War on the Range A new range war is spreading across the Rocky Mountain West. And this time, it's pitting ranchers against a modern-day nemesis: the gas industry. At the center of the conflict is an explosion of drilling for coalbed methane gas over the past decade in iconic Western places like sage-covered buttes and mesas -- wide open spaces that, until recently, ranchers pretty much had to themselves. The number of active gas wells in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado has shot up more than fivefold to about 18,000 from 2,550 in 2001. In Colorado, the number of permits for primarily new gas wells has jumped sevenfold to 7,000 a year from about 1,000 at the beginning of this decade. And in Wyoming's fabled Powder River Basin -- where Buffalo Bill Cody and other Old West legends once rode -- the number of gas wells has more than tripled to about 30,000 from about 9,000 eight years ago. Coalbed methane as a whole now accounts for nearly 10% of natural-gas production in the U.S. Along the way, many ranchers have complained of their cattle operations being seriously disrupted -- and in some cases ruined -- because of so much development activity. Some have formed groups to study the impact, lobbied for more regulation and filed lawsuits to hold producers more accountable. But most ranchers have had little choice but to let the drilling rigs in; the 1872 Mining Act gives precedence to mineral rights over surface users of the land. "As a rancher, I want my business protected from the impacts of the oil-and-gas industry," Chris Velasquez, a rancher in Blanco, N.M., said last April before the House Committee on Small Business, which was looking into the effects of oil-and-gas development on hunters, ranchers and others in the West. The 56-year-old rancher said he had to give up the last 22,000 acres of a federal grazing lease where his family had ranched for more than a century because the roads, pipelines, well pads and quarries put in there for drilling had made running cattle uneconomical. Among the problems: In 2001, 20 of his pregnant heifers aborted their calves after drinking contaminated water from a well-disposal pit....