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The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape
MARK FIEGE
The movement of weeds across human boundaries, and collective responses to that movement, created a common geographic space in which people adjusted parceled land to the exigencies of transboundary ecology. Examining the weed commons in Montana illuminates a shift in the 1930s toward the cooperative management of rural western landscape.
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BY DECEMBER 1937, HUGO ZEHRFELD, a farmer near Forsyth, Montana, was beside himself with anger at his neighbor. In May, the neighbor had plowed his field, but failed to plant a crop. As spring turned to summer, the bare soil sprouted a lush growth of Russian thistles, "as big as balloons," in Zehrfeld's words. Autumn arrived, and the thistles died and turned brown, dry, and brittle. Winter winds broke their stalks. Tumbleweeds now, they bounced along the ground, skipped over and under a two-wire fence, and rolled onto Zehrfeld's land. They stacked against his shelterbelt. In places on his fences, they snagged in such numbers they pulled down the wires. Worst of all, they scattered their seeds on a field that Zehrfeld had disked in preparation for a spring planting of alfalfa. Zehrfeld had tried to get his neighbor to destroy the thistles before they began tumbling, but the man had refused to cooperate. As Zehrfeld told it, "[W]ell he just laughed in my face." Alas, there was little that Zehrfeld could do. A lawyer might have helped, but Zehrfeld had no money. Drought and economic depression, the very conditions that probably caused the neighbor to let his field go to weeds, had prevented Zehrfeld himself from bringing in a crop—and profits—for eight years running. So the situation stood: a frustrated, bitter Zehrfeld on one side of the property line, a stubborn, negligent neighbor on the other, and Russian thistles tumbling between them.1 |
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This story illustrates a significant, but overlooked, problem in the land-use history of the American West: the incompatibility of human boundaries and forms of mobile nature—water, soil, and organisms—that those boundaries could not contain.2 In part, Hugo Zehrfeld lived in a regimented landscape in which fences objectified the abstract divisions that separated one parcel of ground from another. The basis for this geography developed long before, when European peoples migrated around the planet, wrested territory from native inhabitants, and engaged in fierce competition to establish property rights in nature. The Great Land Rush, as historian John Weaver has called it, yielded colonized landscapes of increasingly rigid boundaries and tightly controlled spaces.3 In the United States, the 1785 Land Ordinance arranged the nation's western regions into rectangular townships, sections, half-sections, quarter-sections, and acres, a "systematic grid of power," to borrow geographer Derek Gregory's phrase, that enabled the efficient administration, privatization, and control of particular units of land. The grid, for example, delineated plots in which farmers such as Zehrfeld harnessed biological processes—growth, maturation, and decay—in the service of capitalist production. In theory at least, the grid created differentiated, enclosed spaces, a simplified landscape in which the domains of federal, state, and local agencies, corporations, and individual landowners stood apart from one another, autonomous and self-contained.4 Thus, the imposition of straight edges and right angles came to define Hugo Zehrfeld's land and life. |
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