Unless I’m confused, nothing drastic changed.
In all the states after the original 13 (and TX, VT, ME, HI which were all unique), the federal government acquired title to all land not already privately owned when it acquired the territory.
In the eastern states, most though not all of this land was pretty quickly sold or homesteaded. In western states the vast majority of the land was not economically attractive enough for private owners to appear, so it just stayed in federal ownership. Title wasn’t transferred because there were no buyers.
Starting in the 1890s or thereabouts, the government withdrew increasing amounts of land from the “for sale” group. Reasons usually involved conservation. The process was approximately complete by the mid-20th.
The major thing that “happened,” leading to the difference in the map, is rainfall. Land in much of the West is essentially worthless without water rights, so nobody bought it.
This tendency was aggravated by locals who would buy land at the entrance to a drainage, for instance, into private ownership, and therefore control in practice access to an immensely larger block of land without having to invest capital in buying it. Sometimes they start to think of it as “their land.”
Since the mid-20th the feds have increasingly made land management decisions some of the locals don’t like. But one doesn’t acquire title to land simply because you or your grandparents live next to it.
I agree that deserts and mountains are not that desirable, but I still maintain that title should have passed to the State, but didn't because of some change in legislation.
It's not as cut and dried as you make it. As you pointed out, the Federal Government planned to sell the land - prior to the 16th Amendment, that was a major revenue source.
And that was the real reason that they kept the dirt in Utah. And the State was supposed to benefit from the sales as well - 5%.
So it was always intended that it be sold. The fact that it could not later be sold is partly due to lack of marketability but also due to Federal perfidy.
In Utah’s Enabling Act, the citizens of Utah agreed to “disclaim title” to, and agreed to refrain from taxing the public lands “until the title thereto shall have been extinguished by the United States.” Significantly, these terms for disposal of the public lands in Utah’s Enabling Act are the same terms found in Enabling Acts for many states east of Colorado where the federal government carried out a timely disposal of the public lands. This disclaimer of title was only intended to facilitate the disposal of the public lands so that, eventually such lands would contribute to the revenue bases of federal, State and local governments.
The required disposal of the public lands by the United States over time was a significant benefit of the bargain made by the State of Utah with the federal government at the time of statehood. In addition to the future expectation of taxable lands, Utah was also promised 5% of the proceeds from the sale of the public lands held by the federal government “which shall be sold” following statehood. The subsequent and unilateral termination of the disposal policy to one of permanent retention by the federal government is a repudiation of Utah’s statehood bargain. Lands which, at the time of statehood, were anticipated to be a source of revenue are now largely unproductive. The subsequent actions of the federal land management agencies have reduced the ability of the citizens of Utah to make a living from the land, denied the Nation much needed energy and mineral resources, limited the State’s ability to fund education and have led to poor stewardship of the land.
Please note this comes from the Government of the State of Utah, Constitutional Defense Council on Transfer of Lands.
There are some rather compelling counter arguments to yours which you seem to be leaving out...I assume with your knowledge of the history you must know about this.
I understand that people would like to preserver Escanlante, Kaiparowits and the drainages of the Green and the Colorado. I do too. I lived part of my life there and knew many of the people involved in the conservation wars of the 1970s. We all loved Escalante and Capitol Reef.
But brute force confiscation of the land and making any extractive industries off limits is simply anti-human. Most of the people I knew in these movements were dogmatic misanthropes and Leftist ideologues (perhaps a redundancy...). Left to their own devices they would have turned Salt Lake into a concentration camp followed by obliteration of any evidence of human habitation.
The people in places like Kanab, Panguitch and Salina were all hoping to see at least some industries come in which might improve their lives, but the Watermelons sneered at them in the first go-round of this when the power plant was cancelled.
That was when they hung Redford in effigy in Kanab.
So there are two sides to this rather long story. Everyone wants to preserve the incredible character of the West...but my experience with the Enviros is that they plan that to be for them and only them - they end up with special access rights or work for the BLM and consider themselves a specially privileged group since they are the Enlightened Ones.
Your ball.
People here don’t care about the law at times