Surface Management Responsibility

This detail comes from a 1994 U.S. Bureau of Land Management map titled “Surface Management Responsibility.” It shows federally owned lands in southeastern Oregon.

The federal government owns more than two-thirds of the land in Lake, Harney, and Malheur counties, most of which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). BLM lands, shown in yellow on the map detail above, constitute 48 percent of Lake County, 61 percent of Harney County, and 67 percent of Malheur County. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) also manage nearly two million acres in the three-county region. USFS lands are shown in green, while USFWS lands in purple.

This pattern of land ownership makes the federal government a dominant presence in southeastern Oregon, a presence that has occasionally engendered resentment among local residents. This resentment came to a head during the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s and 1980s, a movement in which some westerners, particularly ranchers, challenged federal land management policies and called for the privatization of federally owned lands in the American West.

Partly as a reaction to the Sagebrush Rebellion, Forest Service district rangers and BLM area managers have taken increased pains to invite and include the participation of local communities in land-management decisions. Although the outcomes are rarely satisfactory to one and all, such compromises as the 2000 legislation designating the Steens Mountain Wilderness likely will encourage and accelerate this trend.

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are major employers in most southeastern Oregon communities. Many of these federal civil servants are college-educated men and women specializing in such disciplines as silviculture, range conservation, wildlife and fish management, hydrology, and archaeology.

Oregon state government serves as another of the region’s significant employers. Highway maintenance crews, fish and wildlife managers, county-based irrigation watermasters, and other public servants add to the payroll of the region’s towns. The State of Oregon also owns nearly 200,000 contiguous acres in northeastern Harney County and northwestern Malheur County, much of it consisting of former tax-delinquent parcels and “in-lieu selection” lands, which it leases for grazing, with some of the returns going to support education. State lands are shown in blue in the map detail above.

Taken together, all government workers―including federal, state, county, and school-district employees―represent over 15 percent of Malheur County's and over 21 percent of Lake and Harney counties’ total employment, figures that are well above the Oregon average.

Further Reading:
Cawley, R. McGreggor. Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics. Lawrence, Kans., 1993.

Written by Jeff LaLande, Cain Allen, © Oregon Historical Society, 2005.