Hunsaker is good-naturedly doing his homework. For the past couple of weeks, he’s been exchanging letters to the editor with Kane County commissioner Mark Habbeshaw — the latest skirmish in the continuing brouhaha over the Grand Canyon Trust grazing retirements. “We are tenacious, if nothing else,” Hunsaker says wryly.

Kate Cannon’s successor doesn’t try to pretend that his job is an easy one. “Kate tried very hard to follow the (management) plan, and the counties had no one else to zero in on,” he says. “I, too, am finding that I get zeroed in on.”

Hunsaker hopes the arguments in Escalante country will someday target policies, not individuals. To that end, he’s trying to smooth out relationships with the monument’s most dogged critics. Hunsaker, a genial guy who jokes that he’s been “married to the BLM for years,” seems particularly well-qualified for the task.

Under Hunsaker’s direction, much of the work in these offices — and on the land — has continued apace since Kate Cannon’s departure. Sixty federal, state and university scientists are conducting research in and around the monument, studying everything from fossil turtles to native seed banks to local oral history. The monument staff has organized several popular lecture series in the area, and two visitors’ centers have opened in local communities.

Many in and out of the monument offices say the area’s fossils, artifacts and natural resources are better protected under the monument designation, thanks to Grand Staircase-Escalante’s substantial people power. Sage Sorensen, a longtime recreation planner for the agency, remembers when he was the only person keeping an eye on hikers, horses and dirt bikes in the Escalante canyons. “It was way more than one person could handle,” he remembers. He’s now relieved to be part of a 20-member recreation staff.

But the effects of Cannon’s sudden exit are still reverberating through these offices. Though new administrations routinely replace agency staff at the state and national levels, it’s extremely unusual for someone on Cannon’s rung to lose a job for political reasons. Her departure, along with the rapid-fire transfers of two other high-level BLM staffers — California BLM Desert District manager Tim Salt and Idaho state director Martha Hahn — was an unmistakable signal from the top. “Just seeing two or three moves like that was enough to scare people,” says a former BLM official who asked not to be named. “Everyone is afraid they’re going to get fired.”

So the monument staff is acting with a great deal more caution, especially when it comes to the more explosive local controversies. One of the most contentious — and hopelessly complicated — issues in Escalante country is the control of roads on public lands. The monument management plan cracked open that emotional debate, directing the agency to place “open” signs on the 908 miles of open monument roads and physically close the remaining routes. The monument transportation plan also requires that part of each year’s budget be spent to block off and otherwise close old roads.

The agency has signed the open monument roads that lie within Kane County, but it hasn’t placed signs on roads in neighboring Garfield County or closed any roads within the monument. Garfield County opposes the signing of roads on its side of the line, arguing that the county, not the federal government, controls the routes under Revised Statute 2477 of the Lode Mining Act of 1866. The Department of Interior halted processing of all RS 2477 road claims six years ago, and Hunsaker says the monument won’t take action until Interior delivers new guidance on the issue (HCN, 2/3/03: Road warriors back on the offensive). But many environmentalists say the BLM could start closing roads if it chose to.

“There’s nothing — except fear of a lawsuit — that’s keeping the BLM from enforcing its transportation plan,” says Liz Thomas of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The Grand Canyon Trust effort to retire four large grazing allotments along the Escalante River is also stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Though the group’s trades and buyouts have already removed cattle from all or part of some 18 allotments in the watershed — deals that were reviewed and approved by the agency “without a peep” from the local communities, says Bill Hedden — the Canyon Country Rural Alliance is doing its best to block the most recent proposals.

The alliance’s leaders have been encouraged by continuing local support; last year, several of them were elected to posts in town, county and state government. They’ve also taken heart from public statements by top-drawer Bush administration officials. Interior Solicitor William Myers opined in late 2002 that the BLM could not completely exclude cattle from an allotment within a federal grazing district; BLM director Kathleen Clarke, a Utah native, recently told the Society for Range Management that “for too long, there’s been an attitude that the only way to address range that is challenged is to remove the cattle.”

In January 2003, the Utah state office of the BLM approved the environmental analyses of the four proposed grazing retirements, but said the long-term fate of all retirements would be decided in a monument-wide environmental impact statement on grazing. That document is behind schedule, and a final version is not expected until November 2004.

Hedden, who has watched his once crowd-pleasing project devolve into a local bogeyman (“Don’t Trust the Trust,” says a common bumper sticker) says national politics and local resentment have been a deadly combination. “When the Bush administration got in, it was like throwing red meat to wolves,” he says. “The attitude was, ‘Now all we have to do is go for the throat, and make it so these new managers act like obedient sheep.’”

SO WHAT ABOUT THE NEW BLM? The national monuments, with Grand Staircase-Escalante as their flagship, were supposed to haul the agency into a brave new era. This administration is giving the BLM a not-so-gentle push in the opposite direction. What’s a conservation-minded land manager to do?

She, or he, can take comfort in two words: national monument. No national monument has ever been overturned (in fact, no one is quite sure how to do it) and, despite the best efforts of Mike Noel and his allies, the Grand Staircase-Escalante is unlikely to be an exception. Even the National Landscape Conservation System, the BLM’s new office for national monuments and other special designations, has so far weathered the political storm (see story below).
Interior Secretary Gale Norton has been much less enthusiastic about the slew of new monuments than her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, and she has announced some guidelines that could weaken protections at the more recent designations, but she has said that planning for all monuments will move ahead.

Grand Staircase-Escalante’s budget has fluctuated slightly in recent years, but it was a substantial $6 million in fiscal year 2003. The other BLM monuments have much smaller budgets — ranging from less than half a million dollars for Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico to $2.4 million for the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in eastern Montana — but they have still been able to hire some staff and start work on their management plans.

Some of these monuments also enjoy a lot more local support than Grand Staircase-Escalante, perhaps because of Babbitt’s efforts to meet and negotiate with locals before Clinton continued his second-term monument tour. The popularity of some of these places has led to new problems (see story page 11), but a nearby fan base might help these monuments in unfriendly times.

So the lifespan of the BLM monuments is likely to be significantly longer than that of the Bush administration. The new, tougher BLM might not emerge as quickly as Clinton and Babbitt had hoped, but it could still be on its way.

Kate Cannon, for one, is hoping to be part of that agency. “If you’re going to manage land, you need to go where the land is,” she says. The hundreds of millions of acres managed by the BLM, she says, are becoming more and more important — not just for recreation, but also as open space.

Monument management shouldn’t turn the BLM into a clone of the Park Service, she points out. “Even though I love parks, I don’t want that model spread across the landscape,” she says, gesturing out her office window toward the stuffed parking lots of Grand Canyon Village. Parks, she says, are an “easy introduction” to wild land. The BLM monuments can offer a vastly more varied experience.

Cannon and many other agency-watchers say the monuments demand something quite different of the BLM: stricter enforcement of the agency’s own unique conservation regulations. The rules are based in long-standing law that declares multiple use, sustained yield, and environmental protection to be the agency’s guiding principles. These values have often fallen prey to funding cuts and short staffing. The monuments, with their bulked-up budgets and specialized staff, have given the agency a chance to improve on history.

“We have a commitment to the public,” says Cannon, “and I don’t mean we the monument, I mean we the BLM. The monument is a small test of whether the BLM can meet its commitment to the public.” Just a short stroll from Cannon’s office, on the southern lip of the Grand Canyon, President Clinton read the brief proclamation that established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To some, that September afternoon felt like the victorious end of an exhausting battle. To others, it felt like the ultimate insult.

From nearly seven years out, that fateful afternoon looks a little bit different. It has turned out to be just the beginning of a difficult test for the BLM, and the beginning of a new and even more complicated debate over Escalante country. The outcome of that test, and the debate that accompanies it, depends on the people who love this extraordinary place: those who live here and those who visit from afar, those who work outside the agency and those who work within it. The true ending of this story, it seems, has yet to be written.

Wilderness Protections Rolled Back

In settling Utah lawsuit, White House reverses Clinton policy. New approach may alter how millions of acres are treated across the West.

Elizabeth Shogren
Los Angeles Times

Utah charged that the BLM had illegally been managing those areas as if they had already been wilderness study areas, stalling or killing many mineral development projects. It argued that until Congress designated these areas as wilderness, the BLM should permit mining, drilling, use by off-road vehicles and other development.

The struggle over the fate of federal lands in Utah -- especially the red rock canyon country of southern Utah -- has long been heated. The state has less land designated as wilderness than any other in the West -- 801,000 acres, the vast majority of it on national forest land. Only about 20,000 acres of southern Utah's red rock canyon country, which draws tourists from around the globe, are protected as wilderness.

In the BLM's first wilderness review of its land in Utah, the agency found 3.2 million acres that met the criteria, and most of those areas are designated as wilderness study areas. (Abstract)

NPS: The Mojave Phone Booth Incident

Neglected SpaceTo Protected Place: An Administrative History of Mojave National Preserve by Eric Charles Nystrom, March 2003

Excerpt from "Chapter Six: Park Management and Administration"

Every national park has had to face problems that arise from visitors' expectations that differ from the course of action required by the Park Service's mission, but Mojave National Preserve has seemingly faced more than its share of these issues, chiefly because of the area's governance under BLM's much more lenient rules less than a decade ago. One of the most unusual incidents began as a minor movement of performance art enthusiasts and their followers rose to international prominence as they worshiped the object of their affection - a lonely telephone booth, at the end of a long string of poles. Park Service employees were amused at first, but chuckles turned to concerns as visitor traffic increased and booth enthusiasts left behind offerings of art and junk, like pilgrims at a pop culture shrine. Concerned about impacts to desert resources, aware of the expiration of Pacific Bell's right-of-way, and unmoved by the apparently frivolous arguments of the phone booth users, the NPS ensured the booth's removal. Booth enthusiasts flooded Mojave headquarters with angry emails and phone calls, and charged the Park Service with only welcoming certain kinds of visitors with open arms, the counterculture's retread of the argument used by almost any group that finds the NPS mission in the way of their personal use of a public place.

A telephone was placed in the California desert around 1948 along a telephone line that stretched from Highway 91 through the east Mojave to Route 66. The idea was to provide local cinder miners with a means of communication with the outside world. The phone itself, known as "Cinder Peak 2," had to be cranked by hand. Emerson Ray, owner and operator of the nearby Cima Cinder Mine, requested the installation of the booth. Sometime in the mid-1960's the phone was replaced with a regular payphone, which was upgraded again sometime in the late 1980s as touch-tone payphones became the norm. [236]

The phone had long been listed on American Automobile Association maps of the area - the word "Telephone" at the junction of a couple of dirt roads. Early visitors to the booth were lured to the area by the apparent incongruity of a telephone seemingly in the middle of nowhere, 15 miles from a paved road. In May 1997, one traveler wrote a letter to a fan "'zine" for the Washington band "Girl Trouble," describing the remote phone. This fired the imagination of Godfrey Daniels, a Tempe, Arizona-based computer programmer and sometime artist, who resolved to call the booth's number every day until he received a response. His breakthrough occurred in late June 1997, less than a month after he started calling, when he reached Lorene Caffee, operator of the local cinder mine, as she made calls from the booth. [237] Daniels, in a transcript of the phone call posted on his website, was clearly thunderstruck by the fact that the booth actually existed, and vowed to visit some day.

Daniels made his first trip to the site in late August 1997, after receiving a Xeroxed map of the area from Dennis Casebier. He got lost, presaging the experience of hundreds who would follow in his tire tracks, and arrived after dark. Still, the booth inspired him:

"It was just as I had imagined it--a lonely communications outpost at the end of a long, long chain of telephone poles. All its glass had been shot out, but I thought it was beautiful. At that moment I felt I might never leave it." [238]

The story of the booth spread rapidly, posted by Daniels on his website and popularized through contacts in the counterculture art world. When he first made a trip to the booth, no one called - Daniels paged a friend so he could hear what an incoming ring sounded like. Most of the commentors on his website were friends from the art world or people who happened across the site accidentally. A series of radio appearances and small news articles, starting as early as 1998 and increased in frequency by April 1999, drew more visitors to Daniels' webpage. The overall tone was still friendly. One writer detailed her plans for an Easter weekend campout, and Daniels replied that he would try to show up. [239] Phone traffic could be heavy if a trip to the booth was publicized in advance. Camping overnight at the booth on his way to the 1998 Burning Man festival, the phone rang almost constantly, enough so that Daniels had to take the receiver off the hook to get some sleep. [240]

Media attention began to spread the word about the funky telephone booth in the middle of nowhere. A visitor in early July 1999 logged three calls in an hour and a half, more than typical but hardly a portent of things to come. [241] As news of the booth spread, the number of visitors to the area also increased. The new enthusiasts came from all walks of life, but they all had the phone booth in common. Andria Fiegel Wolfe, an interior designer from New York, flew cross-country with her sister to answer calls at the booth in their birthday suits. Two southern California men, who had only met online, took a roadtrip to the booth to hang up the receiver when they received constant busy signals. An Arizona man, Rick Karr, acting on orders from the Holy Spirit, spent more than a month camped beside the booth in the middle of summer in 1999. Karr read scripture to astonished callers and documented every one in a logbook, recording over 500 calls. Mike Sims and Ron Kling set up a party at the booth, complete with food and a punk band, to promote their website. [242]

The story of the "loneliest phone booth in the world" was picked up by major news outlets after mid-1999, and the added publicity proved fatal to the booth. Flash News Service first told of the new phenomenon, and the story was subsequently investigated by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Bernardino Sun, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, among others. When news of the booth, along with maps and directions, appeared in major papers serving populations within driving distance of the location, the increase in visitors to the site was enormous. The Los Angeles Times reported Daniels' plans for a Y2K celebration at the booth, and the deluge of self-invitations from people who wanted to be part of the action convinced Daniels to stay away. Dozens of TV crews, including major nationwide networks, made the trip to the Mojave. The phone would hardly be placed in the cradle before it would ring again. Even David Letterman did a spoof, documenting "the mic stand in the middle of nowhere." [243] Those people who had learned of the booth's existence before the media blitz lamented its newfound popularity. One wistful post noted that "Something kinda dies after Brokaw gets ahold of it...know what I mean?" [244]

Many of the residents of the area did not mind the popularity. Charlie Wilcox, a local with a tow truck, made money from ill-prepared booth visitors who ignored warnings not to take two-wheel drive cars on the sandy roads. However, one nearby rancher, Tim Overson, was not happy with the booth or the unusual people who gravitated to it. His frustration was due in part to the fact that the best road to the phone ran literally right through his front yard, and when people got stuck, they often knocked on his door. Mary Martin noted Overson's method of occasional revenge: "although he won't admit it - he'd go on out and cut the wire." [245]

Nothing prepared Mojave management for the popularity of a lonely phone booth. Pacific Bell's right-of-way for the phone booth expired in 1992, and the company hadn't bothered to renew it. The line wasn't very profitable, and much of the need for the cross-desert telephone link had been eliminated when a microwave tower was installed further south, leaving the Mojave Phone Booth at the end of a long line of poles.

With the increased notoriety of the booth and the extensive activity at the site, the NPS grew ill at ease. In early May, park staff happened upon a campfire at the booth, blazing away unattended. This was the final straw: Park Service officials "had a chat" with Pac-Bell and encouraged the phone company to remove the booth. Without notice, Pacific Bell hauled the booth away on May 17, 2000, leaving the counterculture in mourning and the press writing requiems for the "loneliest phone booth on Earth." [246]

The Park Service was deluged with emails, phone calls, and letters from outraged supporters of the telephone booth. Daniels posted Superintendent Martin's park phone number and email address on his website, and exhorted booth supporters to call: "Do it. Do it. Do it till you're satisfied." [247] Many pro-booth correspondents pointed out the appearance of hypocrisy: "[I]sn't this a form of recreation? I thought our system of National Parks was for recreational use?" [248] Almost all protested NPS claims of environmental damage in the area. Some took issue with other parts of the boilerplate NPS reply, which charged booth visitors with bringing decorative white quartz rock to the site and interpreted a note that one user left at the booth reminding visitors to the keep the area clean as evidence of the volume of trash left behind by visitors. [249] Others were threats, including one bomb threat that sounded serious enough to prompt the Park Service to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [250] Many supporters attempted to verbalize their affections for the booth: "It had SOMETHING...something about it was almost mysterious." [251] "Folks...had a possibility to get out for a while from their every day life..." [252] "I'll probably be mourning its death on and off for the rest of my life." [253] The rhetoric of loss, while exaggerated, seemingly reflects a real depth of feeling about the phone booth. The NPS did receive a small number of letters in support of its action, from the National Parks Conservation Association and other individuals who resented the booth as a man-made intrusion inconsistent with the features that were supposed to exist in national parks. [254]

The furor took a considerable time to die down. Almost two years after the booth's removal, the superintendent continued to receive several booth-related emails a week. The incident and the subsequent reaction after the booth was removed illustrate the difficulties posed to the Park Service by the history of the eastern Mojave as a working landscape. When applied to a place that had long been managed for multiple uses, the NPS mission of preservation and protection can seem unduly restrictive to users wishing little resistance to their exercise of unlimited freedom in the form of worshiping a quirky phone booth on public lands.

moja/adhi/adhi6.htm
Last Updated: 05-Apr-2004

Stay True to Rancher's Deal

EDITORIAL
Los Angeles Times

Life has always been something of a gamble for 76-year-old Howard Blair, who scratches a bare living out of a vast stretch of Mojave Desert, just as his father and grandfather did before him. Blairs have been cattle ranching in a corner of what is now the Mojave National Preserve since the 1880s, living off 1,000 acres of their own and more than 200,000 acres of grazing land leased from the federal government.

But Blair and his family face a special gamble now. Their 7IL Ranch will soon be the only working cattle ranch within the 1.6-million-acre preserve, and environmental groups are threatening to go to court to make them stop running their 400 cows, 25 bulls and 300 or so calves altogether.

The lawsuit's premise is that the cattle pose a threat to the endangered desert tortoise. Citing just that danger, a federal court in 2001 sharply curtailed grazing on land outside the preserve, which was established by Congress nine years ago and is managed by the National Park Service. The same litigants as in the earlier legal action -- the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility -- have signaled they plan a similar suit against the Blair operation, near the Providence Mountains 62 miles northeast of Needles.

The Desert Protection Act guaranteed the Blairs and others that they could continue to run their ranches in perpetuity. That was a special provision inserted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the law's major author. But, as The Times' Rone Tempest reported last week, the provision did not take into account the potential suits under the Endangered Species Act that have halted cattle operations at eight ranches just outside the preserve. Other ranchers have sold out at handsome prices. Presumably the Blairs could too if they acted now. But if the environmental groups are successful in their suit, the market value could drop to nothing.

Feinstein says she will do whatever she can to see that the Blairs can stay. And even Eldon Hughes of the Sierra Club says: "These are good people. There may be some middle ground." He's right. They are and there is. It's called common sense.

The lawsuit claims the cows step on the tortoises and crush their burrows. Blair says the cows stay clear of the reptiles, repelled by their smell. Either way, and despite the fact that the tortoises are endangered, they still roam vast stretches of California desert far out of range of the Blairs' paltry herd. The cattle pose a minuscule threat compared with that of the Department of Defense, which wants to expand its desert maneuvers in the Mojave and is seeking exemption from environmental laws.

To allow one family to run its ranch three more years or five generations more would not wipe out the tortoise or undermine environmentalists' important efforts to push destructive enterprises from fragile public lands. Nor would it preserve the cowboy way of life. But Congress and the president of the United States made a deal with the Blairs. They should stick to it.

High Noon at the Blair Ranch

The last cattle ranchers face pressure to leave Mojave National Preserve. The endangered desert tortoise may drive them out.

By Rone Tempest, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

WHISKY BASIN, Calif. -- Howard Blair has outlived two wives, endured years of searing drought and survived sudden freak storms that tossed massive boulders down the Providence Mountains toward his homestead. He lost his favorite horse to a bite from the deadly Mojave green rattlesnake.

Now, he must decide whether to sell the ranch that has been in his family for generations or to stay and run the risk of financial ruin.

At 76, with white hair and a slight hitch in his gait from a hip replacement, Blair is old enough to recall the last gunfight in the Mojave and the days when every little Southern Pacific Railroad town here had a weekly square dance. He watched the two-room Essex Elementary School, 23 miles away, shrink from more than 30 pupils to just four, two of whom are his own grandchildren.

Arriving in the 1880s, the Blairs were among the first ranching families here. Now, they are the last. When the sale of a neighbor's federal grazing rights becomes final later this month, Blair and his son Rob, 45, co-owners of the Blair 7IL Ranch, will be the only working cattlemen in the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve.

Where 20,000 cattle once roamed a range the size of Delaware, there are now only the Blairs' 400 cows, 25 bulls and perhaps 350 calves left in the preserve.

Though the Blairs hang on for now, they are vulnerable to the same pressures that prompted their neighbors to sell out. Like many Western ranchers, the Blairs own grazing rights to the land most of their cattle use. But the land itself belongs to the federal government.

A federal court decision to protect the desert tortoise, an endangered species that lives only in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, threatens the Blairs' future in a way drought or natural calamity never has.

The court ruling, handed down in the summer of 2001, sharply curtailed grazing on federal land just outside the preserve. Now, the environmental groups that filed the first suit have announced their intent to challenge grazing within the preserve. If the groups prevail again, the Blairs could be ordered to remove their cattle.

The family can offer the ranch for sale now to a conservation group that would remove the cows and manage it in the best interests of desert wildlife. Or, they can hope that a judge will rule in their favor.

Amid all the uncertainty, difficult questions loom over the Blair household.

Will the April roundup be the ranch's last? Will this be the last trip for the horses to the sweet grasses in the high pasture? Will there be another family reunion in the shade of Howard Blair's fruit trees?

"We've been praying about it a lot lately," said Kate Blair, Rob's wife and mother of their three children. "Frankly, there's a lot of things that are way beyond our control." Kate, 41, is a UC Santa Barbara graduate with a geology degree who works on a National Park Service maintenance crew, cleaning outhouses and campgrounds, so the family can have health insurance.

"With these people holding the Endangered Species Act over our heads, we know we are going to have to go," Howard Blair said, sitting in the dim light of his living room as a cowboy movie flickered on the TV. "We just don't know when. Whether it is 10 years or next year, we don't know."

On the television screen, actor Tom Selleck, on horseback, looking as though he had just emerged from the tanning salon of a Beverly Hills health club, pronounced defiantly, as if on cue, "As long as there is one cowboy left, it ain't over."

The Blairs are among the last holdouts in a disappearing breed of high-desert cowboys scattered across the American West. Their way of ranching is more difficult than in many other places because there is less rainfall and less grass. In the central Texas hill country, for example, a cow and her calf can survive on two acres of grassland; in the cattle-raising areas of Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, they require only one acre.

In the Mojave, it takes at least 300 acres to support a cow and calf. Where the sparse grass is thinnest, it requires up to 3,000 acres. Riding herd demands long hours, skilled horsemanship and a wealth of natural savvy. "Sometimes we go two to three years without finding some of them," said Howard Blair. All-terrain vehicles, which have replaced horses on many ranches, don't work here -- the land is too rough and uneven, the cattle too skittish.

The complexity of ranching here is evident from the list of ranch assets Rob Blair keeps on a blackboard in his workshop. Spread over the ranch's 210,000 acres are 45 water tanks, 24 corrals, 23 windmills, 37 natural springs, 96 miles of fence and 62 miles of plastic water pipeline. All of them require regular maintenance. If a windmill breaks down or a water line ruptures, a tank that supplies a hundred head of cattle can go dry. Even in his 70s, hobbled by a bum hip, Howard Blair still regularly climbs 20 feet to the top of ranch windmills, dodging spinning blades as he wrestles with bent and broken iron pump rods.

Despite the unceasing work and marginal profits, there is a loyalty to the land that sometimes defies reason. By any sane measure of land use, biologists argue, this should not be cattle country. It's too arid.

Tucked in the horseshoe-shaped Whisky Basin, the Blair 7IL is six miles from the nearest paved road, 62 miles from Needles, the nearest town of any size.

The ranch consists of two modest one-story wood-frame houses where the Blairs live and a collection of solar panels, generators, camper trailers, a maintenance barn, tack shed and a dozen pickup trucks of assorted vintage nestled next to an abandoned silver mill.

In a good year, the ranch might gross $100,000, out of which the Blairs must pay grazing fees, buy new equipment and parts, purchase supplemental feed and veterinary supplies and pay for fuel.

Each of the adult Blairs supplements the ranch income with other work. Howard and Rob operate road graders and backhoes for neighbors. Rob sells handmade saddles.

Until recently, the Blairs had reason to feel secure here.

Nine years ago, when the Mojave National Preserve was created under the Desert Protection Act, the Blairs thought they had won the right to ranch here "in perpetuity" thanks to a special provision in the bill written with them in mind by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

The special Blair-Feinstein connection dates from 1993, when the senator, researching the desert bill, visited the 7IL ranch by helicopter and became instantly, fiercely attached to the Blairs.

A Sympathetic Senator

"I'm basically a city girl," Feinstein said in a recent interview. "Here was this young couple, Rob and Kate, with three young children living in a way that runs contrary to all the television sitcoms that emphasize the goofy side of America. I saw clearly the value and the pride of their way of life. Howard showed me something inside one wall that had been written by his great-grandfather. So when we drafted the bill for the preserve we did it so grazing could continue at the same level it had before."

"Me and her are different in politics," Howard Blair said of Feinstein, "but she's been good to us."
Today, Feinstein vows to protect the Blairs "as long as I am breathing or even after I'm breathing." But her efforts may not be enough to save the Blair ranch if a judge agrees with the same arguments against grazing made by environmentalists in the most recent case involving cattle and endangered species in the Mojave.

That case led to severe restrictions on livestock grazing on most of the eight ranches still operating in the desert surrounding the Mojave preserve.

The ruling followed days of testimony from biologists and desert scholars detailing the devastation wrought on desert tortoise habitat by grazing animals that stomp on tortoises, crush their burrows and destroy brush cover needed to protect their young from swooping ravens.

The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who brought the first suit in federal court, have filed notice to sue the Mojave National Preserve over the same issues.

Damage to the Mojave can take a long time to heal. Tank tracks from pre-World War II maneuvers conducted by Gen. George S. Patton still scar the desert floor.

Environmentalists say a host of animals has been harmed by grazing, among them the Mojave ground squirrel, spotted bat, yellow-blotched salamander and yellow-eared pocket mouse. Grazing, they argue, also has introduced dozens of nonnative plants and is crowding out 29 native plant species.

The Blairs dispute the evidence, contending, for example, that cattle steer clear of tortoises. "They can't stand the smell," Howard said. "If a cow smells a tortoise, she'll make a big effort to circle around it."

As the environmental pressure mounts, an ambitious program by Mojave preserve Supt. Mary Martin has successfully retired all the working ranches in the preserve, except the 7IL. Martin has found nonprofit groups willing to pay up to $10 million for property near the Blairs and says she knows of buyers interested in their ranch.

Rob Blair, who sits with Martin on the Mojave preserve advisory council, is suspicious of the superintendent's motives. "Mary Martin would like us to leave," he blurted during a drive to the ranch headquarters. "It would be a feather in her cap if she drove every rancher out of the park."

The Blairs own barely 1,000 acres, a fraction of the land their cows use.

For the privilege of running their stock on preserve land, the ranchers pay $1.35 a month for every cow-calf pair. In the Blairs' case that amounts to about $6,000 a year for the grazing rights to 210,000 acres.

Forgotten in that equation, environmentalists contend, is that this is all public land, not the private domain of the ranchers. They say the price paid for grazing is much too little to compensate for the damage done to the desert.

A hundred miles away in her Barstow office, Martin denied putting any pressure on the Blairs to sell. "The decision to sell is theirs," she said. "If they say they want to stay they have the choice."
But Martin said that if she were in the Blairs' place, she would probably sell out and use the money to buy private land somewhere else.

"It's hard not to look around the desert and see what has happened to other folks. On the BLM land where the grazing was stopped," Martin said, "there was no compensation at all."

Even some of the environmentalists who have pushed for an end to livestock grazing across the Mojave have a soft spot for the Blair family.

"These are good people. There may be some middle ground," said Elden Hughes, who chairs the Sierra Club's California/Nevada Desert Committee.

Hughes, who grew up on a ranch near Whittier, still sees a role for the Blair ranch as a kind of living museum, with the Blairs acting as resident "historian interpreters." He believes some of the herd could be kept as a kind of historical display.

As their fellow ranchers sell out, the Blairs have looked on in frustration. "What kind of price are you going to put on this lifestyle?" asked Rob Blair.

Judging by the prices obtained by other ranchers, the family might be able to demand $3 million to $4 million for their holdings. Their fear is that the pending federal lawsuit, if successful, could drop the market value of the ranch to almost nothing.

Over a family dinner one recent evening, Rob Blair summarized their predicament:

"These kids are the fifth generation," he said, pointing to his three freckle-faced offspring. "This is our home and nobody wants to leave. But we all agree that if they are going to run us out, it's better to leave with something than empty-handed."

Clear Skies and Coyotes

With their future in limbo, even the most ordinary tasks take on special meaning.

Rising with the dawn, drinking bitter instant coffee and grilling bacon in his cluttered kitchen, Howard Blair said he never tires of the great symphonic beauty of the desert -- the starry night skies and the cry of the coyotes.

At sunrise, the nearby Providence Mountains turn luminous shades of rose. Airliners streaking toward Ontario, Los Angeles and Las Vegas airports leave cross-hatched pink vapor trails in the high desert sky. Golden dust plumes swirl in the windy territory south of the distant Old Woman Mountains.

"Well, I guess I'll say grace then," Howard said softly over a stack of griddlecakes. "Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful day. Thank you for the safe journey home last night. Thank you for watching over us."

Driving home later, after taking some horses to a high pasture, Rob Blair recalled a poem he first heard recited by John Wayne.

"I think it fits our situation," he said.

With that, the rangy 6-foot-3 onetime Needles High School football star broke into verse.

The poem describes a pair of Mexican horsemen coming upon what looks like a deserted ranch. When they near the ranch the riders are surprised to see an old caballero appear in the doorway. Asked why he is still living in the abandoned ranch, the old man replies "mis raices estan aqui." (My roots are here.) The Spanish refrain repeats several times in the poem.

Back at the ranch, Blair produced a book of his own poems he said he had composed while riding. One of them, titled "The Range of Time," reflects the Blairs' current frame of mind.

There's a group of men that are going extinct
We were raised upon the range
When today's society looks back at us
They think we're kind of strange
They tried to put us in a story book
Because they say times have changed
And there's a modern way of doing things and we need your open range.

A union of cowboys and Indians

By Christopher Reynolds
Los Angeles Times

The Autry Museum of Western Heritage -- a young, wealthy institution created by a singing movie cowboy to explore western myth-making along with history -- will consummate a two-year on-again, off-again courtship by merging with the cash-strapped, collection-rich Southwest Museum.

The merger rescues Los Angeles' oldest museum from a life-threatening financial crisis and brings the Southwest's 350,000-item inventory, one of the world's leading collections of Native American art and artifacts, under the same umbrella as the Autry's $100-million endowment.

The move, Autry Director John Gray said, gives the museums a chance to present "a dynamic dialogue between the cultures that made up the American West. There's no other museum that really does that."

Autry and Southwest officials said their pact, outlined in a signed memorandum of understanding, came together through votes on Nov. 21 by the Autry's trustees and directors and on Friday by the Southwest trustees.

Although museum officials said they hope to raise a new building to accommodate many Southwest programs adjoining the Autry's courtyard in Griffith Park, the museums plan to retain separate identities. However, their research functions are to be combined in an Institute for the Study of the American West, and together the three entities will be known as the Autry National Center of the American West.

The institute's first mission: To spend six months deciding how to use each of the museum sites, and to chart a course for how to most effectively unite the institutions.

To start the merger rolling, Gray said, three of the Southwest's 24 trustees will join six to nine of the Autry museum's directors to form a new board of directors to steer the umbrella organization. Most other top supporters of the two museums -- including the Southwest's 21 remaining trustees and the more than 80 members of the Autry Board of Trustees -- will be united on a second board, a level below the board of directors.

Gray will serve as top executive of the parent organization, and Duane King, executive director of the Southwest Museum, will remain in his position.

Autry officials estimate the overall cost of the merger at $100 million, and they aim to cover its cost with new joint fund-raising in coming years.

King said the organization's new stability "should make it easier to attract support, including support from Native American communities." The new enterprise, he said, "becomes greater than the sum of the parts."

In the short term, Autry officials said, the Autry is likely to spend from $500,000 to $1 million to sustain the Southwest's operations in 2003.

Although museum officials are making no guarantees about the historic but bedraggled Southwest building on Mt. Washington, Gray said, "the goal is to have it operate in a public way," while acknowledging that renovating the aging structure might cost $10 million.

For any expansion in Griffith Park, the Autry will need city approval. In recent years, the Los Feliz Improvement Assn., an organization of residents near the park, has been wary of projects that could bring substantial new traffic to the area.

Those and many other details of the museums' union will be worked out in a "due diligence and planning process" that will include solicitations of public input over coming months, Gray said.

Under current plans, the two museums will continue to have separate curators and docents, managing their own collections and exhibitions. They would be free to lend items to each other -- which the two have already been doing for years, officials noted.

The Southwest Museum, founded in 1907, has for the last decade suffered through a series of leadership crises. In 1993, former Director Patrick Houlihan was convicted of removing about 20 valuable baskets, tapestries and paintings from the museum's renowned Native American collection and secretly selling or trading them.

The Southwest's current need for financial help was made clear by a report commissioned a year ago. The confidential report, a draft of which was obtained by the Times, was undertaken by Daniel Belin, an attorney and nonprofit management consultant. It found that the museum's trustees were contributing too little money, paying too little attention to finances and consequently squandering their credibility among other potential donors.

The report also sounded out alliance possibilities with representatives of several other cultural organizations -- including the Autry, the casino-rich Pechanga Indian tribe in Riverside County, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. Except for the Autry and the Pechangas, most expressed doubts about the cost and logistics of preserving the collection, its current site and the institution's independence.

The Southwest board "had become more a collector's club than a museum board," said a source familiar with the museum's internal operations who requested anonymity. In the last two years, more than a dozen board members have left the Southwest Museum.

The Southwest Museum's King acknowledged that his board's fund-raising had lagged in recent years, but he said giving accelerated dramatically in late 2001 when, faced with financial calamity, board members gave or raised $1.1 million as part of a campaign to meet a $250,000 matching grant from the Ahmanson Foundation.

The Southwest's partner in this marriage comes from vastly different roots. From its beginnings 14 years ago, the Autry has been viewed by many museum insiders as an institution with more money than gravitas, its 51,000-item collection running from 19th century maps to memorabilia from Autry's show-business career, its leaders drawn from outside traditional museum management ranks. Gray, who took over as director in 1999, spent most of the last 20 years an executive for First Interstate Bank.

But in recent years, the museum has added staff and mounted increasingly ambitious exhibits in its 45,000 square feet of gallery space. Programming this year has included an exhibition on Jews in the Old West and presentations on the history of the African American cowboy.

Outsiders saw the merger on one level as an eleventh-hour rescue operation but also as an exciting marriage of resources.

Jack Shakely, who has watched the evolution of both museums over more than a decade in his role as president of the California Community Foundation, hailed the merger's "wonderful" possibilities.

Had it not come through, he added, "a lot of us were worried that the temptation to sell artifacts might become irresistible" to the Southwest's leaders.

In late 2001 and early 2002, it seemed likely that the museum would form a different kind of partnership, with the Pechangas. The deal would have given the Pechangas a chance to display items from the Southwest collection in a new cultural center to be built in coming years; in exchange, the Pechangas were to pay the museum $750,000 to $1.3 million yearly. But when the proposal went to the reservation's general membership, voters balked.

Pechanga spokesman Butch Murphy said that members wanted more information and expressed "concern over the amount of money being talked about." Southwest officials declined to say what other institutions apart from the Southwest had expressed interest.

Michael Heumann, chairman of the Southwest Board of Trustees, said in a prepared statement that the move was backed with "strong, strong consensus" after "a thorough exploration" of options.

Two for one

The Southwest and the Autry will merge under an umbrella financial organization; research functions will merge but the two will be siblings rather than one entity. A new Southwest building is planned near the Autry in Griffith Park; possible uses of the historic Southwest building on Mt. Washington will be studied.

Southwest Museum

Founded: 1907

Operating budget 2000-01: $2.2 million, with a reported deficit of $903,000

Attendance revenue 2001-02: $35,066

Endowment: $3.4 million

Autry Museum of Western Heritage

Founded: 1988

Operating budget 2001: $14.5 million

Attendance revenue 2001: $435,000

Endowment: $100 million

Source: Southwest, Autry museums

Water as Business Taps Into Fears

Environment: Concern over possession of a natural resource as a commodity and the possibility of firms' taking treatment shortcuts hamper deals.

by Michael A. Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times

The apparent breakdown of a deal between private Cadiz Inc. and the public Metropolitan Water District to build a $150-million water storage facility in the Mojave Desert raises an issue that may become more relevant to the state's water future: What role is there for private enterprise in supplying water to the California public?

The question evokes fears of the kind of corporate profiteering and market manipulation alleged in the wake of energy deregulation in the state. If anything, privatizing water may be an even more sensitive issue, given its stature as a natural resource essential for physical, as well as economic, health.

In part because of the dangers of cutting corners on water treatment and system maintenance, public-interest advocates have long been wary of efforts to turn over public water supplies or systems to private enterprise.

"One of the things we learned in the energy deregulation debacle is not to give private companies a free hand in the management of a natural resource," said Peter H. Gleick, president of Oakland-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security and coauthor of a study critical of global water privatization. "Water is too important to be left solely in private hands."

Still, many private entities are active in the water trade throughout the state--and some are planning to become more deeply involved.

Among them are owners of water rights in the river-rich north who deliver supplies to the parched south. Others are small-scale farmers who agree to fallow acreage during droughts in order to divert irrigation water to cities and suburbs. And some view the state's geographic imbalance of supply and demand as a long-term commercial opportunity.

In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, for example, a real estate venture between two life insurance companies--Zurich Financial Services and Kemper Insurance Cos.--is proposing to build reservoirs on two marshy islands to hold surplus floodwater for release during dry periods. Layne Christensen Co., a Mission Woods, Kan.-based mineral, energy and water company, is expanding water storage facilities in Kern County that already are under contract to provide dry-year supply to the MWD.

But many other private entities have been lured by visions of riches to be made in the business of moving around water supplies within the state--only to be crushed in a bureaucratic and political wringer.

"A lot of companies trying to move water across the delta have not been successful because it's complicated," said Jerry Johns, water transfer chief for the California Resources Agency. "It requires a lot of overhead. The physical issues are hard. Water rights are complicated. If your business plan is moving water from north to south, you should be prepared to spend a lot of time working out how that's done."

As a commodity, water is protected by a shield of regulation, tradition and emotion that can turn even the determination of who owns the right to use water under what conditions into a forbiddingly complex task. These complexities have blindsided some of the country's most sophisticated private investors, leading to some spectacular missteps in recent California history.

In the mid-1990s, the wealthy Bass brothers of Texas bought up 30,000 acres of farmland in the Imperial Valley, hoping to profit from the spread between the $12.50-per-acre-foot price they paid for Colorado River water as farmers and the $250 that San Diego would pay them to divert it as urban supply. Too late, the Bass family discovered that the water rights did not belong to them as landowners but in trust to the Imperial Irrigation District, which opposed the Bass sale. (The Bass family still made a profit in the Imperial Valley. Meanwhile, the district moved to strike its own deal--still under negotiation--with San Diego.)

Three years ago Azurix, a water-trading subsidiary of Enron Corp., paid $31 million for a 13,000-acre ranch in Madera County, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley farming region. The idea was to allow customers to store as much as 400,000 acre-feet of water in an aquifer under the ranch, extracting it in dry periods as needed. Local farmers viewed the proposal as a pretext for stealing their natural water supply. (An acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons--enough water to meet the needs of two average households for a year.)

"The Azurix project was perceived as a threat, as a means of taking our water and sending it away to the highest bidder," recalled Kole Upton, a pistachio and almond farmer who headed a local water users' group opposed to the project. The Madera County Board of Supervisors eventually passed an ordinance requiring their consent to any water transfers out of the district. Azurix later disintegrated in the Enron bankruptcy. A unit of Layne Christensen has since taken over the property.

Remaking the Grade

A new fund from Porsche will help repair original path to Big Bear Lake

Postcard image of the Clark Grade, circa 1919. (Putnam Valentine, Photographer)

JOHN O'DELL
Los Angeles Times

A volunteer effort to repair Clark's Grade, a 142-year-old dirt track that once was the only way up to Big Bear Lake, is the first beneficiary of a grant from Porsche Cars of North America under its new Cayenne Crossing program.

Porsche created the program to promote its entry this year into the sport utility vehicle market with the Cayenne and will donate funds to the restoration of historic roads and off-road trails across the country during the next few years.

A second donation in California, to be announced this year, will assist a Route 66 support group's effort to restore portions of the historic highway in the Mojave Desert and to install directional signs and historic markers along that portion of the route.

Porsche executives will not say how much they have dedicated to Cayenne Crossing, but it is expected to be a multimillion- dollar program.

The initial grant, announced Tuesday in ceremonies at the foot of Clark's Grade, will fund a three-year effort by volunteers with the nonprofit San Bernardino National Forest Assn. to repair the steep six-mile dirt track that began as a trail for pack mules in 1860. These days it is used by off-road driving enthusiasts but has been severely compromised by erosion.

"We call it a challenging four-wheel-drive trail," said Kris Assel, executive director of the forest preservation group.

Clark's Grade was opened in 1860 by rancher Hiram Clark as a way to get supplies from the Redlands area to miners working in Holcomb Canyon in the San Bernardino Mountains. The canyon, site of Southern California's largest gold rush, is just north of modern-day Big Bear Lake.

Clark's mule trail followed a steep series of switchbacks originally tramped out as a footpath in 1845 by explorer Benjamin Wilson, who climbed up from the Santa Ana River at the foot of the mountains behind Redlands.

Wilson found a deep valley when he crested the mountains and, after spotting many grizzlies, called it Bear Valley.

The valley then had only one natural lake, at its east end (now called Baldwin Lake), and remained unpopulated for decades. It was ignored even during the gold rush, when by 1866 there were 1,500 miners living in nearby Holcomb Canyon, said valley historian Tom Core.

And though busy, Clark's Grade "was just a crude mule trail that remained a trail until the 1890s, after the dam was built," Core said, and the valley floor was flooded to create what now is called Big Bear Lake.

Bear Valley was dammed in 1884 by Redlands land speculators who had found that oranges grew quite well in the area. They wanted to create a mountain reservoir to supply water so they could sell the otherwise-arid land for commercial groves.

The resulting lake initially was called Bear Valley Reservoir, then Pine Lake and Bear Lake. It finally became Big Bear Lake in the late 1890s because developers farther down the mountain had created a smaller lake they called Little Bear, which later became Lake Arrowhead.

After the reservoir formed and fish began breeding in it, the area was discovered by lowlanders and became a popular, though hard-to-get-to, retreat for visitors from Redlands, San Bernardino and even as far away as Upland and the eastern edges of Los Angeles, Core said.

The first automobile road into the area came up from Running Springs to Fawnskin in 1885. The valley got its first hotel in 1894, Core said, "and has been a resort area ever since."

To help boost tourism, a group of speculators formed the Bear Valley Wagon Road Co. in the early 1890s, he said, and turned the Clark's Grade mule track into a one-lane dirt road that could be traversed by automobile to provide a second route into the valley.

Because the road was only one lane and quite steep, traffic up and down the grade alternated.

A group would form at the bottom of the grade and the road would be opened to let them drive up, while a group of travelers leaving the valley would form and wait at the head of the trail, Core said. The last car in the upward group was given a flag, and when the driver arrived in the valley, he would hand the flag to the driver of the last car waiting in line to go down and the direction of travel would reverse.

"They had to do it that way because there were almost no places to pass, and it was so steep you didn't want to get caught heading in the wrong direction and have to back up," Core said.

Although an asphalt road from San Bernardino into the valley was built in 1924, Clark's Grade remained a popular secondary route until the 1930s, and it has never been abandoned.

"But it's in terrible shape today," Core said. "I lead tours up here and used to take groups down the grade, but the last time I did it, about three years ago, one car burned up its brakes and I decided it had deteriorated too much to do group travel anymore."

Assel said her foundation's volunteers spend hundreds of hours a year keeping fast-growing brush cut back along the edges of Clark's Grade but have not had the money for other maintenance.

With the Cayenne Crossing grant, the forest association will be able to provide funds to the U.S. Forest Service for grading and other repairs on the road, Assel said.

Some of the funding also will be used to prepare and install directional and informational signs along the route.

"The support from Porsche will enable us to do a lot of postponed maintenance," she said. "It will remain a four-wheel-drive route, but we'll be filling in eroded ruts, shoring up crumbling shoulders and making sure this historic route can remain open for the public to enjoy."

Does desert cross cross the line?

by Matt Weiser
High Country News





A white cross cemented atop a rock outcropping in Mojave National Preserve has become the center of a fight over religious freedom on public land. The six-foot cross, made of metal pipes, was erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and has served as a local gathering point for Easter sunrise services. But it could come down if the American Civil Liberties Union prevails in a lawsuit against the Interior Department.

Located south of Interstate 15 near Baker, Calif., the cross has faced increasing scrutiny since it was included in the 1.6-million-acre Mojave National Preserve in 1994. The ACLU sued the federal government in March 2001 on behalf of former National Park Service employee Frank Buono, who considers the cross a federal endorsement of Christianity and an unacceptable union between church and state.

The National Park Service contends the cross is an historic memorial to war veterans. In January, state Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, tacked a rider to a defense appropriations bill, designating the cross as a national war memorial and appropriating $10,000 for a commemorative plaque.

For Wanda Sandoz, whose husband, Henry, has maintained the cross for 18 years, the cross is a reminder of America's war dead. But, she says, "I also think of Christ dying on the cross."

ACLU attorney Peter Eliasberg says the cross is a religious symbol that does not belong on public land. "It's insulting to say this is a war memorial, when it obviously doesn't represent lots of people who fought and died for this country," he said.

The case will be reviewed this summer in U.S. District Court in Riverside.

California Dunes May Be Reopened to Off-Road Vehicles

By NICK MADIGAN
New York Times

Federal officials are proposing reopening land that had been off limits to riders of dune buggies and other off-road vehicles in the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, which in recent years has been the site of virtually unfettered chaos on holiday weekends.

A proposal drawn up by the Bureau of Land Management seeks to reopen 49,310 acres of dunes that were closed to off-road vehicles under a settlement reached in November 2000 between the bureau, a coalition of off-road clubs and three groups of environmentalists, who were concerned about the damage being done to endangered plants and animals.

''The administration seems to be abandoning a negotiated settlement that would provide a balanced approach to the use of the dunes,'' Daniel R. Patterson, an ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity in Idyllwild, Calif., said today.

Mr. Patterson and other environmentalists believed that their settlement with the government precluded a retraction that would allow unlimited use by the off-roaders, who come in the thousands to race in towering dunes near the five areas that are currently protected.

''We're pretty much blown away by the fact that we have an arrangement between conservationists, off-roaders and the B.L.M., and approved by a federal court, and now the Bush administration is seeking to dismiss that deal,'' Mr. Patterson said.

The bureau's proposal says the area provides a ''world-class recreation opportunity,'' and adds that with increased policing and monitoring the effects of the off-roaders and other users can be mitigated. One area, for instance, would be limited to no more than 525 vehicles at any time for the first year of the plan, with future numbers adjusted according to the effects on the landscape.

The plan, which has a 90-day comment period, calls for establishing curfews ''in areas of historic lawlessness'' and ''limiting alcohol use to established camp areas.''

But law enforcement officials have had difficulty policing the dunes, especially on weekends, when as many as 200,000 people come to the area, about 150 miles east of San Diego. Last Thanksgiving, there was a homicide, two stabbings, two fatal accidents and innumerable brawls.

Officials at the Bureau of Land Management, which has final say over use of the area, did not return calls seeking comment.

The environmentalists are trying to save endangered species like the Peirson's milkvetch plant, which is unique to the Algodones Dunes, and the desert tortoise.

''If they're not going to keep the areas closed where the plants and other endangered species are, then the plan fails to protect the American people's precious resources,'' said Terry Weiner, a botanist and coordinator for the Desert Protective Council, which seeks protection for Southwestern deserts. ''You cannot appreciate the dunes if you're raging across them at 40 miles an hour with smoke in your face and deafening noise.''

The November 2000 agreement was reached between the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Bureau of Land Management and five off-road groups, including the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which says it has 600,000 members.

Dan Meyer, general counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility -- which says it has 10,000 federal, state and municipal workers as members -- said his primary concern was the bureau's own law enforcement officers, who are charged with maintaining order against often overwhelming odds.

''The rangers come to us because they're concerned about all that off-road vehicle traffic and, basically, how they're supposed to be traffic cops for thousands of off-road vehicles,'' Mr. Meyer said. ''There's a real sense of lawlessness out there. It's something out of 'Mad Max.' ''

Harold Soens, a member of the California Off-Road Vehicle Association, which has sued the Bureau of Land Management over the earlier closures, said of the proposed change, ''I think it's a good deal.''

He added, ''At the moment, you're putting more people in a confined area, and they'll eventually ruin the landscape.''

The Algodones Dunes, which lie in a 40-mile swath north of the Mexican border, have been a source of controversy for years. The 32,240-acre North Algodones Dunes Wilderness, to the north of the area currently under revision, has been permanently closed to off-roaders.

The Bureau of Land Management document lists 80 animal and bird species and more than 60 plants found in the area.

A Fight to Protect Home on the Range

By Rene Sanchez
Washington Post

The cowboys on Dave Fisher's ranch have an unwelcome new chore: They are wrangling to save a reptile.

In cattle roundups like none other in the West, they saddle up at daybreak and set out for hours along rocky trails that wind through miles of grazing land here in the Mojave Desert, searching for cows that may be unwittingly wiping out small tortoises indigenous to the region.

The work is rough and slow, and Fisher, a grizzled rancher who prefers the old rules of the open range, would rather not bother with it. But for the first time, he has no choice.

"The environmental folks," he said, "are changing everything."

It all began this month. After years of lawsuits, studies and court hearings, he and every other cattle rancher in the Mojave are being forced to remove herds from nearly a half-million acres of federal grazing land during the six months the imperiled desert tortoises emerge from burrows to mate and forage for food.

The range may never be the same in this blazing and barren mountainous region 150 miles east of Los Angeles. It is the latest battleground in the West's chronic conflict over public land, which is escalating once more. Conservation groups are engaged in new fights over protections won for threatened species in recent years, and land interests that say their livelihoods are being ruined by such campaigns are hoping a sympathetic White House will defend their cause.

To keep cattle away from tortoises, federal land managers are erecting fences across long stretches of grazing areas. Once a week, they also are patrolling for cows now considered trespassers on turf they have long roamed. Ranchers, who face fines and other penalties if they fail to comply with the regulations, are shutting off water wells in some areas in the hope of moving herds.

Environmentalists say the steps are hardly too much to ask of ranchers to help save the desert tortoise, which the federal government declared a threatened species more than a decade ago. They say grazing cattle can crush tortoises or their burrows, eat vegetation they need to survive and trample ground plants they use to hide from desert predators.

The tortoises, about a foot long, are also vital to the health of desert wildlife, biologists say. Other species use their burrows as homes, too. By some estimates, hundreds of tortoises could once be found on every square mile here. Now the tally, at best, is dozens. The tortoises live underground when the desert climate is harsh but come out during the spring and fall, which is when ranchers now have to clear out their cattle.

"Livestock is certainly not the only threat these tortoises face. It's just the most unnecessary threat, and the one that we can most control," said Daniel Patterson, an ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, which has led the fight to limit grazing in the Mojave. "All ranchers have to do is move their herds off some of the land for some of the year. It's a real reasonable deal, and it's what's most in the public interest."

But ranchers say they are reeling from the restrictions. Rounding up and moving cattle from such large swaths of land is complicated and expensive, they say, because of the desert's difficult terrain and limited water supply.

Some ranchers contend the new rules could cost them several hundred thousand dollars and force them to reduce the size of their herds or drive them out of business altogether.

"This is giving us a real hard time," said Ron Kemper, whose cattle graze on 150,000 acres in the Mojave. "You just can't step outside and say, 'Come here, cows.' I really think some people hope this makes us all go bankrupt and leave the land."

Officials in San Bernardino County, in which most of the Mojave lies, are supporting the ranchers. Some say environmentalists are exaggerating the trouble that cattle cause and contend the tortoises face much more danger from ravens and the growing army of weekend warriors driving off-road vehicles through the desert. They also worry that the restrictions will harm the local economy.

Bill Postmus, a county supervisor, sees even bigger stakes. The clash over the tortoise, he said, is in many ways a struggle over what the priorities of the West should be. "It's not just about a few old ranchers out here," he said.

The plight of the desert tortoise has long been a subject of intense federal debate. Near the end of the Clinton administration, after years of scrutiny into what ails the species, the Bureau of Land Management negotiated a settlement with environmental groups that had sued to limit grazing in the Mojave.

Ranchers were supposed to be ordered off sensitive land last spring. But after dispatching investigators to the desert and spotting cows all over newly restricted areas, environmental groups charged that the federal land agency had decided to ignore the agreement after President Bush took office.

They returned to court and won another victory when U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Clinton appointee who oversaw the settlement, accused the Bush administration of violating "the letter, the spirit and everything about" the limits on grazing. Alsup threatened to hold federal officials in contempt and ordered the process to begin last fall. Furious, the ranchers appealed.

But an administrative judge appointed by the Interior Department to hear the case upheld the earlier ruling, although he said the BLM did not adequately consult with the ranchers about the change coming to the range.

Some ranchers appealed again and won temporary reprieves last fall just as they began removing cattle. Since then, ranchers have reached an uneasy truce over the issue and are cooperating with BLM officials. A few are still plotting legal strategies to try to overturn the grazing limits.

At times, local authorities have feared the tense dispute would erupt into violence, but none has been reported.

"So far, so good," said Larry Morgan, a conservationist with the BLM's Mojave office. "This is a big adjustment for everyone. The ranchers are pushing the cattle out, but in some places there's nothing to stop them from going right back. It's hard on them, and it's hard on us to get out there and monitor what's going on."

Environmentalists say they have doubts that federal officials are enforcing the grazing limits. They are sending their own investigators into the desert to make sure cattle are no longer in sensitive tortoise habitat.

"We realize things aren't going to change overnight," Patterson said. "But we're not going away on this issue."

Fisher, whose family has been ranching in the Mojave since the 1920s, sounds both defiant and defeated about the new policy. He is president of the local cattlemen's association and says that all the talk on the range these days is about whether to keep fighting or to give up and sell.

He owns about 400 cows and now has to keep them off 65,000 acres. Until BLM officials finish building a fence stretching 12 miles across the land he uses, he has cowboys working dawn to dusk to get cattle out and off the restricted area. Many of his cows are native, he said, and do not want to leave the only water spots and trails they know.

"We've never been kept out of our spring country before," Fisher said. "And when they want to start taking away my family's livelihood like this, I've got to say, 'Whoa.' But heck, I suppose what's happening is also probably just inevitable. It's all changing out here."

Dave Fisher, whose family has been ranching since the 1920s, says the new rule protecting tortoises could put some ranchers out of business.Hundreds of tortoises could once be found on every square mile of the Mojave Desert. The tally has dropped to dozens per mile.

History Captured Alive

Dennis Casebier is an expert at oral histories




Story by STUART KELLOGG
Photo by LARA HARTLEY
Victor Valley Daily Press



Dennis Casebier, executive director of the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association (MDHCA), has interviewed 200 people who once lived in Lanfair Valley.

Starting in 1910, the well-watered valley north of Goffs enjoyed a homesteading boom.

But as will happen, bust followed.

“Of 400 homesteads,” Casebier says, “fewer than 200 ‘proved up.’ The people I interview now have all left Lanfair Valley.

“I do oral history in an empty land.”

On April 26, he met with members of the Mohahve Historical Society and students of Leo Lyman, professor of history at Victor Valley College, to discuss what Casebier has learned about collecting oral histories (“an art form, not a science”).

Much of what Casebier shared has as much to do with courtesy as with research technique.

Equipment

“Oral histories take a lot of time,” Casebier said, “so don’t scrimp on equipment. I use a Bell & Howell recorder and standard-size 90-minute cassettes. A 60-minute tape is too short, a 120-minute tape too thin.”

Remarking that Nikon makes a lens especially for photographing photographs, Casebier urged the amateur historians to have their pictures of documents developed at a top-of-the-line photo lab.

Be prepared

Because every interview subject leads to somebody else, Casebier maintains a computerized list of old-timers’ names, addresses and phone numbers. Every now and then, he prints it out and puts the most recent version in his car.

“And I always carry a tape-recorder,” he said. “Who knows, I may have to go to jail tonight, and there I’ll meet an old-timer on my list.”

Advance notice

To assure a potential interview subject that he and the MDHCA are professional, Casebier may put an old-timer on the organization’s newsletter mailing-list.

“Hopefully,” he said, “when I do call, they’ll have been waiting to hear from me.

“But I never send a potential subject a copy of one of my books (e.g., Casebier’s “Guide to the Mojave Road”). If I did, they’d tell me what’s already in the book.

“But after our interview, I may give them a book.”

Knowledge of the topic

Although each subject contributes something of value, Casebier said, “You need to know more about the topic than any one person you interview.”

Citing a subject who remarked, “My grandfather lived in Blake, not Goffs,” Casebier said, “In fact, Blake and Goffs are the same place. Briefly changed to Blake, the name was later changed back to Goffs.”

Potential for intimidation

No matter how much you know, Casebier said, never correct the subject, for that will surely turn them off: “And don’t flaunt your own knowledge of a topic.”

“Shut up and listen”

In line with the above, Casebier said, if an older person gets a blank look, don’t prompt them: “They are thinking, so let them think. It takes time to remember events of 60 years ago.”

Follow-on notes

Rather than disturb the flow of recollection, write down questions as these occur to you, and ask them later.

“Make sure to tell the person why you are writing notes,” Casebier said. “As it is, most of your questions will have been answered by the time a person stops talking.”

He also warned interviewers to watch for signs of fatigue, “for if the subject is tired, they won’t give their top performance. Suggest a break for a few hours or, if possible, come back the next day.”

Maintain control

If a subject goes off about an old hurt (ranting, for example, against the government or a family member), he permits it — for a while. Then he steers them back to the topic at hand.

Military service

In an exception to his “Maintain control” rule, Casebier lets veterans tell their war stories even if these have nothing to do with Lanfair Valley. “I try to get what I need first,” he said, “but they deserve it.

“For veterans of World War II, I always ask, ‘Where were you when the war ended?’ and ‘What do you think of the atom bomb?’

“A guy who’d fought at the Battle of the Bulge was on a troop ship, heading from Le Havre to the Pacific, when he got word of Hiroshima. ‘I’d been good as dead,’ he said. ‘Now I wasn’t.’ ”

Casebier added: “Always ask a vet what unit he served in. This will help historians who come after you.”

One person at a time

Dismissing family reunions as “having no value except as a chance to add to your old-timer list,” Casebier stressed the importance of not allowing other people to interrupt a subject: “Be willing to say to an adult child, ‘I’d like your mother to answer this.’ ”

But having interviewed two people separately, it can pay to talk with them together.

This is what Casebier did with a man and a woman who’d gone to school together in 1914 and hadn’t met since:

“By interviewing them separately, and then together, I got so much more than I could have gotten from either one alone.”

Raise the comfort index

“Most of my people are elderly, simple folk,” Casebier said, “and so I start with easy questions: What is your full name? Any middle name? Your date of birth and where? Who were your parents (you may get a story out of that)?

“Maybe I’m chicken, but if there is a touchy issue, I put it off. For example, if I already know that the subject’s grandfather made moonshine.

“Once I was scheduled to interview the only man to spend time in San Quentin for cattle rustling. When I rang the bell, an elderly man with an oxygen tank opened the door.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no!’ But he brought up San Quentin right away.”

Transcription

Back home from an interview, Casebier promptly duplicates the tapes.

“Never transcribe from original tapes,” he cautioned. “Instead, transcribe from duplicates. You can also mail dupes to a volunteer transcriber who may not be the best interviewer but is a much better typist than you.”

According to Casebier’s wife, Jo Ann, “All transcription is verbatim. No language or factual errors are corrected.”

Remarking that he prides himself on capturing candor, Dennis Casebier said, “There was once a lot of prostitution in Searchlight (Nev.).

“When I mentioned this to one woman, she said, ‘Go down the street and talk with so-and-so. She was a whore.’ ”

Which may be why it’s Casebier’s policy not to enter a history in the MDHCA data base as long as the subject is alive — without their express permission.

Photographs and documents

To preserve homestead papers, postcards and other ephemera, Casebier brings a photocopier to each interview.

He also solicits photos: best of all as gifts to the MDHCA, next best as loans. Barring that, he photographs pictures on site.

In any event, Casebier said, “I organize the photos in the order that they’ll be copied — and ask the person to talk about each one. I also photograph what’s written on the back.

“The best interview subjects are teachers. They’ve spent their whole lives talking, appreciate what we are doing, and understood the need for caption material.

“I believe the caption is 50 percent of a photograph’s value.”

Just as he duplicates tapes, Casebier copies every image twice and in the same sequence. “That way,” he said, “I’ve got a backup set in case one batch of negatives is lost at the photo lab.” He added that “a scanned digital-image is no substitute for a continuous-time print from a negative.”

Leads for other interviews

An important part of any oral history is developing leads to other subjects. To make it easy for people to contact him, Casebier leaves cards with everyone he speaks to.

“Another way to get leads,” he said, “is to print an old photo and caption in the newspaper. This is sure to provoke calls from people eager to tell you the truth of the matter!”

Established in 1883 as a siding for the Southern Pacific Railway, Goffs grew in importance when, in 1907, a short-line railroad connected it to the rich mines at Searchlight.

By 1911 there were enough children living in Goffs (the sons and daughters of railway employees) to require a school: at first a rented, frame structure; later a handsome Mission-style building.

The school served a total of 412 students before closing down in 1937, obviated by a new school in Essex.

The old Goffs schoolhouse is now the centerpiece of the 113-acre Goffs Historic Cultural Center (founded by Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, in 1989) and headquarters for the nonprofit Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association.

“The other day,” Casebier said, “we were having a board meeting, and an elderly lady appeared in the door of the schoolhouse. When I asked, ‘May I help you?’ she said, ‘I’m part of the puzzle.’ “She was one of the 412 students.”

Of their shared passion for oral history, Casebier told his audience: “My only regret is that I didn’t start earlier. It’s taught me how to listen and how to appreciate the elderly.”

Dispute Over California Desert Range Turns On Ruling Conflict

Livestock Weekly

BARSTOW, Calif. — Federal officials and environmental activists contend that cattle are grazing in forbidden territory. One of the ranchers is pinning his hopes on a last-minute appeal by his attorney. Another rancher says it is the federal government that in violation of a court ruling.

Under an agreement between the BLM and the Tucson, Ariz.,-based Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, about a half-million California acres are off-limits to grazing from Sept. 7 to Nov. 7, and from March 1 to June 15.

The agreement also restricts mining and off-road recreation to protect habitat for a tortoise, bighorn sheep and 22 other species.

Environmental activists claim the cattle out-compete the reptiles for food, stomp on their burrows and crush the tortoises.

The tortoise is rapidly declining in the desert, say the activists, because of grazing, respiratory disease, predators such as ravens, off-roading and urban sprawl.

The ranchers say prohibiting grazing in the area will put an end to their livelihood. It would cost an estimated $15 million to fence the area.

The Bureau of Land Management agreed last month to have eight ranchers remove their cattle from 427,000 acres of public land that is home to the desert tortoise, an officially "threatened" species.

The two-month fall removal period was to begin Sept. 7, but BLM officials, reportedly riding off-road vehicles, say they found cattle from two of the allotment ranchers on the out-of-bounds territory in the Mojave Desert here.

San Bernardino County officials say they're worried that the court order could erupt into a range war.

Sheriff Gary Penrod says he canceled an agreement that allowed federal rangers to enforce state and local laws against such things as drunken driving and vandalism. Penrod says he doesn't want to be associated with any BLM worker who might precipitate violent range disputes.

Employees at the BLM's office in Barstow and Needles who normally work on recreation, maintenance, law enforcement and wildlife issues now look for cattle where they aren't supposed to be. They cover the eight ranches between the San Bernardino Mountains and the Nevada border, some 200 miles away.

At the end of September, Anthony Chavez of the BLM's Barstow office found 12 cattle and three horses on the off-limits range on the Cady Mountain allotment.

Tom Wetterman leases the Cady Mountain allotment for 150 cattle.

The Wettermans' Cady Mountain allotment, about 25 miles east of Barstow, is 230,000 acres. Cattle grazing would be restricted seasonally on about 88,000 acres.

On Sept. 25, BLM monitors say they found 12 cattle grazing illegally on Wettermans' allotment. Seven cattle were found Sept. 20 in a restricted area, BLM officials say.

Wetterman says he's counting on an appeal Wyoming-based attorney Karen Budd-Falen filed with the Office of Hearings and Appeals in the U.S. Interior Department.

San Bernardino County also filed an appeal on behalf of the ranchers.

In the meantime, Wetterman and his wife, Jeanne, have turned off the well that lures the cattle to the banned area and are negotiating with the BLM to move the boundaries of the exclusion area, according to BLM officials.

Tim Read, BLM district manager in Barstow, says the couple could face fines or suspension of their grazing permit. Eventually, the cattle could be impounded.

Other cattle have been spotted by BLM or environmental activist "cattle watchers" on an allotment southeast of Barstow that is leased by Dave Fisher, president of the High Desert Cattlemen's Association.

The order bans grazing on 54,000 acres of federal land near Fisher's Shield F Ranch, near Ord Mountain, south of Barstow. On Sept. 21, BLM monitors say they found 54 head of cattle at six different locations in restricted areas on Fisher's grazing allotment. On Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, inspectors say they found 19 cattle grazing illegally.

Fisher says it's the BLM that hasn't complied with a court order. Following a 13-day hearing in Barstow, an Interior administrative law judge ruled in August that the BLM failed to consult with the ranchers before issuing the range-closure order.

The BLM set up a two-day workshop in Barstow so the federal officials could meet with the ranchers, but several of the ranchers say they weren't notified in time to attend. Fisher says he was out of town at the time.

The appeal, filed by Budd-Falen, is based on the ranchers' accusation that the BLM failed to consult with them.

Fisher says he has enlisted the aid of a rangeland improvement task force from Las Cruces, N.M., that has agreed to facilitate meetings between the ranchers and BLM.

Siege of the Tortoise

Fifth generation rancher Dave Fisher has worked the tough high desert country in the Mojave all his life. He is a champion to other cattle growers who find their livelihoods imperiled by yet another environmental “surrogate” —the desert tortoise.

Dave Fisher, President of High Desert Cattlemen's Association

By Tim Findley
Range Magazine

Dave Fisher gazed out from the passenger seat of the sheriff’s Jeep and seemed to be struggling a little more than usual at holding down the sort of temper that erupts in slow waves from a large, quiet man not used to starting trouble.

“I guess I could just go up and tell them it’s private land and they need to get off,” he said, more like thinking aloud than actually proposing such a threat.

“You could, Dave,” Sheriff’s Sergeant Errol Bechtel reassured him. “We’d be with you.”

But Fisher said no more. Up ahead, the old van was pulled headlong into a flat spot off the rocky road, its sliding panel door open to the noontime heat. There was no one visibly inside it or nearby on the barren slopes dotted with short stands of Mojave yucca and scattered with sharp ankle-busting igneous debris strewn about by some previous eruption.

It wasn’t until the obvious law enforcement vehicle was near enough to be making loud crumbling noises off the road that a young man finally swung into view, feet first from the shade of the van, and sat with his knees to his chin in the panel doorway. He was dressed in shorts with no shirt, and his healthy pride of wavy golden brown hair and beard gave him away in about an auction second as just about what Dave Fisher expected.

Still, the tall rancher said nothing of what he was thinking as he strode on up the last bit of distance to where the young man stared back at him, a cloud of uncertain defiance already showing on his face. “Do you know you’re on private property?” Fisher asked at last in a not altogether unfriendly way. “No I don’t,” said the young man, shifting his glare between Fisher and Sergeant Bechtel. “But is that why the sheriffs keep stopping us twice a day?”

From that point, it could have gotten to be a much warmer afternoon. “...And I don’t appreciate your invading my privacy, either,” the young man added to the shutter-clicking Range photographer. As it turned out, though, young Dan Kent wasn’t a half-bad guy to talk to. They hadn’t “stopped” him or others along the road in the past couple of days, but deputies had checked their vehicles before, and this time, maybe the presence of a young lady who stayed well back in the shadows of the van added a little to Kent’s irritation at the interruption.

It was private land they were on—Dave Fisher’s deeded land that is spotted over more than 5,000 acres of Ord Mountain near Barstow, Calif., where Kent, a Utah resident, and about two dozen other trained and certified young people like him, have come for the summer to count tortoises.

Their contract with U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, underwritten with contributions from the Department of Defense, calls for an expenditure of $400,000 to total up a fairly accurate estimate of how many of the hard-shelled critters there are creeping among the volcanic debris, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes of Ord Mountain.

When he warmed a little to Fisher’s cool hospitality, Kent admitted that up to that point, they had probably counted more rattlers. But that’s something Fisher could have told him beforehand. Where they were at nearly 5,000 feet is above the normal range of the desert tortoise, and the “turtle,” as Fisher prefers defiantly to call it, is not fool enough to be crawling around in the heat of the day. So what, exactly, Fisher felt he had a right to ask, did these people think they were really doing on his grazing allotments and deeded land in a valley so wild and bare that “tree top” is measured by the miles between them?

If it’s what Fisher, and the High Desert Cattlemen’s Association, and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, and most local governments for hundreds of miles around think it is, then the “turtle counters” Fisher fumes over have themselves in the middle of a mess that won’t so easily be solved by helping Dan Kent and his funded friends find the dim lines on a map between “public” and private land.

Fisher wouldn’t recognize himself as a sort of high-pocketed, modest Stetson, Gene Autry type hero, but for at least the last 10 years, this fifth generation rancher with a voice about as hard as the rocks he was raised on, has been the singular champion on behalf of cattle growers all over the high desert who find their livelihood imperiled by yet another environmentalist “surrogate”—the desert tortoise.

There was probably an incident one day somewhere in the Mojave Desert during the last 150 years when a big bovine of some type accidentally put its clumsy hoof on the back of a tortoise and squashed it. Must have happened, like all things do. No shell-scattered body was ever found to prove it, however, and, actually, the flat smears you can still occasionally see along U.S. 395 attest to the much more likely, and still common, catastrophe encountered by the long-lived reptile. Cows, to those who don’t know, aren’t capable of grubbing down to the base of plants, and because they eat the higher foliage, may actually improve growth for what’s at the bottom, where the tortoise eats. And as for leftovers, it seems an open question over whether the tortoise is choosy about where it obtains its carbohydrates. It is a fundamentally stupid issue. Cows don’t threaten tortoises.

If they did, for example, it might have been much less likely 25 or 30 years ago, when the price of gasoline was cheap enough to be competitive, that a few service stations in the hot flat stretches offered a free tortoise with every fill-up. It happened, and how many of the critters got tossed in the back of somebody’s suburban station wagon for a ride into extinction is anybody’s guess.

The desert tortoise is, even today, not endangered. It has just been made to seem that way by the pressure of environmentalist organizations led by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and opportunistic politicians who have added it to the “threatened” list of American species. Nobody really knows if even that much is true, which is one of the reasons federal authorities say they are willing to spend nearly half a million dollars in an attempt to count the slow moving creatures one-by-one on Dave Fisher’s “Shield F” ranch.

Ord Mountain is not the motherlode of desert tortoises, and counting them there won’t make scientific history. But Fisher made trouble right from the start in 1990 when the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity as well as the Audubon Society and others interested in “cattle free” rangeland first began waving around the tortoise as their own version of the spotted owl.

With generations of his own experience behind him, and aided by the knowledge shared by others who had lived and died in the Ord Valley without sometimes as much as a road to get the body out before spring, Fisher tried to point out to federal Bureau of Land Management authorities that any potential argument between ranchers and “turtles” made no sense.

For his trouble, Fisher got recognized last year, in the dying days of the Babbitt empire, as the grazing permittee and landholder most likely to be a problem to the maybe doomed tortoise. Based on an out-of-court settlement with the environmentalists, the BLM, in effect, directed Fisher to cease full grazing on 154,000 acres of his generations- old permit, and to expect trouble on even his own 5,000 acres of deeded land. They knew such an order, even if it was temporary, could drive him out of business, and even said so in their “findings.”

Incredibly, the BLM concluded in its written report that the region’s economy would be benefited by the nonprofit “financial sponsors” of the turtle savers. “...the cost savings realized by temporarily not investing money in a livestock operation would allow groups to divert funds into land acquisition, management, administrative functions and other endeavors.”

Fisher is, for all you’ll ever see of him, a calm, quiet man. But there’s something in the way he asks his own questions that suggests more. He talks to himself, works the problem out loud; he settles for stewing patience. But one of these days...
His friends—the longtime friends of his family over generations in the San Bernardino Valley—knew that about Dave. If in the BLM decision directing protection of the tortoise Dave Fisher and the Shield F were to be the fall guy, it certainly wouldn’t happen without resistance.

Thus in short order after Fisher was directed to remove cattle from his allotments, did the county sheriff sever formal enforcement agreements with the BLM and let it be known whose side deputies would take in any dispute. “This action...may result in physical resistance by cattlemen attempting to preserve their stock,” wrote San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod in a letter to the BLM. “I do not wish to be associated with any [BLM] personnel who may be precipitating possible violent range disputes through their official action.”

So, similarly, did County Supervisor Bill Postmus fire off a letter warning of “actionable harm” to the county’s economy if the BLM tried to put ranchers out of business. And so up the line through 28 members of the state legislature and at least one member of Congress objecting to BLM’s arbitrary action did the letters fly.

But that didn’t stop the Center for Biological Diversity and their love of the little tortoise from threatening more lawsuits to force BLM action. By the beginning of this year, they quietly staged the training ground sessions in Las Vegas that brought such people as Dan Kent and his friends from Utah to learn about counting tortoises in a moving two mile grid over “public” land on Ord Mountain. And though it costs money just to send young folks like them out to tramp around the rattlesnakes, that suddenly came available from the U.S. Department of Defense, which, oddly enough, borders Fisher’s allotments and properties on two sides. The Army’s Fort Irwin and the Marine’s 29 Palms desert airbase are both reportedly eager to expand their own operations without any tortoise trouble.

So far, other than that, nothing has happened. The BLM knows Fisher is not about to remove his cattle, and they know not to expect anything like help from the local sheriff if they try it themselves.

“Oh, you’re Fisher!” Dan Kent said in obvious recognition that day on the mountain.

Fisher, as noted, is the kind of slow-to-rile guy who also finds it hard to just let something go. You can just about watch it physically happening as he struggles with himself between patience and a roar you sense is down there wanting to come out. Finally, that afternoon after explaining in several ways to Kent and others from his “turtle counting” expedition what is private and “public” property, Fisher climbed back into the friendly sheriff’s Jeep.

“Maybe,” he said, talking to himself again. “I should have just told them to get off.”

Update: In June, Interior Secretary Gale Norton declared a state of emergency involving the BLM demands on Fisher and six other ranchers in the Mojave. She ordered a hearing before an administrative law judge in late July to review BLM actions halting grazing on behalf of the tortoises.

The “turtle counters” on Fisher’s land, meanwhile, have gone somewhere else, but not before sending a letter to BLM authorities in Barstow which sources said complained of Fisher and a group of armed men in “dusters” harassing one of their volunteers. According to sources, the letter claimed Fisher had “brown drool” at the corner of his mouth, and the volunteer was particularly upset by a photographer who “violated his privacy” by taking his picture without his permission.

Tim Findley—the photographer complained about by the turtle counter—witnessed neither dusters nor drool.