Fear of the Federal Government in the Ranchlands of Oregon

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/m...of-oregon.html

Fear of the Federal Government in the Ranchlands of Oregon

Two years after the standoff at the Malheur Refuge, many people in the region remain convinced that their way of life is being trampled.

By JENNIFER PERCY
JAN. 18, 2018

I took the eastern route from Idaho, on a day of freezing rain, over the Strawberry Mountains, into the broad John Day River Basin, in Oregon. I was used to empty places. Most of my childhood was spent in this region of eastern Oregon, in remote areas of the sagebrush desert or in the volcanic mountains with their jagged peaks and old-growth forests. My family moved away just before I entered high school, and I never returned; I’ve felt in romantic exile ever since. This part of America that had once belonged to my childhood became the spotlight of national news in the winter of 2016, when the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — an old childhood haunt — became the scene of a cowboy takeover. The takeover began as a protest in the town of Burns after two ranchers were sentenced to prison for arsons on federal land. The ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, caught the attention of the Nevada rancher Ammon Bundy, who thought the punishment unfair. Bundy and a crowd of nearly 300 marchers paraded through Burns, and a splinter group eventually took over the Malheur headquarters. For 41 days, they refused to leave, protesting federal ownership of public lands, which they considered unlawful and abusive. I didn’t understand what had happened since I left, why so many people seemed so disillusioned and angry.

The ground was snow-covered when I visited John Day last winter and the temperature below freezing. I was there to attend a meeting organized by Jeanette Finicum, the widow of LaVoy Finicum, an Arizona rancher who was shot and killed by government agents a year earlier. LaVoy was a leader of the Malheur occupation. He left the refuge for a speaking engagement in John Day with plans to return, but he was shot three times at an F.B.I. roadblock. For that reason, his widow was calling this event “The Meeting That NEVER Happened.”

The town of John Day isn’t much more than a two-lane road through end-of-frontier brick buildings and is barely two square miles in size. A “closed” sign hung from the Ranch and Rodeo Museum, and the only vacancy was at a motel called Dreamers Lodge. Just west of town, off the Journey Through Time Scenic Byway, were the John Day fossil beds, where the remains of saber-toothed tigers and small horses were dug up from 30-million-year-old volcanic ash. To the east, replicas of covered wagons stood on the side of the road.

I pulled up next to a minivan in the parking lot of Americas Best Value Inn. Three women stepped out. The driver wore American flag earrings and a Christmas sweater, her hair piled on her head. She was a candy-company representative in Boise and had driven to John Day with a trunk full of Mentos. “What’s going on with the media is absolute crap,” the driver said. We walked down the street, to the Outpost restaurant, and over lunch, she described what was happening in eastern Oregon as a “truth insurrection.” One of her companions, a delicate, elderly lady with long white hair, told me that she attended protests during the federal siege at Ruby Ridge, followed the killings at Waco and took an interest in the Bundys during the occupation. All three believed the government could come to their homes anytime and shoot them. “Someone please needs to get this story right,” the elderly lady said. When I showed her my tape recorder, she gave me a high five. She figured I couldn’t twist her words now. “Sometimes it happens,” she said. “The truth will end up in The New York Times. But your editors will probably mess it up.” I asked what truth she had in mind. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “LaVoy was not ‘killed’; he was ‘murdered.’ ”

The meeting was up the road at the Grant County Fairgrounds, in a building called the Trowbridge Pavilion, where every summer local residents gathered to show prizewinning livestock. The parking lot was crowded with pickup trucks mounted with Don’t Tread on Me flags and decorated in stickers that read, “LaVoy” or “Not Guilty.” The crowd was all white, a mix of ranchers, farmers, loggers, miners, firefighters and hard-right Mormons from Idaho, Utah and Arizona. There were as many women as men, lots of families and children. People wore T-shirts that read #libertyrevolution. A few dozen self-proclaimed militia members, mostly representatives from the Oath Keepers and the Oregon Three Percenters, were there, as well as members of the Finicum family and the Bundy family. I recognized occupiers from their mug shots. A few people carried guns to show their support of the Second Amendment. Many had traveled from out of state, and some had driven through the night, on bad roads and through dangerous weather, and spent money on hotels and food they could not really afford, they said. Why? They told me their livelihood was at stake.

A long line formed to get in the door, and I started a conversation with Robin Olson and her 18-year-old daughter, Emily. Robin had long hair and bangs that brushed against the frame of her glasses. The Olsons lived in Powell Butte, a town of less than 2,000 people in central Oregon, not far from where I grew up. “This is the West,” she told me. “This is the real West. If only everyone could see it.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“To support the ranchers and farmers who feel like the people they are feeding are trying to destroy them. The people in the cities and suburbs just don’t get it.”

Emily was a member of the Central Oregon Patriots (COP), a conservative grass-roots organization that rose out of the Tea Party. Its members intended to push back against environmental regulations that they believed hindered economic growth. They wanted the local community to make the decisions, not the federal government. “We are not a militia,” Emily said, “but everyone calls us a militia. I’m probably the only person under 60 in the group, and I’ve been called a terrorist. Can you believe it?”

The building was about the size of a gymnasium, and inside an American flag that looked big enough to be a parachute hung behind a small stage equipped with a podium and a projector screen. In exhibit booths, people bought copies of books on patriot ideology, including an end-times novel by LaVoy Finicum and a biography of the rancher Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s father, by Shawna Cox, another Malheur occupier. “The rural people don’t have power to stand up against this mighty army that’s coming up against them,” Cox told me.

The Finicum family sat on one side of the stage and the Bundys on the other. Three members of the Bundy family — Cliven, Ammon and his brother Ryan — were at the Nevada Southern Detention Facility in Pahrump. After the Malheur occupation, 26 of the occupiers were charged with federal conspiracy. The Bundy brothers and five others were acquitted in October 2016, but the Bundys and their father were in detention for their role in a 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at the Bundy ranch. Each faced more than a dozen charges for stopping a federally mandated impoundment of Cliven’s cattle as payment for fines and fees, including conspiracy, assaulting and threatening federal officers and obstruction of justice. Ammon’s mother, Carol, was in attendance at the meeting, as was his wife, Lisa, who had told me she didn’t know that Ammon intended to occupy the refuge until she saw a livestream on YouTube. In the video, her husband stood on the back of a truck bed and told a crowd about his plans. Lisa got Ammon on the phone. “He was like, ‘Just trust me, honey, I wouldn’t have done anything that God didn’t tell me to do.’ ”

About 650 people showed up at the meeting that afternoon, and tens of thousands of viewers watched on Facebook Live. The building was dimly lit, and cold air blew through door. The evening’s M.C. was Trent Loos, a sixth-generation farmer from central Nebraska, best known among patriots for hosting “Loos Tales Podcasts” and “Rural Route Radio,” shows about rural America. Loos wore a red neckerchief and a leather vest over a button-down shirt tucked into jeans that fit snugly over riding boots. He spoke in the quick, clipped manner of an auctioneer.

These patriots were right-wing populists who felt they were losing power. Many in the crowd expressed excitement about President Donald Trump and advocated for the transfer of federal lands to local control. They blamed environmentalists for the decline of rural culture and talked about the Endangered Species Act as a government conspiracy meant to drive ranchers off the land.

LaVoy’s widow, Jeanette Finicum, had thick white hair with a fringe of bangs. Her loose black T-shirt read, “It matters how you stand,” a quote from LaVoy. A pin near her breast read, “I am the virus,” referencing a quote from Oregon’s longtime Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who described the ideology of the occupiers as a virus after they were arrested. She was a soft-spoken mother of 12, and at one point, she stepped onstage to share a video montage that included images of armed federal agents and burning cars, followed by “peaceful” images of cowboys, including LaVoy and Ryan Bundy. “I ask: Who are the real terrorists?” she said to the crowd.

KrisAnne Hall, a 48-year-old lawyer and former prosecutor, was the evening’s keynote speaker. Hall averages 260 speaking engagements a year; the Southern Poverty Law Center once included her on its list of 998 anti-government groups and figures in the United States. She teaches that almost every federal agency, other than the military, is unconstitutional. “Do you think the federal government is out of control?” she asked. “We need to wake up. Nothing needs to happen except America needs to have a revolution of the mind.”

Kate Dalley of a Utah affiliate of Fox News Radio wore heels and a red trench. “I want to talk about truth in media,” she told the crowd. “I know you laugh when I say that, because it’s kind of an oxymoron.” The media, she told us, was controlled and infiltrated, and the scripts were already written by the powers that be. She talked about the history of journalists working for the C.I.A. “They included journalists from The New York Times, Time magazine, which was already bought and sold by the elite anyway, The Washington Post, TV networks like CBS.” Robin Olson leaned forward and gave me a pat on the arm. “It will be O.K.,” she said. “We still like you.”

In a 1992 photograph of America taken from space at night, the land in the Eastern half of the United States resembles a smear of the Milky Way, while the Western half resembles bright star clusters in empty space. A visitor to eastern Oregon would find country covered in sagebrush and juniper, hills painted with belts of ocher, orange, brick-red sand, Mars-like pillars formed by waterfalls and volcanic sludge, glacial lakes, volcanic uplifts, ancient seabeds and between all this, small human settlements: wheat fields, alfalfa farms and cattle ranches. The geographer Paul Starrs writes about the photograph in his essay “An Inescapable Range, or the Ranch as Everywhere.” “The dark space is ranching,” he says. “Ranching’s realm is really, then, definable as being where most people are absent.”

I thought about this photograph when I first returned and began speaking with the people. After only a few generations living here, what made them feel the land so completely belonged to them?

Robin Olson told me that a lot of the region’s thinking about politics in the West originated from a publication called Range magazine. “What you will find,” she told me, “is that it was never about the sage grouse, never about the spotted owl and never about the wolf. It was about getting people off the land.” I asked Robin about the sage grouse, whose population had plummeted from 16 million to a few hundred thousand, and she told me, “I don’t think they are really endangered.” The sage grouse “just happened to live in almost every Western state” and that’s why “the government chose it.”

Range could be found in almost every grocery and tack store in rural Oregon. The glossy quarterly claims a readership of around 170,000, half of them ranchers and farmers in the rural West. Range, its website says, is “devoted to the issues that threaten the West, its people, lands and wildlife,” and it intends to “halt the depletion of a natural resource, the American cowboy.” In an article from 2012, the Endangered Species Act and the spotted owl are described as tools “used by radical environmentalists and government agents to destroy the timber industry in the 1990s.” The publication calls Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” a work of liberal propaganda. It is critical of the concept of global warming and suggests the real concern is global cooling. The magazine published features on the Malheur occupation and articles supporting the Bundys’ fight against the federal control of Western land.

In many ways, it seemed, the people were constructing their ideas of the land upon a fantasy of the past. In the 2003 book “Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed,” Nancy Langston, an environmental historian, writes about how each wave of white settlers to the Malheur ignored the history preceding their own. When Peter French first arrived in 1872, Langston writes, “the place had seemed nearly empty to him, and indeed it was this apparent emptiness that made the watershed such a fine place to establish an empire.” Of course, the land was not empty at all, but belonged to the Paiute Indian tribe, which had been living in the region for at least 13,000 years. In the decades after the land was designated a wildlife refuge in 1908, under the orders of President Theodore Roosevelt, conservationists built dikes, storage dams, canals, ditches and channels, and sprayed rotenone, an aquatic poison, to kill invasive carp. All these manipulations were done to make the Malheur seem wild again, the way it was before white settlers arrived.

In the 1970s, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act shifted the focus of the Bureau of Land Management from resource extraction to conservation. The policy marked the beginning of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a grass-roots revolt among ranchers, loggers and miners against environmental laws, like the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Rural communities believed these new restrictions and regulations undermined their prosperity and shifted the fate of small-town economies into the hands of the federal government. If an endangered species lived on the range, for example, the bureau could decide to cut cattle numbers. Such protections fueled theories that the government was trying to eliminate ranchers to control the land.

The history of Oregon is filled with stories of violent and racist groups. Communes, cults, alternative religious communities, militias: The state has been home to nearly 300 of them since 1856, including the Christian Identity movement, Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and the Roy Masters’ Foundation of Human Understanding. African-Americans were legally barred from residence in Oregon until 1926; the state, according to some historians, was essentially founded as a kind of white utopia. No one in my family, three generations of Oregonians, had ever heard about that.

When my mother revised her understanding of the past, her romance with the West came to an end. A few years ago, she decided to start using the word “genocide” to describe the fate of the American Indians at the hands of white settlers. My grandparents had been involved in cults and fringe religious groups, and my mother and father attended past-life readings. One day she handed me a stack of these readings. On these pages was a story scribbled in the curvy cursive loops of the religious leader who told my mother that she had once been a brave pioneer on the edge of the Western frontier defending hard-won land from the onslaught of Indians.

For many years, my family made it a habit to drive out to places like the Malheur and other remote areas. We carried rock picks. We found artifacts and fossils in the cracked mud of dry lake beds. We searched behind the high school baseball diamond in Fossil for the imprints of ancient ferns and crawled through buildings abandoned by the cult of the Rajneeshee. We saw arrowheads scattered on land where scientists uncovered the bones of ice-age sloths. We dug up an agatized root and dragged it home. We slept under the stars or in a trailer my father sometimes hitched to the truck. My mother filled my backpack with survival gear, and my father always carried a loaded gun. We cut down trees where we saw one; built a fire where we wanted one; slept on the ground in the valleys, among the sagebrush, near Indian burial sites. The eastern Oregon desert felt like a world that belonged to me. I felt antipathy toward visitors; even a lone hiker on the trail felt like a disturbance. In these moments, I figured that I, too, had arrived to an empty place. The rest of the world, the rest of America, were distant news.

If you drive two hours south of John Day on Route 395, you’ll pass 1.7 million acres of Malheur National Forest, and end up in Burns, a town of a few thousand people. Outside Burns, on an old ice-age lake bed, is the ranch of Joe Cronin. In the spring, Cronin’s ranch fills with birds from the neighboring Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: great egrets, trumpeter swans, black crowned night herons.

At 7 a.m. one day last January, there were more tractors on the road than cars. Cattle huddled in the snow-covered fields. I drove beneath a wood ranch gate, fitted with steer horns, and Cronin stepped out of his house to greet me in the driveway. He was a blue-eyed, 68-year-old, with a white goatee, wearing a plaid Elmer Fudd hat, baggy bluejeans and a mossy-oak camo coat with matching gaiters. His wife, Gay, made coffee in the kitchen, and their son Dirk loaded frozen hay bales onto a tractor bed. This was Cronin’s “home ranch,” where he housed his cattle in the winter and provided shelter for their newborns. In the spring, he gathered the cattle in trailers the size of semis and hauled them north, into the Malheur National Forest, where he owned 320 acres of land. He also had a permit that allowed him to graze his cattle for five and a half months of the year, usually June to October, on lands in the Malheur managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Every year he and Gay attended a required meeting to discuss the terms of their permit. Usually, the Forest Service decided how many cattle he could let out on the range and for how long. If an endangered species lived on the federal land, the terms of the permit were subject to change.

Cronin told me that he wasn’t at the Meeting That NEVER Happened because he was advised by his lawyer not to attend. He called the Bundy takeover of the refuge a protest and didn’t see anything wrong with that. He was quiet for a minute. “Well, they probably shouldn’t have taken over that refuge, but what I liked about it was that it got this conversation going about government overreach. People wouldn’t believe it otherwise.” He remembered the day the F.B.I. came to Burns and barricades went up at the courthouse. The school turned into a staging ground. He said the town looked like “something out of that ‘Red Dawn’ movie, for Christ sakes” and that “it was World War III in Harney County.”

Joe and Gay didn’t travel much because the cattle always needed to be looked after. In Burns, they didn’t have a local radio station, and they got their news when they could from television. Cronin didn’t attend college, and the farthest east he had traveled was Boise, Idaho. “I’ve worked out here all my life,” he said. “That’s my degree.” Joe had the sleep cycle of a lumberjack, waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and going to bed around 7 in the evening. It was what his family had always done. In 1955, Joe’s dad took a job at the Edward Hines sawmill, which purchased a 67,400-acre tract of timber in the Malheur National Forest. Burns was a vibrant timber town until around 1973 when the mill started laying off workers, and the unemployment rate in Harney County reached 30 percent. The mill closed after the Forest Service restricted the cutting of old-growth forest in the mid-1990s. For-sale signs went up and people moved away. Cronin graduated from high school in 1968 with about 120 people in his class, and his grandson’s class will graduate with about half that many. The biggest employers in the region are now the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies. Cronin was in the logging business for years, but it was hard to make ends meet. He bought a small ranch in 1994. He started with four cows, and after 10 years those four cows turned into a 600-head operation. He didn’t use antibiotics or hormones, and his cattle were grass-fed, no fertilizers in the field. Each calf was born into his open arms.

After he fed the cows, he took me for a drive on some icy back roads. Near Rattlesnake Creek, we stopped to gaze at a herd of half-starved mule deer. “Our main problem,” he said, “is with the Fish and Wildlife Service.” A few years ago the agency found the bull trout was vulnerable, including on the river that runs through Cronin’s land and determined grazing cattle endangered the fish’s spawning grounds.

“They say the cows are killing the fish,” Cronin said. “I think it’s a vehicle to remove cattle off national forest. I can’t see anything wrong with that river. I think the government science is slanted.” Cronin asked a riparian ecologist who had been at the University of Montana to run an independent analysis of Little Crane Creek, where his livestock grazed. “He said that it was one of the healthiest riparian areas he’s ever studied,” Cronin said. “Excellent shape.” The ecologist sent a copy to Cronin and another to the Forest Service office in John Day. “Never heard anything about it,” Cronin said. “But if I’m hurting that stream, I want to know about it. I just don’t understand it. They are saying the numbers are down. I think there ought to be an independent study. We just get the feeling that the science is out of touch all together.”

Cronin’s friend David Torrence came up the road in a pickup. People called him “Big Hat.” He wore a gray hoodie and a pretty big hat. There were two Chihuahuas in the passenger seat. He and Cronin caught up on the weather and chatted about the bald eagles in the canyon. “The Forest Service didn’t let us haul logs in the canyon,” Cronin told me, “because of those birds. They said the trucks were waking up the birds. Look at all of them.”

Big Hat asked about me. Cronin looked my way. “Should I say it?” he said. He meant my New York Times affiliation. Big Hat got out of his truck, stuck his sun-wrinkled face in the open window and folded his arms over the door. He asked about the meeting I attended in John Day. “Was there any violence or anything?” he said.

“There was no violence,” I said.

“You know, Trump,” Big Hat said, “he has been having all this with the media, you know? How they twist [expletive] up and everything? I was watching the news, and it showed a local reporter who was at the meeting. She told Jeanette [Finicum] she was expecting violence and demonstrations, you know? Jeanette was all teary-eyed, and she said: ‘Hey, we are not outlaws. We are not criminals. We are full-blooded American ranchers. We don’t want no violence.’ ” He pointed at me. “You people are talking about violence and the meeting hasn’t even started? We just think that the government got too much control.” He opened his mouth and shook his head. “We just want to live our lives.”

“I told her my story,” Cronin said. “I get up at 3 a.m. and start watching Fox News. I’m so pissed off by 5 o’clock, it’s time to go to work.”

“Hey, hey,” Big Hat said. “Fox News is a good channel.” Big Hat said he voted as a Democrat until Donald Trump’s election. “Trump has been the best guy we’ve dealt with in 30 years,” Big Hat said. “I voted for Trump. But all my sisters and stuff are all pissed off at me because I’d been a Democrat.”

Cronin switched parties because of gun control in the ’80s. “I went right up to the courthouse and changed to a Republican.” He tapped the gun on the dashboard: a .22 Magnum he’d packed for 30 years. “I don’t have a permit to carry concealed,” he said. “I’m one of those guys who wants you to see my goddamn gun. See where it’s at. Almost put it away for you but thought, No, she just needs to see me the way I am. It’s part of our lifestyle.”

Cronin brushed some hay from his shoulder. “Now,” he said, “I know The New York Times, they don’t like anything Trump does. When he was elected though, oh, my God, maybe something will start happening to help us out here. I’m just looking at natural-resource uses. Out here, no one has ever done anything for us. We are saying what’s happening and nobody is listening and nobody cares. Nobody back East loses one second of sleep over two ranchers. They said we’re bad guys.”

Later that day, Cronin and his wife took me to see the spot where LaVoy Finicum was shot. There were elk tracks in the thickets and ice on the roads. He pointed out the dying trees with bare branches and yellow needles. “The forest doesn’t look like this on our property,” he said. “The government’s side of the fence looks like [expletive].”

Cronin stopped the truck. He pointed to a smear of red spray paint in the snow.

“That’s probably where he died right there.”

My childhood home of Tumalo lies at the meeting point between the foothills of the Cascade Range and the high desert. When I was a kid, the town had less than 500 people, a post office, a hamburger joint and a gas station. Tumalo was like a border town between one kind of Oregon and another, between the foothills of the central Cascades and the rural high desert of the east.

My parents ended up here only because they were hippies who wanted to live off the land. My induction to the land began with my parents, but my introduction to the culture began at Tumalo Elementary School. The kids were sons of farmers and ranchers, and they wore work boots to school and talked about their heads of cattle, their prize livestock for breeding, their acres of wheat. I wanted nothing more than to become like them. After school, I attended 4-H meetings, learned to shoot a rifle and traveled door to door with my Christian friend to warn neighbors that if they didn’t believe in Jesus they might burn in hell. Despite my efforts, I never felt fully part of the culture. I tried to hide my liberal parents, who refused to buy me livestock, any livestock, for 4-H competitions. I was stuck showing guinea pigs. Every week I visited the guinea-pig lady’s house to learn how to brush and clean prizewinning rodents. At the fair, my guinea pig won nothing. In fifth grade, I wanted to try rodeo. All the kids started with mutton busting, which meant sitting on a sheep while it ran. I tried riding a sheep that my friend found in a field, but I got bucked from it and broke my wrist. After that, the kids praised me. I associate those years most fondly with thrill and violence: that wrist bone I cracked beneath the weight of a sheep, the electric horse fence I gripped in the rain, the day I put my hand inside a pregnant, laboring sheep and pulled out a living creature.

After a three-hour drive west on Highway 20, I was back in Tumalo. It was still a quaint town, dotted with juniper trees, centered on the general store, but it had been overtaken by a fancy coffee house and a yoga studio. I wanted to cry. I visited my elementary school and took a few pictures of the playground, but a man chased me off. I felt a kind of native antipathy toward Bend, which had more than doubled in population since I was a kid and spurred the growth of nearby towns.

That week, Robin Olson, from the meeting in John Day, had invited me to a high-school wrestling match in Redmond, not far from Tumalo. It was Crook County versus Redmond, longtime rivals. The gymnasium of Redmond High School was dark. The bleachers were crowded with ranchers, miners and loggers. A single lamp hung over a vinyl wrestling mat. Some of these kids get up at 4 a.m. to work the ranch, go to school and then wrestle at night. I’d been to this gymnasium before to watch family and friends wrestle on the mat.

Robin’s nephew was going to wrestle that night. She told me that they had been on their way to a wrestling tournament at Burns during the occupation at the wildlife refuge the night her son, Daniel, decided he wanted to meet Ammon Bundy. They drove to Malheur, and Daniel asked Bundy to autograph a pocket constitution. At the gym, about halfway through the night, her nephew stepped onto the mat. The Crook County boys pointed their arms at the mat to send energy into the fight. “It’s not so much wrestling,” Olson explained, “as it is a religious experience.” The boys grabbed at each other, wiggled in and out of headlocks. Their skin was luminous with sweat. In the end, her nephew walked off defeated.

“We are just out here trying to survive,” Olson told me. “We have been preserving the land for the last 100 years, but now you are telling us we won’t preserve it? How do we get along with the people who are trying to take away everything precious to us?”

Robin’s daughter Emily had been an active member of 4-H. She once competed in the Crook County Fair. In 2014, she went to New York City for a choir trip, and she thought it was “all right.” Most Thursday nights, Emily attended a Central Oregon Patriots meeting at the Calvary Baptist Church off Main Street in Prineville. On Feb. 2, I joined Emily there, along with her mother and her grandparents. It was snowing and 15 below zero. The wind burned your skin. The adult Bible-study room where we gathered was warm and brightly lit. The walls were covered in Jesus posters.

A couple of dozen members sat around foldout tables set with vinyl tablecloths. They recited the Pledge of Allegiance and said a prayer thanking God for this day and for the snow. The group had been meeting for six years and every year held a raffle. They raffled a gun once in a while and a freezer full of meat at Christmas. On the Fourth of July they handed out pocket constitutions. Tom Case, the chairman of the group, crossed his arms. “You might have heard we are a militia,” he said to me. He pointed to Darlene, a woman in her 70s with short gray hair and large prescription glasses. “She’s a dangerous lady,” he said. “You should see her with a broom in her hands.” Everybody in the room laughed.

“Another thing you might hear,” Darlene said, “is that we are trying to take land away from the federal government, and we are not. We just want to work with them. See, if you’re a patriot, you’re automatically evil. You’ve seen that. Look around the table. A lot of us know how to shoot a gun, but that’s about it.”

“Oregon Wild would say we are a shadow government,” Case said. Oregon Wild, a conservation group, had lobbied to expand wilderness and recreation areas in the 845,000-acre Ochoco National Forest near Prineville. The potential of that forest as an engine of economic growth gnawed at the members. To fight federal regulations in the Ochoco forest, the patriots helped form a political-action committee that drafted a proposal called the Crook County Natural Resources Plan, which argued for “coordination,” a process that would allow state, county and other lower-level governments to give input to federal agencies’ land-use plans. The 59-page resource plan favored extractive use of public lands, called for no reduction in cattle numbers, asked that forests be logged following a wildfire and requested that lands previously open to mining remain open.

“We have to do everything we can to preserve our culture and community,” another said, “so that we all don’t fade away to Portland for a job.”

A woman named Kristin Thomas told us she was new to the patriots. She was a vegetarian with long blond hair who read Shakespeare and had attended Juilliard for stage acting.

Thomas shared a story about her father’s life as a commercial fisherman on the Indian River in Florida. She told us that his business collapsed after the “ban the nets” movement that eliminated the use of gill nets in the 1990s. “The media twisted everything,” she said, “saying that my father caught dolphins and sea turtles in his nets. We took care of our river, and we didn’t overfish, but we were always the bad guys. The day after ‘ban the nets,’ my dad’s best friend died of a heart attack, one of my friends hung himself, another shot himself.” The room was quiet. Darlene jumped in with her own story. The Forest Service was going to shut down a ranger station that she had visited every year since she was a child. She lifted her glasses and wiped her eyes.

After the meeting ended, the patriots drove to McDonald’s, as they did every Thursday night, because it was the only restaurant open past 9 p.m. They pushed tables together and ate soft-serve ice cream. Everyone ordered vanilla.

Robin and Emily were headed home to Powell Butte and suggested that I follow them on the Ochoco Highway until it intersected with Highway 20. Emily rode with me in my passenger seat. When we reached the intersection, Olson called Emily and said she was going to lead me through the snowstorm, to Burns. I tried to stop her. “It’s too late,” Emily said. “She’s going all the way.”

We drove for hours through the dark. I could see nothing ahead but the churning snow and the distant glow of brake lights. The road was straight and flat and populated by rabbits. We heard a thump. “I killed something,” I said. Emily smiled. “Don’t worry about the bunny,” she said.

Nearly half the state of Oregon appeared to be on fire when I returned in August. Megafires were burning nearly 300,000 acres of forest, and the skies turned a sickly yellow hue in the evening.

The Forest Service offices for the Malheur National Forest are on the outskirts of John Day in a building decorated with big topographical maps, Smokey Bear posters and replicas of old skulls in glass viewing cases. The office worked with 60 ranchers, including Joe Cronin. When I sat down with Steve Beverlin, the forest supervisor for the Malheur National Forest, I asked about the ranchers who didn’t trust the government. Beverlin looked surprised. “None of our permittees attended the Finicum event in John Day,” he said. “Our employees all have a good relationship with all the permittees. They don’t talk like that. They recognize the laws of the United States.”

I told Beverlin that I’d spent time with one of his permittees, and he did talk like that. Beverlin asked who it was, and I told him it was Joe Cronin. He shrugged. It was the first he’d heard of it. I asked about Cronin’s riparian report. He said they probably had it somewhere. “The split caused by the Bundys in Burns will take generations to heal,” he told me.

That week, Cronin was out at his summer range, deep in the Malheur National Forest with his cows, sleeping in an old homesteader’s cabin. Blue and violet-colored sagebrush spread east, north, south and west. The nights were cold. There was no internet, no cellphone service, no potable water. The bathroom was an outhouse. It was about as desolate a spot as you could find.

I met Cronin and Gay in the town of Seneca, population 197, and followed them down an old logging road for two hours into the woods. Along the way, Cronin stopped his truck, got out and pointed at a sign. “Now,” he said, “I want you to pay attention to this.” The sign reminded fishermen to release bull trout, which have been listed as “threatened,” or they would be fined. That was all. Cronin climbed back into his truck.

The landscape shifted from dark forests to sunlit meadows. About every half-hour we came across a gathering of cows. There was one spot on a hill where cellphones picked up service. Cronin ran to it in his spurs and cowboy hat, stood on the highest point and caught up on some business. Gay sat in my rental car and led me the rest of the way, over washboard roads that turned into something like a dry riverbed, clotted with boulders and jagged rock. We barely made it.

Cronin called the settlement Cow Camp. It was a mix of trailers, trucks, old farm equipment and homesteader shacks. He and Gay slept in the original homestead, a one-room cabin. The wood was gray and cracked. Sparrows built nests in the awnings and small animals burrowed beneath a sagging fence. Inside, bright, buttery pine boards covered the walls. There was a queen bed with a quilt and two gun racks.

Cronin searched for his glasses and smoothed a topographical map of the Malheur National Forest over the top of the dining table. On the map, his private property, 320 acres, was marked in blue. It was a small island in a sea of green, which was the public land where he had a grazing permit. Cronin’s allotment of grazing land was divided into eight pastures, and the North Fork of the Malheur River ran through one pasture called Mountain Unit.

The Forest Service had just started limiting use on one of Cronin’s pastures to protect bull-trout habitat. The agency wanted Cronin to keep his cattle out of the creek, which is an important spawning grounds for the fish. Cronin tried, but he couldn’t keep the cows out unless he fenced off the whole pasture. He needed that pasture if the calves were going to gain enough weight. Cronin asked the agency if he could fence off the creek instead, and they agreed. But then he would have to find another water source. There were springs running beneath the ground that would be easy enough to dig up. But he needed permission and the process would take months.

“If they are going to take away my permit,” he said. “I’ll tell them I disagree with that, without just compensation. O.K., are you going to compensate me for it? Do you want to buy from us so we are never on there again?”

Cronin sat down and pulled off his boots. The hardships of ranching showed in his body. Cronin had cracked his neck when a horse bucked him, and two months later he was hit by a tree branch and suffered a concussion.

“I just don’t believe the science,” he said.

He turned to his wife. “What do you think, Gay? Do you think the bull trout is endangered?”

“If they were endangered,” she said, “they wouldn’t be able to go out and count them.”

Joe Cronin said he contacted Trent Loos, the radio host and M.C. of the meeting in John Day, to talk about regulations on federal land. “I hear that Loos has Trump’s ear,” Cronin told me, “so Trump will know some of the issues out here we’re dealing with.”

For dinner, Cronin cooked a beef brisket the size of a football on an outdoor grill and talked about global warming. In elementary school, the teachers told him that the earth might plunge into another ice age, and the news had scared him, but then the ice age never happened. He thought it would be the same with global warming: It would never happen. He mentioned the petrified oak trees dug up nearby, and he said that oak trees only grow in warm climates. “The point is,” he said, “a million years ago it was a hell of a lot warmer climate then than now.”

Cronin poured meat juice on his dogs’ food. “You got to get that Range magazine,” he said. “This article on why global warming was a farce had graphs and everything.” In the article, the author accused scientists of installing temperature-monitoring devices near asphalt to record higher temperatures. “I assume it’s all fact-checked,” Cronin said.

The day before, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. A man named James Fields drove into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed a 32-year-old woman. I said that the white supremacists had seemed to channel Trump’s vision of America. Had it shifted Cronin’s thinking at all?

He and Gay had been out on the range and hadn’t heard about the event.

That night I slept in a R.V. trailer next to the cabin. Inside was a cowboy hat, a handgun and some soiled clothes. Cronin told me the wolves in the area didn’t always kill to eat but left whole carcasses behind. I didn’t sleep well. During the night, a fog rolled over Cow Camp, and in the morning before the sun rose, I could barely see. I heard Cronin in the corral, getting the horses ready to ride. They were running in circles. When the sun came out, the fog brightened and it looked heavy like smoke. Cronin was inside it, waving at me. It looked like a dream, like we were all burning alive.

The writer William Kittredge was raised on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon and later spent 30 years as a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. He writes about being born into the ranching culture, loving that culture but also making the decision to leave it. He had many misgivings about “ruining” the Warner Valley, where his ranch was located. People in his hometown considered him a traitor for what he wrote. In his 1996 book, “Who Owns the West,” Kittredge calls for a change in mentality: “We have taken the West for about all it has to give. We have lived like children, taking and taking for generations, and now the childhood is over.”

In October, the Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, and his team announced their intent to amend 98 science-based sage-grouse management plans in 10 states, a plan that favored resource extraction over conservation. Trent Loos was selected as a member of Trump’s agricultural-advisory team, a committee of rural representatives that intends to mobilize support in communities and reduce environmental regulations. In December, Trump announced the largest federal land reduction in United States history, including almost half of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Escalante’s once-seamless expanse of protected land was divided into three separate monuments.

Kristen Thomas, the member of the Central Oregon Patriots from Florida, had written a letter to Ammon Bundy in prison, and he’d written back. She had chatted to Ryan Bundy over a livestream while he sat in prison. She loved listening to the Bundy boys talk, she told me when we spoke on the phone this summer. “We’ve grown a lot deeper,” she said. “The movement is solidifying.” Thomas had been learning about F.B.I.-informant behavior, training, tactics and goals — how to go in and implode a movement, how to create chaos, how to divide a people — because she believed the patriot movement had been infiltrated. “We are not raping the environment,” she said. “We are not doing the things you are accusing us of doing.”

On Jan. 8, almost a year after the rally in John Day, the Bundys walked free. They had been on trial in Las Vegas for 11 months, before Judge Gloria M. Navarro dismissed the case, citing the federal prosecution’s and the F.B.I.’s “flagrant misconduct” and “deliberate attempts to mislead and distort the truth.” The prosecution withheld more than 1,000 pages from the defense, which included reports that federal snipers surrounded the Bundy family as Bureau of Land Management agents prepared to impound their cattle and that F.B.I. surveillance cameras recorded the Bundy home. Thomas felt vindicated. “I think the Bundys have woken up a lot of people experiencing different versions of federal oppression,” she told me. “If we pull back and make a smaller federal government, we won’t have as many problems. When the feds have all the power, look at what they do.”

In August, I met Emily and Robin Olson for dinner at Tastee Treet, a vintage hamburger joint in Prineville. We sat in a red vinyl booth, and Robin ordered a bacon cheeseburger and a root-beer float, which Emily described as her mother’s “last meal,” meaning the meal Robin would choose if she knew it would be her final one. While Robin ate, she reflected on the landscape she witnessed on a road trip in July. They drove 5,600 miles through 10 Western states in two weeks. They tried to hit every Western state but missed California and Utah. They never passed a town of more than 20,000 until they reached Fort Collins, in Colorado. “The rural United States, it’s like eastern Oregon,” she said, “and that’s like the entire world.”

They visited Yellowstone National Park and saw, they said, two million acres of natural resources gone to waste. “At least one day a year,” Robin said, “we ought to be able to go in and take advantage.”

Emily thought the trees were too close together. “Didn’t look healthy,” she said, “because they don’t log.”

“And look at all those buffalo,” Robin said. “Can’t some of them be used for meat?”

“You wanted to eat them?” I said.

“I was looking at the buffalo and just seeing a steak,” she said.
Robin was disappointed in Yellowstone, but she remained hopeful about Trump. “A lot of conservatives were concerned that he wouldn’t be conservative enough.” At home Robin saved a copy of The Bulletin, a local paper in the liberal-leaning town of Bend, with the headline “Trump Victory” because it gave her “energy” to look at it. “Sometimes I look at that headline and think, Right, yes, I feel good.”

Two ranchers, a young husband and wife, walked into Tastee Treet and sat down behind us. They were friends of Robin. “Hey, do you guys like The New York Times?” Robin asked.

The husband told me that his son came home from school one day and informed him that cow flatulence was contributing to global warming. “No, it’s just the climate cycle,” he told his son. Emily had had the same teacher. “When I learned her teacher was doing stuff on global warming,” Robin said, “that fired me up.” Robin asked for five minutes of class time to give a counterargument.

“I think if people are honest,” Robin said, “they look at all this and think black helicopters and tinfoil hats, but if you really go deeper, you’ll ask: ‘What are they doing to take away the forestry, logging and timber industry? What are they doing to take away farming?’ ”

“Too much to be a coincidence,” Emily said. “The spotted owls, the wolves, the sage grouse, the cougar, the frogs.”

I tried to suggest a lack of understanding between rural and urban people, but Robin stopped me. “No,” she said. “We just want different things.” The statement was cold and clear. It suggested the end of reconciliation. “We don’t want you breathing down our back,” she said. “Bottom line is we don’t trust you. We don’t trust you to look out for our best interests. And in truth we don’t even know that you know how to. A lot of people were saying this was about saving the bunnies and butterflies, but that’s not what this is about.”

Robin sat over her empty plate. “It’s about getting people off the land,” she said. “It’s dark.”

Jennifer Percy is a contributing writer for the magazine whose last feature, about Japanese families searching for their loved ones after the 2011 tsunami, won a National Magazine Award.

And it's "interesting" that the general area is mentioned ...



... relevant to the discussion of current events and nuclear explosions.

Dilbert as a q, WHY do you seem to always have to quote teh entire article?? THEN LINK IT? Do one or the other, NOT both.. Reading though a mountain of text is getting annoying..

Dilbert as a q, WHY do you seem to always have to quote teh entire article?? THEN LINK IT? Do one or the other, NOT both.. Reading though a mountain of text is getting annoying.. Originally Posted by garhkal

some websites like new york times, wall street journal has a paywall. not everyone can get to read the article behind the paywall.

getting past the paywall is a bit tricky. it depends on what website you're coming from.

so, its why we try to post when appropriate.

Interesting read. However, the author's assessment of what happened in Charlottesville lets the reader know she has a congenital, lib-retard bias.

Originally Posted by eccieuser9500

Keep following your loser, icky used.

And it's "interesting" that the general area is mentioned ...

... relevant to the discussion of current events and nuclear explosions. Originally Posted by LexusLover

Some people just don't get it.

Some people just don't get it. Originally Posted by eccieuser9500

which is what?

That was a good read. It could have been added to one of several threads already started on this subject.

some websites like new york times, wall street journal has a paywall. not everyone can get to read the article behind the paywall.

getting past the paywall is a bit tricky. it depends on what website you're coming from.

so, its why we try to post when appropriate. Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm

Then why only link that story from said 'paywall blocked' site?? Are the stories not reprinted elsewhere?

Then why only link that story from said 'paywall blocked' site?? Are the stories not reprinted elsewhere? Originally Posted by garhkal

that depends on with the originating media. I think media like the NYT or WSJ have contracts with certain websites permitting reprints or free viewing. if they want the article on their site, they have to pay for its use.

for example, I find an interesting link to an article at another website, Realclear.com but I can't read it as there's a paywall at the site of the article. so what I do is copy the link to google and google provides a link to that article that I can read. it works most of the time, but not always.

a site may have link to the article, but its still blocked.

some browsers have an extension that lets you bypass a websites paywall.