By Guy Kelly
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Edward Thomas Taylor never lost an election. No one from his own party dared oppose him.

He served Colorado for 60 consecutive years and authored more than 100 federal laws.

The one that bears his name, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, not only established a way of life in the West but continues to affect the landscape more than six decades after its passage.

The law regulates the use of public lands for grazing of cattle and sheep. It directed the secretary of the interior "to stop injury to the public grazing lands by preventing overgrazing."

Sounds simple enough, but the passage of the law and Taylor's own change of heart on the issue of conservation and land management encompass a broad sweep of American history and Colorado lore.

"I never have aspired to greatness," Taylor said when he was 79. "I have aspired only to usefulness. I hope to be of worthwhile service in the future."

When he died at age 83 in 1941, he had far exceeded those modest wishes.

Taylor was born just as the gold rush of 1858 and 1859 began to open Colorado to the outside world. As a young man, he came to Leadville from Kansas to teach high school. He left to get a law degree from the University of Michigan and returned as superintendent of schools there.

But Leadville's 2-mile-high altitude didn't agree with him, and he moved to Aspen and then Glenwood Springs, where he started a law practice focused on water law.

As Taylor's practice grew, so did the controversy surrounding the use of publicly owned lands by ranchers.

For early cattlemen, the bounty of grassland was free of charge, unfenced and unfettered by inhabitants.

When the Civil War ended, buffalo and American Indians dominated Colorado. Within two decades, cattle, ranchers and cowboys reigned on the same land.

"There was a lot of cheap land, cheap food and cheap labor," said Robert Taylor, a professor at Colorado State University's Animal Sciences Department.

The early homesteaders were given 160 acres apiece of select land under the Homestead Act of 1862, which was designed to create a network of small, independent farmers.

Although these parcels were usually near a reliable source of water, they were too small and had soil too dry to produce a steady, marketable harvest of traditional crops.

But the settlers were surrounded by vast tracts of arid and semi-arid grasslands, and they soon realized that only sheep and cattle would grow well in such an environment. Also, the soil seemed resilient to grazing.

This realization may have been crystalized by the observation that stray cattle from the long Texas-Montana drives fared well roaming freely in the West.

Most western rangelands soon lay entirely in the hands of ranchers who "built fences, controlled water for livestock and formed policing associations to protect the unowned grass resource from overuse," historian Peter B. McIntyre writes in The Road to Rangeland Reform.

The federal government largely ignored this violation of the "open range" policy on public lands until the turn of the century, when public concern over diminishing timber reserves and grassland quality increased.

The first public warning about overgrazing came in 1902.

"The public ranges of the region are in many places badly depleted," David Griffiths, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist wrote in Forage Conditions on the Northern Border of the Great Basin. "This is directly traceable to overstocking."

The creation of the National Forest Service by President Theodore Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Gifford Pinchot in 1905, coupled with the rise in public concern for the conservation of natural resources, resulted in more intensive regulation of public rangelands.

While the debate was raging, Taylor's political career was on the rise.

He had won election to the Colorado General Assembly and become a district attorney and charter member of the Colorado Bar Association.

He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1909, a position he held until his death 32 years later.

The man who one day would become known as the "father of western water legislation" once strongly opposed forest regulation.

As a congressman, however, he gradually accepted and then promoted the multiple-use concept of the Forest Service. That policy allowed use of the land by miners, hunters and loggers as well as ranchers.

During Taylor's first years in Washington, there was major trouble in ranch country. With public lands uncontrolled, competition for the land was fierce, especially between cattle and sheep ranchers, according to Century in the Saddle by Richard Goff and Robert M. McCafree.

There was bitter conflict in northwestern Colorado, where sheep from Utah and Wyoming occasionally invaded cattle ranches. In December 1911, more than 100 sheep were killed on a ranch southeast of Craig, apparently to intimidate a rancher named George Woolley who planned to expand his sheep operation.

By 1915, bills were being introduced to regulate grazing, but none won passage. Tensions in ranching country increased.

In 1920, 350 sheep brought in from Utah were clubbed to death in northwestern Rio Blanco County by seven masked men.

Outside the national forests, homesteading and unrestricted livestock use on public lands continued unabated for years.

In 1934, the Taylor Grazing Act became law, parceling the range into allotments and creating the modern Bureau of Land Management.

The act, strongly supported by local, state and national stockmen's associations, finally stopped the warfare and solved some major public lands problems. But it did not reverse the degradation of rangelands.

It did, however, produce small, stable western communities built on feeding, supplying and financing ranchers, historian Peter B. McIntyre writes in The Road to Rangeland Reform.

Employment could be found either on a ranch or with a public agency addressing ranch issues.

Many ranch families added generation upon generation of stockmen to manage both private ranches and public range leases.

At Taylor's funeral in 1941, the words of Grand Junction publisher Walter Walker proved prophetic.

"There is no question regarding his unswerving loyalty to the Old West," Walker said. "He herded cattle and knew the West as few men did.

"Ed Taylor will be remembered best as an expert on the public domain. His greatest services will be recorded when the history of the public domain is written."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: They called him the Soviet Elvis. Coloradan Dean Reed never became a household name in America, but he achieved international stardom from Moscow.

November 2, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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