Is Utah Sahara Bound?
ing on the arid lands of Utah.
What
was it that Cottam wrote that made the stockmen so hostile to him?
After all, he was one of their own - having been born of rural Mormon
parentage in the St. George area. He wrote:
A
hundred years of struggle against nature in Utah suggests ultimate
defeat for man unless more brains as well as brawn are used in the
battle. For we have seen many of our springs shrink in volume and some
of them fail entirely to discharge their precious liquid. We have
witnessed the denudation of our mountain slopes through fire,
poisonous gases and unregulated grazing and then like whimpering
children have bewailed the cruel devastating floods that have followed
these abuses. We have seen our sparkling mountain streams run red with
silt and become sterile of aquatic life.. It seems incredible that a
full half century of intermittent but devastating floods has not taught
an intelligent people the obvious relationships between vegetation,
soil, and water.
Several
different types of native grasslands were once common in the semi-arid
southern Utah. The pronghorn antelope serenely grazed upon them.
However, upon the introduction of cattle and sheep, it took only about
10 years or so to overgraze these sensitive lands. With, the natural
ecosystems altered, cheat-grass aggressively invaded the former
grasslands. And the big sagebrush, a hardy and cold-tolerant shrub
spread out over wide areas to dominate much of the ecosystem.
During
the decades of the 1880s and 1890s there was a tremendous upsurge in
sheep population in Utah. The grass-covered mountain ranges of the
Wasatch, the Uintas and the high plateaus were overgrazed, and sheep
trailing did much damage to the watershed areas. As Cottam noted, from
far off one could detect numerous herds of sheep by the clouds of dust
created by their many hoofs. He
By Ken Sleight
EDITOR"SNOTE:
Ken Sleight made these observations about the drought in the arid West
and the need for sustainable range practices more than a decade ago, in
the printed Zephyr, long before Global Warming became a part of our
lexicon. We offer his observations here, for the first time online.
Also,
I urge all my readesr to email Mr. Sleight and tell him to get back to
his computer and start spinning some more yarns for The Zephyyr..JS
On
Feb 19, 1947, Dr. Walter Pace Cottam, a professor of botany at the
University of Utah delivered the distinguished annual Frederick
William Reynolds lecture during Utah's centennial settlement year. His
subject: Is Utah Sahara Bound? sent shock waves through Utah's ranching
and farming communities. It must have taken great courage to accomplish
what he did. The University published his remarks in bulletin form and
opponents as well as supporters studied these in detail. Like a
bombshell, the fallout continued for months.
In
my senior year of high school that same year, I gave a talk too at a
Future Farmers of America state function in Salt Lake City entitled
"Contour Plowing," a short piece about preventing soil erosion on farm
lands. We had already discussed the Cottam address because of its
far-reaching impact. After our session, some of us were ushered to the
University of Utah where we strolled about the campus and among its
beautiful lawn and tree-covered grounds. Ivy crept up the walls of its
old buildings. I was so impressed I decided to enroll at that
venerable old school. I secured my own personal copy of Cottam"s
speech. He begins: "Could we but turn back the clock of time one short
century and on the morrow's dawn gaze out over this valley asleep in
the morning shadows of the Wasatch Mountains, we would see no human
habitation, perhaps a few scattered teepees of the red man — no
streets, no trees, no smoke. The thought is incredible." At first, I
wasn't aware of his speech's continuous impact. Ranchers from across
the state criticized him severely. According to Maxine Martz's Cottam
biography, Why Hurry Through Heaven, the irate stockmen wanted Cottam
fired from the University, but University president A. Ray Olpin
refused to do so.
During my venturous five years at the University,
I'd often head for that tranquil setting,
my arms loaded with challenging lessons and library books.
His provoking lectures often focused on his own revealing work,
Is Utah Sahara Bound?.
His lectures and the lessons he taught
have stayed with me these many years.
I
enrolled in the University that same fall, and I intended to take as
many natural resource courses as I possibly could. Eagerly, I signed up
for Dr. Walter P. Cottam's botany class. Cottam became one of my most
influential and inspirational professors. He was a tough and exact
teacher. He rightly flunked me, after warning me, for cutting too many
of his student-assistant lab classes. Rather than attending them, I
headed for the trails of the nearby mountains. Though the lab didn't
excite me, Cottam's lectures certainly did. One day, the esteemed
professor led our class on a little walk into a shallow gully behind
the Thomas Library (now the Utah Museum of Natural History). There we
viewed the lofty trees that he himself had planted — cottonwoods, live
oaks, a pagoda tree, a sequoia, and a host of others. He had hybridized
some of the oaks that he had planted by crossing southern Utah's live
oaks with Gambel oaks. This produced more hardy oaks that reportedly
held their leaves through the winter. At one time the University had
thoughts of filling in that gully, but Cottam protested and took it on
himself to plant trees in it. His hallowed site became reverently known
thereafter as "Cottam's Gulch."
During
my venturous five years at the University, I'd often head for that
tranquil setting, my arms loaded with challenging lessons and library
books. His provoking lectures often focused on his own revealing work, Is Utah Sahara Bound?. His
lectures and the lessons he taught have stayed with me these many
years. I still have a copy of this masterpiece, which deals with the
effects of graz-
Drought or no drought, KEN SLEIGHT likes to wet his whistle from time to time.
condemned
the extravagant and unbridled exploitation of the plant life resource,
and he pointed out how the towns of Sanpete County had been hit with
the fury of ravaging floods. "Truly the fathers' sins against the land
are visited upon their children for generations to come, especially
when the children continue in the same transgressions," he said. This
statement was born out by the disastrous flood at Mt. Pleasant in July
1946.
He
emphasized the fact that in 1903, after the Manti National Forest had
been created, the federal government needed to take steps "to protect
these people from themselves." It banned grazing within the entire
Manti Creek watershed for a number of years. By using data he
collected from Mountain Meadows in Washington County, at the infamous
Mountain Meadows Massacre site, he ably illustrated the ecological
catastrophe caused by livestock on those delicate meadowlands. The area
is still in jeopardy to this day.
The
Great Basin deserts weren't so green after all, he said. The deserts
weren't "blooming as a rose" as we had all been led to believe in the
overblown oratory given in public and church meetings. He revealed to
us the processes of range destruction and the extent of damage it
inflicted. It all occurred within two or three decades after initial
Mormon colonist settlements. The new settlers were ignorant of their
impact upon the land. For the years between 1847 and 1937, he cited
strong data that native grass cover in Utah's Great Basin went from 45%
to nearly zero. Sagebrush increased from 1% to 11%, rabbitbrush rose
from 1% to 13%, and the juniper-pinyon cover increased from 10 % to 38%. Star-
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