In the Western United States and Canada, open range is rangeland where cattle roam freely regardless of land ownership. Where there are "open range" laws, those wanting to keep animals off their property must erect a fence to keep animals out; this applies to public roads as well. Land in open range that is designated as part of a "herd district" reverses liabilities, requiring an animal's owner to fence it in or otherwise keep it on the person's own property. Most eastern states and jurisdictions in Canada require owners to fence in or herd their livestock.
History and practice
The Western open-range tradition originated from the early practice of unregulated grazing of livestock in the newly acquired western territories of the United States and Canada. These practices were eventually codified in the laws of many Western US states as they developed written statutes. Over time, as the Western lands became more populated and more developed (through railroads, mining, farming, etc.), open-range laws began to be challenged and were significantly curtailed, though they still exist in certain areas of most Western US states and Canadian provinces. Open-range conditions existed in Western Canada prior to the 1889 amendments of the Dominion Lands Act, which prohibited cattle from grazing on unleased land, though the practice did not disappear immediately. Open-range management has also been practiced in other areas, including the Caribbean and some Eastern US states, such as South Carolina during the colonial period. The practice was also widespread in Mexico, and some argue that the Mexican tradition may have been the predecessor to open-range practices in the American West, much of which was part of Mexico prior to the 1840s. American ranchers borrowed many other cattle-raising techniques from Mexico. Unlike the Eastern United States, the Western prairies of the 19th century were vast, undeveloped, and uncultivated. The land was also generally much more arid, with scarce, widely separated sources of water. Until the invention of barbed wire in the 1870s, it was more practical to fence the livestock out of developed land, rather than to fence it in. As the United States government acquired Western territories by purchasing, conquest, and treaty, land not yet placed into private ownership was publicly owned and freely available for grazing cattle, though conflicting land-claims and periodic warfare with Native Americans placed some practical limits on grazing areas at various times. Free-roaming range cattle were calved, moved between grazing lands, and driven to market by cowboys. Brands on cattle marked who owned them. Unbranded cattle, known as "mavericks", could become the property of anyone able to capture and brand them. The invention of barbed wire in the 1870s made it easier to confine cattle to designated areas, which helped to prevent overgrazing of the range, and made fencing huge expanses cheaper than hiring cowboys to handle cattle. In Texas and surrounding areas, rapid population growth required ranchers to fence off their lands. This initially brought considerable drama to the Western rangelands. Indiscriminate fencing of federal lands was commonplace in the 1880s, often without any regard to land ownership or other public needs, such as mail delivery and movement of other kinds of livestock. Various state statutes, as well as vigilantism during the so-called Fence Cutting Wars, tried to enforce or combat fence-building, with varying success. In 1885 U.S. federal legislation outlawed the enclosure of public land. By 1890 illegal fencing had been mostly removed. In the north, overgrazing stressed the open range, leading to insufficient winter forage for cattle and their subsequent starvation, particularly during the harsh winter of 1886–1887, when severely overgrazed rangelands combined with unusually cold temperatures killed hundreds of thousands of cattle. This was called the Big Die-Up by ranchers and across the northern plains, led to the sudden collapse of the cattle industry. By the 1890s, barbed-wire fencing had become standard on the northern plains, railroads had expanded to cover most of the U.S., and meatpacking plants were being built closer to major ranching areas, making long cattle drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas unnecessary. The age of the open range was over and large cattle-drives were no more. At the same time, independently-owned ranches multiplied all over the developing West.
Modern times
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