There's Gold in the Hills

Summary

Josh Jackson | Longreads | June 12, 2025 | 5,262 words (19 minutes) The BLM—short for the Bureau of Land Management—was established in 1946, when the Department of the Interior merged the General Land Office with the Grazing Service. Today, the BLM is one of four federal agencies that manage public land across the United States, and it manages an astonishing 245 million acres across the western states and Alaska. I was dumbfounded by this number. Two hundred and forty-five million acres? How on earth had I never heard of these lands? Even the idea of “public lands” wasn’t a concept I fully understood. But as I learned more about them, I came to see public lands as something miraculous. When you consider our national zeal for owning private property, it is astounding we have set aside 618 million acres of federal land for the public. These are areas of land and water that are owned collectively by the citizens and managed by the federal government. The concept is worth reiterating: These lands are our common ground, a gift of seismic proportions that belongs to all of us. No matter your color, creed, or class, and even if you’ve never signed your name to a deed, you are a landowner. We are all landowners. Coming to terms with this endowment was a revelation. Of course, there’s a deeper story behind how these lands became part of the federal domain, and it likely won’t surprise you to learn that it’s an undeniably ugly one. It didn’t take long for me to discover that these lands were systemically stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes. Through invasions, plagues, violence, coercion, bribery, war, and lopsided deals with the United States government, Indigenous groups and their ways of life were nearly obliterated. Behind every layer of history I peeled back was a heartbreaking story of loss. The second distinction that sets BLM lands apart lies in how these leftov...