Draining the Swamp
By 1870 there were 15 million beef cattle in the United States. Between 1886 and 1888- years now known by Historians as the “Beef Bonanza”- four million longhorns were driven north to meet the railroad. Heritage British breeds from the Northeast began to be shipped west to improve the rangy Longhorn breed, as the Longhorn did not make for the best eating. Breeding British Herefords with the scrawny wild Longhorns would add 300 pounds of edible flesh to the produce more profitable offspring. With this newly booming western economy came an influx of colonists. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska doubled several times in the 19th century, and Dodge City became the cattle capital of the nation, with over 500,000 cattle passing through its railyards annually. During the Beef Bonanza and the intervening years cattlemen spread across the country to build their empires, and Cattle Towns followed in their wake. So too, did environmental destruction.
The Swamp Land Acts of 1849, 50, and 60 were federal laws created to encourage the “reclamation” and settlement of so-called “useless” areas which were keeping the US from the sale of contiguous swathes of federal land. The lands, generally called Swamp Lands by the government, included bogs, wetlands, estuaries, sloughs, and marshes. These moist, rich landscapes exist now in just a fraction of their former range and diversity. In the American southwest lush desert wetlands, known as cienega were once a common sight. In the grasslands of the Midwest, “looking-glass prairies’’ once reflected the endless sky and provided refuge for fish, mammals, and migrating birds. Entire states like Iowa and Indiana were once marshy swampland, teeming with life. The Swamp Land Acts destroyed these habitats by selling 91 million acres of wet land to be transformed into “productive acreage”. Cattlemen bought the majority of the land. Some of the land bought by ranchers was used as permanent pasture, which required only moderate draining, but other cattlemen used their extensive funds to purchase newly invented ditching machines and completely dry out the land. This newly created land was rich with nutrients from the destroyed habitats, and perfect for farming. Cattle barons began renting out their drained lands to tenants, creating small towns on their acreage and making fortunes. As the 20th century progressed, cattlemen came to depend on federal permits to run cattle, first in the new National Forests, then on the public domain. Most western ranch operations rely on irrigated hay pastures to provide winter forage, which drains rivers, degrading riparian environments. More than 75 percent of the West’s wildlife species are dependent to some degree on riparian habitat.
The original Swamp Lands Act of 1850 was so successful that two further acts were passed freeing up more land for development. Cattlemen became land monopolists, frequently obtaining land through legislative corruption. This corruption was easy; the laws were vague. In the state of Oregon, there was no limit for how much swamp land one man could claim, and only twenty percent of the purchase price (a dollar an acre) had to be paid up front. In the southeastern part of the state, swamplands were mainly marshy meadows around lakes, important water sources in the arid high desert plains. As cattlemen bought up the swamp lands in the state, they effectively fenced off water resources from anyone else in the area- including settlers. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the homestead size to 320 acres and brought about a wave of settlement into semi-arid western regions, including eastern Oregon. By selectively purchasing the swamp lands around lakes and rivers, the cattlemen made it impossible for anyone to settle near their land, and vastly increased the area where they could graze their cattle freely. The Oregonian wrote in a furious expose of the practice that;
“…selections were made with a view of cutting off every possible access to water. And as no one can live away from the water, the surrounding country for miles becomes a cattle range for the land grabber.”
In desperation to attract settlers, the Stock Raising Homestead Act was passed in 1916, further doubling the homestead size to 640 acres in semiarid regions. This size increase was ostensibly to allow settlers who had no choice but to settle away from water to raise cattle instead of farm. These homesteads tended to fail; the land suffered from severe droughts and often proved too dry even for cattle. The eastern half of the state of Oregon was permanently changed by the Swamp Lands Acts. Cattle ate the willow that grew along riverbanks, which caused those banks to degrade, making the river wider and the streambanks into steep drop offs. These steep banks created steam channel incisions, which lowered the water table. The region is in a perpetual state of drought, and very sparsely occupied, even today. The massive amount of land that has been used for cattle grazing for over a century is now an endless desert dotted with invasive (but drought-tolerant) sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata var. Tridentata), with hardly a wetland to be seen over millions of acres.
What wetlands remain in the United States enhance water quality, filter pollutants, sequester large amounts of carbon, and provide food and habitat for a vast range of species. Natural river systems and wetlands reduce flood risk by storing water and slowing water flows, and keep water table levels high, reducing the impact of droughts. Shockingly, cattle still graze on many remnant wetlands on our public lands. Cattle change the species mosaic of a habitat by selectively eating plants that they prefer and leaving those they find distasteful, causing long-term changes in the makeup of wetland plant communities and decreasing vegetation biomass. These vegetation changes affect the insect and invertebrate communities, which in turn affects vertebrates like frogs and fish, who feed larger species like birds and mammals. Feces from cattle has a massive effect on the water column in wetlands, disrupting the sediments and increasing the nutrients in the water, leading to algae blooms and changes in water temperature. Many wetland sedge meadows where cattle historically grazed become covered in shrubs when the cattle are removed. These shrubs invaded the landscapes when cattle disturbed the vegetation mosaic. Without the cattle there keeping them small, these invaders will spread and grow, further reducing the biodiversity of these meadows. The quick fix is to continue to graze cattle on these lands- therefore cattle are touted as a means of “restoring shrubbed wetlands.” Unfortunately, they are only necessary because of cattle grazing’s presence in the first place. Cattle grazing in degraded wetlands is not a viable long-term solution and does nothing to restore the original plant and animal communities of these rare landscapes, or to increase their water storage capacity to pre-agricultural levels.
On sloughs and coastal wetlands, studies have found declines in biomass and production of salt marsh vegetation where cattle graze, and that native pickleweed declined on coastal cattle lands, increasing invasive species encroachment. But still, the cattle are allowed to graze on public coastlines. In Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh ecosystem on the central California coast and the second largest wetland in the state, it was found that actively grazed salt marsh pastures were characterized by high percentages of bare ground and a loss of the native groundcover, pickleweed. By the early 1970s about half of the slough’s marshlands were diked and altered, mainly for grazing lands. In 2018 the Point Reyes National Seashore park service celebrated the “160-Year History of Dairy and Cattle Ranching” by listing modern industrial cattle ranches on the National Register of Historic Places. One third of this iconic National Seashore- nearly 28,000 acres- is leased to an elite group of commercial cattle ranchers, despite the fact that all land within the Point Reyes National Seashore is within the UNESCO Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve.
The effects of the draining and destruction of wetlands across the country cannot be overstated. The landscape of the continent was permanently changed, and the ripple effects of these changes are still felt today. Waterfowl bred on wetlands, and as drainage projects increased, their breeding grounds shrank. By 1934 it was reported that in all of North America only 27 million waterfowl of all species remained- less than one fifth of the population in 1900. The devastation only continued from there; from 1940 to 1962 over 45 million acres of wetlands were drained. Historian Tim Flannery described the destruction of North America’s waterways as “Arguably the greatest blow ever struck by the European Americans at the continent’s biodiversity”. It continues to this day.
References
Steinman, A.D., Conklin, J., Bohlen, P.J. et al. Influence of cattle grazing and pasture land use on macroinvertebrate communities in freshwater wetlands. Wetlands 23, 877–889 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1672/0277-5212(2003)023[0877:IOCGAP]2.0.CO;2
Middleton, Beth. (2016). Cattle Grazing in Wetlands. 10.1007/978–94–007–6172–8_60–2.
Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, Soil Report №13, Kankakee County Soils (Urbena, 1916), Page 2:
Bogue, Margaret B. (n.d.)The Swamp Land Act and Wet Land Utilization in Illinois, 1850–1889, Agricultural History Society
“Relation of Drainage to Land-use Policies”, Land Available for Agriculture Through Reclamation, Supplementary Report of the Land Planning Committee to the National Resources Board, Part 4 (WA, 1935), 39.
Olliphant, J Orin. (1968) On the Cattle Ranges of the Oregon Country.
McClung, Robert M (1969). Lost Wild America. William Morrow and Company, NY
Flannery, T. (2002). The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. United States: Grove Press.
Chambers, Jeanne C and Amy R Linnerooth(2001). Restoring riparian meadows currently dominated by artemisia using alternative state concepts- the establishment component. Applied Vegetation Science, 4: 157–166.
