Excerpt from Public Access to Public Domain Lands: Two Case Studies of Landowner-Sportsman Conflict For the past 100 years and more there has been a constant and often bitter struggle among rival users for control and use of public domain lands. The early history of the West largely is a story of conflicts between white men and Indians, cattlemen and sheepmen, stockmen and homesteaders. Mineral interests, timber operators, conservationists, and, more recently, recreationists entered the struggle. The Bureau of Land Management must not only act as a referee, but also ensure that the outcome will be in the best interests of the general public. To say that this is a difficult task would be a serious understatement. Laws and regulations governing the use and management of public lands are complicated, and often conflicting and some believe they are largely obsolete. Each Special interest group tends to equate its own welfare with that of the general public, and there are few firm legislative or administrative guidelines for identifying or measuring the public interest. This study deals with a relatively new type of conflict over the use of public domain lands. The dispute is focused on the issue of public access. Sportsmen and some other recreational users are demanding more and better access to public lands. Private landowners and certain user groups (including some recreational interests) would like to preserve the status quo. Thousands of square miles of public domain lands, scattered from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, presently are unavailable to recreational users, due to physical or legal restraints upon public access. The outcome of this struggle will determine, in large measure, how these lands will be used-and by whom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.