The state of Texas is, to put it mildly, one heck of a vast expanse of land. To wit, ours is, by a fairly long shot, the largest of the contiguous United States and, among them all, second only to behemoth Alaska. For illustrative purposes, consider that within the 268,596 square miles of Texas that spread out between Perryton, in the Panhandle; Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley; El Paso, in far West Texas; and Orange, in the Golden Triangle of southeast Texas, you could squeeze almost fifty whole Connecticuts. And, believe the Texanist or not, the state could also encompass nearly 175 Rhode Islands, though that’s not really saying a whole bunch, as the mighty King Ranch alone is almost the same size as the Ocean State.
Amid this impressive abundance, however, is a relative scarcity of publicly accessible land. You’ve probably come across the stat at one point or another: More than 96 percent of Texas is privately owned. This makes us an outlier, especially among other big states. Alaska is more than 95 percent public, almost exactly the opposite of the case in Texas. And the land in most Western states is around 50 percent public or greater. California is 49 percent publicly owned, and Oregon comes in at 55 percent. The national average is around 60–40 private-public, respectively. Texas also ranks a mere thirty-fifth in the nation for the number of state park acres per capita (an improvement from a few decades ago, when it was a dismal forty-ninth). When you measure the percent of public land by total acreage, only Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska are behind us.
But how exactly did this lopsided state of affairs come to be? For answers, let’s go back to Texas’s early origins, when Spaniards, Mexicans, Republic-era Texans, and, finally, American Texans ruled the enormous roost.
Because of our colorful history—Texas having, at various times, been claimed by Spain and Mexico and then the independent Republic of Texas, the Lone Star State is a unique case amid the rest of the Union as it relates to public lands. And due to Texas’s outsized size and scant early population, its land was long seen as both a good way to attract immigrants and a primary source of revenue. As such, land in the public domain was used for a variety of transactional purposes by each of our successive governments; the Spanish crown, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas all issued various types of land grants through the years, to the tunes of millions and millions of acres.
Still, in 1845, when Texas entered the Union as the twenty-eighth state, it did so with a whole lot of land. Before 1850, Texas was much bigger than it is today, at one time even reaching all the way up into Wyoming and including portions of present-day Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Texas also had $10 million in debt, which it attempted to remedy by way of its large public domain. The terms of Texas’s annexation treaty with the United States initially proposed trading 175 million acres for the U.S.’s assumption of the $10 million debt, to which Uncle Sam said, “No dice.” So Texas entered the Union with all of its land and all of its debt intact.
The Compromise of 1850, as anybody who made it through seventh grade Texas history can attest, finally settled most all unsettled debt issues. Texas ceded its claim to those tens of millions of acres that reached up to Wyoming, and in return, the U.S. ponied up $10 million in federal bonds. Texas made good on its obligations and still retained almost 100 million acres of public land, which was a unique situation among the states. Until then, only the original thirteen colonies had been allowed to retain control of their public lands upon being granted statehood. So in most states, the federal government ended up with control of a much higher percentage of land than in Texas, and the feds were a lot more likely to conserve and protect land than was the state government. Texas lawmakers saw land as an endless commodity, and they unloaded lots of it through efforts to attract settlers, build infrastructure, fund schools, and the like. Construction of the Texas Capitol was, in the 1880s, essentially traded for the 3 million acres of Panhandle land that became the famed XIT Ranch, for instance.
Texas has, going back to prestatehood days, managed to unload more than 200 million acres of its lands, and today the once vast public domain has dwindled to some 22 million acres, not all of which is accessible to the public, of course.
When the Texanist asked Jeff Francell, the director of land protection for the Texas chapter of the Nature Conservancy, about Texas’s dearth of public land, he echoed the thumbnail historical sketch the Texanist provided above. He also noted the uniqueness of Texas’s situation at the time of its annexation. “Other states, especially in the West, had huge amounts of unclaimed land that became federally owned,” he said. “This land was later turned into national forests, national parks, and land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and was mostly made available to the public.”
Francell then made a good point by noting that in the late nineteenth century, when Texas was using its land to attract new Texans, pay off debt, and do public works such as building our impressive Capitol, few people considered the recreational possibilities of our public holdings—or the importance of usage to such ends. The American conservation movement was in its infancy, and the very idea of conservation for the betterment of the public didn’t exactly jibe with the mythic yet real individualism for which Texans are—for better or worse—still known. State leaders, too, have long been less than champions of the cause.
As a result, whether Texans today, who are, by the way, overwhelmingly city dwellers, have easy access to nature depends in part upon privilege and class. Though the Texanist grew up in semi-bustling Temple, he was lucky to have endless opportunities to enjoy the great outdoors, or semi-great outdoors. The home in which he spent his youth was situated on Temple’s southern outskirts, and very nearby was old man Wendland’s wooded property, where, via innocent trespass, there was plentiful fishing, frog gigging, and critter trapping. The Texanist also spent countless hours traipsing along Bird Creek, exploring, relaxing, and smoking the abundant grapevine stems. And then, too, the Texanist’s family had a modest spread situated on the Little River, a short drive south. Here there was camping, fishing, hunting, and more exploring, but also plenty of forced (by the Texanist’s dad) labor, which consisted mostly of mesquite clearing.
Old man Wendland’s land, though, belonged to old man Wendland. And the banks of Bird Creek, upon which the Texanist freely roamed, belonged to sundry Temple home- and business owners. Plus, as great as it all was to a young boy with an admittedly limited worldview, these wild places paled in comparison to the actual great outdoors. Later in his life, the Texanist would have the opportunity to explore Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Padre Island National Seashore, Big Bend National Park, and, eventually, Big Bend Ranch State Park, which was added to the state’s parks system in 1988, when its massive 212,000 acres (now more than 300,000 acres) doubled Texas’s state park holdings.
Having access to the great outdoors, the real great outdoors, such as the beautiful locales provided to Texans via our park systems, is more than just a luxury. Rodney Franklin, a 33-year veteran of Texas Parks and Wildlife who serves as the current state parks director, explained it to the Texanist in simple terms. “It’s important to remember that access to the outdoors is good for people physically, emotionally, and mentally,” Franklin said. “It’s just good for overall health and human well-being.”
Franklin then turned his attention to the future and to future Texans, noting that our already massive population of 30 million is expected to reach 50 million by 2050. “It’s important for us to really increase the opportunity for people to get outside here in the state of Texas,” Franklin said. To that end, he praised recent efforts to increase the state’s parklands, noting the passage of a constitutional amendment in 2019 that fully dedicated sales tax revenue from certain sporting goods to Parks and Wildlife’s parks division and to the Texas Historical Commission. Franklin and his fellow conservationists are also optimistic about the recent overwhelming passage of Proposition 14, which, for the occasion of Parks and Wildlife’s hundredth anniversary, created the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund, a $1 billion dedicated funding stream for acquiring and developing state parks. “That’s a billion dollars that will help ensure that we can grow our state parks,” Francell said, noting the tremendous bipartisan support the amendment received. “People in Texas love our land. They overwhelmingly support that, no matter what their politics are.”
So, while almost all of the vast expanse of Texas land does rest in private hands, the public’s ability to access nature is improving. And that’s a good thing for all Texans, including the likes of old man Wendland and those Bird Creek property owners back in Temple, to whom the Texanist would now like to apologize for his past trespasses.
