Last round-up for the Bundy clan

The party is over

I clearly remember reading about Cliven Bundy almost 20 years ago. The news report, I forget now from where, probably in the excellent New West newspaper, High Country News. It was one of those pieces of news that make you shake your head and wonder if you got it right. It might have been an example of false equivalency, where the reporter made it sound as if Bundy had a valid point. How was it possible that a guy was keeping federal authorities from doing their job by threatening violence? How was it possible that he was illegally grazing cattle on public land, threatening the desert tortoise, a protected endangered species, and getting away with it? What century were we talking about here?

Bundy continued to get away with making his own law at gunpoint. There were two subsequent federal court verdicts which he was able to somehow ignore with impunity. Tim DeChristopher technically broke the law in a no-harm no-foul no-guns way and spent 2 years in federal prison., but Bundy remained free. There was no arrest warrant, no lien on his property, no word from the Department of Justice, or FBI, or from Department of Interior that anything was going to be done. Clearly the code of the West was one of unequal justice. Environmentalists go to jail on any technicality. White males in cowboy hats go free.

In April 2014 the Bureau of Land Management finally tried to round up Bundy's federally trespassing cows. Astonishingly they were driven off by hundreds of armed ranchers and cowboys. This kind of conflict is an old story in the West that won't seem to go away. The best summary out there is by Christopher Ketcham, a modern Bernard DeVoto and writing in the same magazine as DeVoto did. The U.S. Government backed off, left the cows to the outlaw cowboys, and again did nothing.

The law seems to be different in the Intermountain West, as are the politics. When the Bundy clan moved their sedition movement to Oregon they moved a little too close to a place of rational politics and politicians. Oregon governor Kate Brown was apparently asked by the feds to remain silent on the Malheur occupation. But after almost a month of the now usual no federal response, she could not stand it and came out publicly demanding law enforcement. Immediately the action on the ground by law enforcement began to change. A week later the first Bundys were arrested. Almost certainly the word had come down from the administration to finally enforce the law. As I have posted earlier, political logrolling finally gave way to the law of the land.

It takes time, and it is usually messy, but this country seems to muddle through. Cliven Bundy is in jail and the book is being thrown at him. The laws he broke remain the same, but they are finally being enforced. The rest of the country has now had a glimpse of the backwards, backroom dealings of politics and law in the West, the Old West, but we are being dragged into the current century. And even Bundy's trespassing cows are finally, over 20 years later, going to be removed from protected public land.