And after the Forest Service absorbed range research a few years later, the interests and priorities of forestry would dominate the fledgling field of range science for decades to come.Frederick Vernon Coville was the son of a bank director in upstate New York. After graduating from Cornell, he was hired as Assistant Botanist in the USDA in 1888, and five years later he succeeded George Vasey as Chief Botanist and honorary Curator of the National Herbarium. He is most famous for his work as a botanist, especially in connection with the Death Valley Expedition of 1891, and for his path-breaking research on the blueberry, which helped make it a commercial crop in the northeastern US. Although less well known, his role in charting the course of rangeland research and administration must be considered among his most enduring accomplishments. For Roosevelt’s Public Lands Commission, he wrote the blueprint for the grazing lease system subsequently adopted by the Forest Service , and his fieldwork and reports in the decade after 1897 set the terms of engagement for public range grazing research. As Pinchot succinctly put it years later, “Until the Forest Service developed a body of experts of its own, Frederick V. Coville was the first and the earliest authority on the effect of grazing on the forest” .Struggling to define and assert management authority over the forest reserves, the General Land Office had banned all livestock grazing in 1894, believing it necessary to protect forest regeneration and reduce fires. The move provoked resistance from sheep and cattle owners throughout the West, and at the end of June 1897, new policies were announced rescinding the ban for cattle nationwide but retaining it for sheep, blueberry grow bag size except in the reserves of Oregon and Washington, where “the continuous moisture and abundant rainfall…make rapid renewal of the herbage and undergrowth possible” .
A week before announcing the partial rescission, the Secretary of Agriculture instructed Coville “to make an investigation of the alleged damage to forests by grazing of live stock [sic], more especially the effects of sheep herding in the Cascade Forest Reserve of Oregon,” which had been created in September 1893. His subsequent report clearly articulated the empirical and analytical framework from which the CoyoteProof Pasture Experiment would later be designed. Coville’s field methods were both ecological and ethnographic,8 and he came to see fencing, herding and predators as tightly inter-related elements of the problem of the western range.Coville firmly rebutted two widespread claims about sheepherders: first, that they were “aliens” or non-citizens who represented “a comparatively low class of humanity” ; second, that they were responsible for starting forest fires. These were politically volatile arguments to make, and they stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing views of many prominent figures, such as John Muir, who famously described sheep as “hooved locusts” and whose vision of wilderness erased and excluded both non-whites and laborers of all kinds . Coville sidestepped the polemics, apparently considering both of his claims to be settled by the facts on the ground. Instead, he focused his analysis elsewhere, detailing the herders’ management techniques, their knowledge of the value of different plants for sheep growth, and the variation in their skills. He noted that “The acreage per sheep required for grazing throughout the summer is exceedingly variable, depending on the kind and character of the vegetation” .Overgrazing in the Cascades had occurred, according to Coville, but it was neither ubiquitous nor longstanding, and it had not yet altered the composition of vegetation in the reserve. He attributed the damage he observed not to the herbivory of the sheep but to their physical movements. “The principal bad effects of overgrazing are to be attributed rather to trampling than to actual close cropping” . This could be prevented, he believed, by securing sheep owners’ access to the range resource.
Open access for all made each herder rush to use the range ahead of the others, “to get all the grass possible without reference to the next year’s crop, for he [the herder] is never certain that he will be able to occupy the same range again. Where the competition is close the difficulty of insufficient forage is increased by the haste of the herder in forcing his sheep too rapidly over a grazing plot, the result being that they trample more feed than they eat. So year after year each band skins the range” . A system of permits to graze specified areas would relieve this competition, and also enable the government to impose other terms, such as stocking rates and rules regarding fires.Coville conducted similar fieldwork in Arizona in 1900 at the invitation of Pinchot. The conflict there also concerned sheep grazing, but in relation less to timber and fires than to watershed conditions above the Salt River, whose waters were being developed for irrigation in the Phoenix basin below. The trip was proposed and hosted by Alfred F. Potter, a prominent local sheep owner and secretary of the Arizona Wool Growers’ Association. After a three-week wagon tour of the Mogollon Rim country, Coville and Pinchot concluded, as in Oregon before, that sheep grazing should be permitted but carefully regulated. Shortly thereafter, Pinchot recruited Potter to come to Washington as Assistant Forester in charge of the Branch of Grazing. Potter and Coville would later author key parts of the Public Land Commission’s 1905 report, making the case for exclusive leases to graze fenced allotments of the Western range. The trip also cemented a long-lasting friendship between Coville and Pinchot.In late March of 1907, Pinchot and Potter met with C. V. Piper, Chief Agrostologist in the BPI, to discuss “the range investigations which they would like to have undertaken by this Bureau.” In a memo the following day, Piper reported to Bureau Chief B. T. Galloway that the Forest Service had reduced stocking on northwestern sheep ranges by about 25 percent, “by agreement with the stockmen. It is however the desire of the Forest Service to increase the carrying capacity of these summer ranges and consequently the allotment of stock to each district as rapidly as possible,” and “to permit as many stock as possible to run on these summer ranges.”
Experiments were needed to determine whether degraded ranges could be reseeded, and to determine “what system of range management both with cattle and with sheep will best permit the more valuable native grasses to re-seed themselves and thus increase the carrying capacity and maintain it at a maximum.The investigations will not only be necessary to the best administration of these range lands but will result in enormous benefit to the live stock interests of the West.” Piper recommended that J. S. Cotton, who had studied range conditions in central Washington be put in charge of the experiments. It appears Pinchot overrode this suggestion in favor of Coville. An inter-bureau agreement was reached that the BPI would cover Coville’s salary and expenses, while the Forest Service paid the rest of the costs. In mid-May, Coville headed west to set up the experiments. From his hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, he wrote to Pinchot: “After a conference with Professor [Charles] Bessey and Professor [Frederic] Clements, and with the prospective appointee himself, I have secured one of the men we want for the forest grazing experiments. He is Mr. Arthur W. Sampson, a resident of the state of Nebraska, and a graduate student of the University. He is an expert in plant ecology and should be appointed as such.” Sampson’s training under Bessey and Clements was critical for Coville because it meant that the other men he hired would not need expertise in botany or ecology; its importance for the future of range science was even greater, because it helped install Clementsian ecological theory as the foundation for the discipline. Five dayslater, in Logan, Utah, Coville hired Jardine, describing him thus to Pinchot: “Mr. Jardine is twenty-five years old, a graduate of Utah agricultural college, and now an instructor in that institution. He was brought up on a ranch in southern Idaho and is familiar with the handling of cattle, horses, and sheep. He is well qualified both by his personal characteristics and his training to take part in the forest grazing investigations.” En route from Lincoln to Logan, Coville stopped in Laramie, Wyoming, blueberry box to interview a prominent sheep owner by the name of Francis S. King. An immigrant from England, King and his brothers owned or leased some 120,000 acres of private land in Wyoming and were famous for their prize-winning purebred Merino, Rambouillet, and Corriedale rams and ewes . Coville’s notes from the meeting suggest that King’s ideas and opinions played a significant role in refining the details of the imminent experiments in Oregon. King saw two advantages to protecting sheep within a predator-proof enclosure: reduced labor costs and improved animal performance.On June 3, Coville reported to Pinchot that he had selected a site with good forage, ready access by wagon, and “an abundance of coyotes, wild cats, and bear, with an occasional cougar and lynx.” “The stockmen” in the area, he wrote, “are greatly interested in the experiment, the consensus of opinion being that under a pasture system the carrying capacity of the range will be doubled.” He had found a “thoroughly efficient hunter” to hire for the project, and he recommended some modifications to the fence design based on his conversations in Wyoming . He had also met with the press to promote the experiment. One reporter wrote: “It is believed that the same amount of grass will support many more sheep when they are pastured than when they are herded. Should this theory be proved, the result will revolutionize the entire policy of the department in regard to the reserves and will have a great bearing upon the stock industry.”10 .By mid-June, Jardine and Sampson had reported for duty, the fence was under construction, and Coville soon returned to Washington. The fence—an imposing and elaborate combination of barbed wire, wire mesh, and stout posts —was completed too late for a full season’s research, but a band of sheep was placed in the new pasture for one month and observations were made both of their behavior and of the effectiveness of the fence at repelling predators. As for the latter, “the fence proved successful as a protection against coyotes, not successful as a protection against grizzly bears, doubtfully successful against black and brown bears, still problematic against cats, and not successful against badgers” . The hunter and his hounds patrolled the perimeter each day, recording signs of predators and, when possible, pursuing them . But just as Merriam had feared, one coyote was trapped inside the completed fence, and two sheep were lost to predators—one to a bear and another to the coyote . These predators interfered with efforts to observe “the action of sheep when they are allowed perfect freedom in an inclosure [sic] and protected from annoyance by animals” , but Jardine nonetheless judged that “the test was very satisfactory. They [the sheep] retained, more or less, the natural instinct to mass, but from the first day the tendency to open, scattered grazing, with little or no trailing, increased” . While conceding that solid data had yet to be collected, Jardine concluded: “That the experimental system will materially increase the carrying capacity of the range is not to be doubted” .The following summer, after repairs had been made to the fence, a band of 2,209 sheep were turned into the coyote-proof pasture without a herder. The hunter resumed his daily patrols, and the behavior of the sheep was monitored all day, every day from June 21st to September 24th. Only 15 sheep died during the 96 days, none due to predation. The objective was to induce “open grazing,” as Jardine termed it. “Whether sheep are in large or small bunches it is essential for the protection of the range that they be well scattered and graze quietly. Close-bunched grazing, massing, running, and trailing one after another should be prevented if possible, not only for the good of the range but for the good of the sheep. In this respect there was marked change during the season” . Here, the predators were not the only culprits: herders themselves, and especially herders’ dogs, were like predators in that they could provoke fright in sheep and cause them to bunch, mass, and run.