Pipe Spring National Monument is establishing a native vegetation plot reminiscent of the grasslands of the Arizona Strip before the 1850s by removing over-abundant shrubs such as four-wing saltbush and sagebrush and planting native grasses and forbs to encourage a diverse plant community. About 150 years ago, the Arizona Strip supported a varied high-desert mix of grasses, forbs, and brush that fed antelope, deer, and rabbits, provided subsistence foods for native peoples, and supplied seeds collected by the Southern Paiute with finely woven basketry. The abundance of desert grasses also attracted cattle and sheep ranchers, but by the 1870s and 1880s Clarence E. Dutton of the United States Geological Survey wrote that grasses once covering the desert south of the spring had nearly vanished within ten miles of it because increasing aridity and cattle grazing destroyed the pasturage before seeds could mature. A letter from Jacob Hamblin to John W. Powell in 1880 likewise said that sunflowers, luxuriant grasses, and many other native food plants had been eaten out by stock.