In his rebuttal to Gale Dick about Western public lands myths ("History is on the side of the Sagebrush Rebellion," Opinion, June 28), Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, charges Dick with several "fallacies" before hurling himself into two of them: selective history and contextual deviance.

His baseless claim is that the U.S. Constitution grants the states the land within them, but Easterners stole it and won't give it back. This is a curiously Western whine, erupting most predictably when the White House moves into more moderate hands.

And it's not new. In the middle of the last century, Western stock growers sought to snatch Western forest grazing lands. Utah native Bernard DeVoto, through his column in Harper's magazine, launched a lonely crusade against what he called a land grab -- the biggest ever. DeVoto won that round, but the clamor to eliminate public lands continued.

In 1964, the Congress chartered the Public Land Law Review Commission to comprehensively review land laws and federal agencies' policies and practices. It was scarcely an Eastern cabal. Colorado Rep. Wayne Aspinall, quintessential Westerner, was its chairman. When the commission issued its report in 1970, of 12 congressional representatives, all six senators and three of six House members were Westerners. (Interestingly, one was Rep. Laurance J. Burton, like Bishop a Republican representing Utah's First Congressional District.)

The PLLRC recommended "retaining in Federal ownership those [lands] whose values must be preserved so that they may be used and enjoyed by all Americans." The commission also recommended that "No additional grants should be made to any of the 50 states."

The PLLRC likely led directly to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 which also directed that "the public lands be retained in Federal ownership."

None of this fazes Rep. Bishop. He relies for most of his argument on the Constitution's Article IV and, as he interprets it, the mandate that "public lands shall be sold by the United States." A fairer reading of that language, and in context, suggests that "shall" is meant to condition a possibility rather than dictate an action: "if you sell them," not "sell them now."

Bishop understandably doesn't bother to mention the plain language of Utah's statehood act, reiterated in the state Constitution, by which the state renounced "all claim to unappropriated federal lands within its boundaries."

Even bizarre constitutional theories often land in the federal courts. Bishop's has and has repeatedly failed.

All this seems persuasive enough to settle the matter. It won't, of course. That, ultimately, is the mystery: that sentient people would oppose the very existence of public lands, open to and managed for all of us. Those lands are the great glory of the American West, something to be valued, not vilified. They are what keep native-born Westerners here, or bring us back, and lure countless others to share them.

Not a Utah native, Wallace Stegner came to love Utah's people and its places. He said this of one such place, the Robbers' Roost country ofWayne County:

"It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it."

Though his subject was wilderness, Stegner was speaking of public land. He was speaking for most Americans. And he spoke for me.

Darrell Knuffke is chair of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.