On January 29, 1960, a United States Senate subcommittee sat at Twin Falls, Idaho, to hear stockmen's complaints about cuts in their grazing. One of the witnesses that morning was Lloyd Brower, a cattleman from Arbon Valley. In a short statement he told the subcommittee how a quarrel over range a few years before had ended with a deal that put his cattle on the national forest, and why he thought a new cut there was wrong. His words survive in the printed record of the hearing.
The rancher from Crystal
Brower was a valley man. He gave his name at the hearing as "J. L. Brower, from Arbon Valley," and the site's family records show who that was: Joseph Lloyd Brower, born at Idaho Falls on December 10, 1905, the son of Ariah Brower, who entered land on the Hawkins side of the Bannock Range in 1907. Lloyd married Hannah Blair in 1924 and from 1930 ranched in the Crystal district, the high basin of springs and creeks in the valley, near the Bradley ranch. By 1940 he owned his place.
In December 1946 he appeared in a Conoco advertisement in the farm magazine Wallaces Farmer. It described him as farming "1,340 acres of wheat and alfalfa near Arbon, Idaho" and running "over 300 head of cattle," with the help of his wife, two daughters and hired men. It listed his machinery, from two heavy-duty trucks and two tractors to a Massey Harris combine and a Delco light plant. The advertisement was written to sell oil, but it gives a sense of the size of the outfit. In October 1954 a Lloyd Brower, probably the same man, was one of two deputies sworn in for the Arbon and Crystal Valley Vigilantes, a ranchers' patrol against thieving.
The hearing at Twin Falls
The hearing, titled Grazing on Public Domain Lands, was held by the Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah presided, the only senator present. He explained that Senator Frank Church of Idaho had heard a great many complaints the previous fall about cuts in grazing allotments, and that the hearing was meant to let the users of the public domain state their problems. Church could not attend. His statement, read by his administrative assistant, John Carver, spoke of small range users hurt by grazing cuts "proportionately more harshly than some of the larger users."
In the morning session the Pocatello Cattlemen's Association had its turn. Its spokesman, Leavitt Taylor, said the members now faced a cut of 40 percent on the forest and had appealed it twice. Leigh Gittins read the association's suggestions, and its secretary, Ross Gibson, spoke. Then Taylor called on Brower, "also a member of the Pocatello Cattlemen's Board."
"A small range war"
Brower began by saying he had "a little ax to grind" and would not take long. He called himself "a comparatively small operator." For many years, he said, he had run cattle on "my own deeded range," and that had been satisfactory, but his land lay between farmers and sheepmen next to the national forest. "It created a small range war, what we called a small range war," he said.
The Taylor grazing people, the cattle association, the national forest and the sheepmen, he went on, all "met right up on our range," and he seemed to be "the fly in the ointment." "Taylor grazing" was the stockmen's name for the grazing districts on the open public domain, run by the Department of the Interior under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934; the national forests came under the Department of Agriculture. Cattle and sheep trespassed on his land, Brower said, "and vice versa, me on them." One sheepman agreed to buy him out or get rid of him some other way. "They didn't want me up there."
So he went to the forest, he said, and asked what chance he had of a solid footing that would keep him in the cattle business. They told him that it looked "as good as deeded." That made him feel pretty good. He went ahead and "made the change with the sheepman," which got him out of the sheepman's way and onto the forest, "which I was proud to do."
Then he came to his complaint. "I don't run a big herd but I run a good herd," he said, and his cattle had come off the range in good shape that year, as they had every fall since he began running on the forest. He called the Pocatello Forest "one of the finest ranges in southeast Idaho," a range that others who had ridden across it with him had praised, and said he did not think the stockmen were justified in "taking this 40 percent cut" at all. His farm, he added, lay across the forest from the city where they did their business. He thanked his listeners, Senator Moss thanked him in turn, and no one questioned him. Noah Myers, who had bought a ranch at Arimo, spoke next.
What the record leaves out
Brower named no one in his account: not the sheepman, not the men at the forest, and no year beyond "a few years ago." He did not say where in the valley his deeded range lay, what the deal with the sheepman involved, how many cattle he ran by 1960, or how many the forest allowed him. The hearing record does not say whether the 40 percent cut went ahead. What it keeps is a valley cattleman's short account, in his own words, of how the old contest between cattle, sheep and farms played out on his range.
On this site: the Crystal area history; the Bradley family, whose neighbors included the Browers; the Lusk family, into which Lloyd's daughter Berna Deane married; and the Brower family on the valley timeline.