Colorado ranchers’ Pinon Canyon victory earns magazine cover story

“In 2005, the entire agricultural community in Southeast Colorado faced losing their ranches to an aggressive land grab by the U.S. Army. By combining biological evidence, cultural heritage, intense document research, the political process, and when necessary, legal action, these ranchers smartly, legally, and collectively saved their land.” Thus begins, in big type over a two-page southeastern Colorado landscape, an eight-page feature in the October/November issue of American Cowboy written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Bob Welch. Reaching subscribers last week and newsstands now, Welch goes back to 1983 to tell of what’s become known among area ranching families as The Taking, when the Army created the quarter-million-acre Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) by using eminent domain to take the land from families unwilling to sell. Welch then jumps to 2005 when a map leaked to the La Junta Tribune-Democrat revealed an almost-unimaginably huge new land grab by the Army, which had secretly developed an elaborate plan to expand PCMS to seven million acres—roughly ten percent of Colorado’s land, bound by Interstate 25 to the west, New Mexico and Oklahoma to the south, and the Arkansas River to the north. More than 17,000 people would be removed from their vacated land. “This time, though, the Army lost the element of surprise,” Welch writes. “The ranchers and their allies would fight. They formed the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition (PCEOC) and two offshoots, Grasslands Trust and Not One More Acre!, and began drawing up a battle plan.” Welch proceeds to tell the story through interviews with many of the opposition leaders, all of them longtime residents of southeastern Colorado. None had experience as political organizers. Most were ranchers, and most of their families had been on the same land for generations.