I laugh in Ben Ficklin’s direction...
What “history books” did you used to read??? Those depicting the settling of the “west”??? What part of the “west”???
Did you not in an earlier post insinuate that the Navaho should not have a “bag limit” on ATV’ers trespassing on “government land”???
Are you saying the BLM or other alphabet government enforcement agency needs to contract out to native American tribe to conduct violent acts upon citizens rights???
You certainly bring another level of strain into the overall discussion again...
You ask what part of the west? The west is those lands between the 98th meridian and the Cascades/Sierra Nevada. The 98th meridian is the eastern wet/dry line: To the east is wet and to the west is dry. The Cascades/Sierra Nevada is the western wet/dry line: To the west is wet and to the east is dry.
These lands are called the Great Plains but in the past were often called the Great American Desert. Its the western plains, the intermountain west, and the "islands of trees", which is those lands above a certain elevation that receives rain/snow because the height of the Rockies squeezes(condenses) the last bit of moisture from the air.
The western plains are anchored on the south by the Chihuahuan desert and the intermountain west is anchored by the Sonoran desert.
So we really define the west by geography and rainfall/evaporation rate. The difference between the evaporation rate in San Antonio and Williston is equal to 15 inches of rain.
There's lots of history books that deal with history of the west broadly and narrowly and are organized around dates and events.
But there is the book "The Great Plains" written by the Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb. Published in 1931, it is still considered to be the bible on settling the west and is still in publication because many western colleges and universities use it as a textbook.
It doesn't deal with dates and events. Its a characterization of the west and how man had to change to occupy the lands. It covers geology, geography, flora as in long, short, and bunch grass prairies plus the brush lands. Fauna as in buffalo, prairie dogs, etc. It discusses water and range law. Also the invention of the Colt revolver, variable pitch windmill, and barb wire and how settlement couldn't proceed without these. The book does cover the dam building in the west that occurred prior to publication in'31 but many, many more were built later. Even though the Ogalala aquifer was known at the time, the impact of that aquifer on farming and ranching would not happen until after '31. The book doesn't cover Reserved water rights because in '31 that wasn't controversial. It was only after the courts began re-interpreting that law later in the century that it did affect the west.
It also thoroughly discusses the successes and failures of the methods which Congress used to disperse the public lands in the west. These policies worked well to the east in the wet zone or wetter zones, such as the northwest territories to the west and north of the Ohio river.
Congress obviously had an aversion to turning over large tracts of land in the west to individuals the way Texas, Spain, and Mexico did. Maybe this was egalitarianism or perhaps Congress, which was composed of those from the north and south, was intent on limiting the political and economic power of the west after the west became states in the union.
That's all history and you can't change history.
You should read this book. You can buy it new for $23 at Amazon and used copies are a few bucks. I bought mine used 20 years ago at the Half Price Book Store in Arlington.
Another book you should read is Cadillac Desert because it covers the history and future of water in the west.