I looked backed at the writings between Idaho’s Republican Senator Weldon Heyburn and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 about Idaho’s forest reserves to prepare for the covering the Idaho Legislature’s Interim Committee on Federal Lands Friday at 9 a.m. at the Capitol.
These two Republicans had clear differences about the value of the reserves and their role in American life. Heyburn saw the reserves as an affront to the state’s ability to choose the remaining 50,000 acres the federal government promised it would get under the Admissions Act.
At statehood in 1890, Idaho received federal grants of 3.65 million acres but it took a few years to identify all the lands it wanted. Today the state has 2.46 million acres.