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If you want to make sense of what the Trump administration is going to mean for land in the West, you need to understand a few things.

The first is the president's vision to establish energy dominance.

And we'll come back to that a little bit later.

But the other thing to understand is this moment in history, a turning point in the West.

It was called the Sagebrush Rebellion.

It was this conservative movement that took hold in the 1970s and 80s that challenged

the federal government's management of the vast swath of public land.

But before we get there, let's go back even further to the time when the American frontier was still open and the country's leaders were trying to draw settlers west.

Dan McCool is a scholar of the West and he's going to take us through this history.

This was a time when they wanted to make it very easy for people to move out west and

access the resources by subsidizing them. And a lot of people showed up. And by 1890, the frontier

was gone. But these giveaway programs, a lot of them remained on the books.

And that really formed the mentality of both the government and the people living out west.

That the job of the government was to provide resources, land, water, forage, timber.

And in 1946, the General Land Office was combined with a couple of other smaller agencies

to form the Bureau of Land Management.

And its clientele was miners and ranchers.

That's who was interested, and that's who accessed the public domain lands.

And they basically had total control over it.

So this developed a prevailing ethos among ranchers and timber companies and other

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