Abstract
Roaming across the northern and western borders of Yellowstone National Park into Montana, the bison that spend their summers in the park enter private lands in search of winter grazing.1 Montana cattle ranchers object to the migration, because many of the bison carry the brucellosis virus, a disease that can infect cows and cause them to abort their calves. Worse yet, if any Montana cattle are infected with brucellosis, the state will lose its brucellosis-free certification from the federal government. Losing this certification drastically reduces the value of all cattle in Montana, because they cannot be easily entered into interstate commerce.
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Notes
This chapter is adapted from Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, “From Free Grass to Fences: Transforming the Commons of the American West,” in Managing the Commons, ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), 200–16.
Eric Zuesse, “Love Canal: The Truth Seeps Out,” Reason 12 (February 1981): 16–33.
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931), 206.
Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), 182.
Maurice Frink, W. Turrentine Jackson, and Agnes Wright Spring, When Grass Was King (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1956), 98–99.
The stockgrowers’ lobbying power declined dramatically because of the disastrous winter, and the 1889 territorial legislature repealed many stock laws. See W. Turrentine Jackson, “The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, Its Years of Temporary Decline, 1886–1890,” Agricultural History 22 (October 1948): 265, 269.
Minutes of the Montana Stock Growers Association, 1885–1889, quoted by Ray H. Mattison, “The Hard Winter and the Range Cattle Business,” The Montana Magazine of History 1 (October 1951): 18.
Alistair Cooke, Alistair Cooke’s America (New York: Knopf, 1973), 237.
Jay Monaghan, ed., The Book of the American West (New York: Bonanza, 1963), 292.
For a more complete description of the effort to claim public land, see Gary D. Libecap, Locking Up the Range: Federal Land Control and Grazing (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981).
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Livestock on Farms, January 1, 1867–1935 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 117.
For a more complete discussion of water rights, see Terry L. Anderson and Pamela S. Snyder, Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1997).
Clesson S. Kinney, Law of Irrigation and Water Rights and the Arid Region Doctrine of Appropriation of Waters 1 (San Francisco: Bender-Moss, 1912), sec. 598.
Wells A. Hutchins, Water Rights Laws in the NineteenWestern States, Miscellaneous Publication no. 1206, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Natural Resources Economics Division, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1971), 442–54.
Gregory B. Christainsen and Brian C. Gothberg, “The Potential of High Technology for Establishing Tradeable Rights to Whales,” paper presented at “The Technology of Property Rights,” 1999 PERC Political Economy Forum, Bozeman, Montana, December 2–5, 1999.
Michael De Alessi, “Fishing for Solutions: The State of the World’s Fisheries,” in Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet, ed. Ronald Bailey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), and Christainsen and Gothberg, “The Potential of High Technology for Establishing Tradeable Rights to Whales.”
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© 2001 Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal
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Anderson, T.L., Leal, D.R. (2001). From Free Grass to Fences. In: Free Market Environmentalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299736_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299736_3
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