Pretty easy to lecture someone on honor when he won’t abide by the agreements that made his state something other than federal territory in the first place.
Also pretty easy to lecture that just because “they” were dishonorable doesn’t justify your dishonor.
Quite honestly, even the title of this thread is misleading. Utah would not be anything other than federal territory but for the federal governments decision to allow the formation of a new state. Thus, Utah has no property inside or outside its borders other than what it was allowed to have when it became a state, so Utah does in fact have control over all the property that became Utah property; it’s not entitled to control what was never its property to begin with.
Not one agreement has survived its becoming inconvenient for the Federal Government, the States be damned.
Not one treaty with the indigenous people, and any time the Feds want to virtue signal, they cut off another million acres or so from being harvested, either timber, minerals, or even oil, declare it a National Monument or wilderness area, and some cannot even be driven through.
No other part of the country, except Alaska is subject to such sweeping and capricious edicts. Justify that bullshit in your own mind, but it is the difference that makes for people out west as seeing the Federal Government not as a protector or provider, but a ravening pack of wolves come to eat out our substance.
Those lands removed from productivity become a drain on their respective States, patches of tinder, awaiting fires that are made more difficult to fight by policy enacted from thousands of miles away. Last year a little smoke in the East caused pearl clutching and the vapors, but here in North Dakota we annually get smoke so thick you can't see 1/4 mile through it, from parts of Western Montana and the Pacific Northwest burning. I guess things that people would not put up with in Eastern States are okay to dump on us. Two tiers, yes, vassal states, not equals. There is a long list of convenient 'justifications' for everything from planting a nuclear arsenal in the prairie and making us first strike targets to saying we can't cut that particular precious tree, but it is a burden we unilaterally bear, and one summarily overridden by political and pseudoscientific considerations when convenient for the more populated states. It's damned one sided. When we can dictate whether you can use water or cut a tree or dig a hole in the ground, we'll talk about equality and agreements, and not until.
