End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 28, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Driving them off the land
Eviction of Western ranchers 'amounts to a war of religions'

On Feb. 21, Ruby Valley rancher Cliff Gardner is due to appear for sentencing before Chief U.S. District Judge Judge Howard D. McKibben in Reno. Despite an affidavit from his attorney that it was impossible to prepare a defense in the face of the court's refusal to clarify its rules or jurisdiction, Gardner was convicted Nov. 17 in federal court in Reno of grazing his cattle from time to time on government land near his Ruby Valley ranch without permission.

He could face up to a year in prison and $10,000 in fines.

Gardner makes no bones about the fact he places cattle on that land from time to time, as his family has done for 130 years -- since Mexican War veteran William Gardner "was discharged out of Fort Douglas there in Salt Lake in 1872 -- he came west with an old gun, a wagon full of kids and a handful of scrip that the government give him to claim some land."

In arid Nevada, no rancher can make a go of it on the 160 or 320 acres his grandparents were allowed to homestead. To run even 300 to 500 head of red Angus, as the Gardners do, requires thousands of acres. Thus, Western ranchers have always grazed their cattle on the adjoining public lands.

The question is: what does "public" mean? Do the ranchers have an established property right -- a grazing right -- just as both state and common law across the West acknowledge private citizens may have legitimate mining or water or right-of-way claims on that land, established both through paperwork "filings" and through years of habit and custom and adverse possession, which cannot be overturned by mere bureaucratic whim?

Or does the federal government -- as Judge Johnnie Rawlinson has brazenly asserted in the similar case aimed at driving Clark County cattle rancher Cliven Bundy off his Mesquite Allotment -- literally own all this land, with "plenary" rights to kick anybody off, any time they please?

The way Bill Clinton spent his final weeks in office waving million-acre parcels of these "public lands" off limits to human trespass with each flourish of his pen, it would certainly appear the federal government owns these lands and can use them -- or bar them from human use -- as they see fit.

There's little doubt the federal government did exercise precisely such imperial authority when these lands were territories -- just as Washington City can still do as it darned well pleases with the "public lands" in places like Puerto Rico and American Samoa. (Just ask the Puerto Rican folk unhappy with that little naval gunnery range on Vieques Island.)

But did the Founding Fathers really intend for the federal government to permanently own 87 percent of Nevada ... 68 percent of Utah ... 50 percent of the land mass of California ... for as long as the sun shall shine?

Why? To meet what goal of a "limited government" instituted solely to "secure the rights of all Men"? To keep these lands out of the hands of settlers, miners, ranchers, loggers -- out of the hands, in short, of the American people themselves?

To what purpose?

Mind you, no one objects to setting aside a few areas of particular scenic beauty as National Parks. But we're not talking here about building Wal-Marts in Yellowstone -- we're talking about sealing off hundreds and hundreds of miles of desolate desert scrub from the only activity for which they've ever proven to be of the slightest use -- grazing cattle.

When did the federal government buy these lands? Where are their deeds recorded? To whom do they pay property taxes? Or, if they're held "in common for all the people," how do I identify my one part in 250 million, so I can rent it to Cliff Gardner?

Cliff Gardner is quiet about it -- he's not the kind of man who shouts much. Nor does he even have unanimous support among the state's other ranchers. ("Too many of them are doing too well with the federal handouts and subsidies that are coming down," explains his wife, Bertha. "They Don't want to rock the boat.")

But make no mistake. Unassuming Cliff Gardner is taking on the entire majesty of the federal government -- a federal government which Range magazine reports has succeeded in reducing livestock production on Western public lands by 20 percent in the past eight years; a federal government which -- the Reno-based magazine argues -- has embraced the visionary "Wildlands Project ... an almost unbelievable scheme to favor wildlife over human habitation ... (which) fully implemented, suggests a reduction in human population in the West by one-third."

Defiant, Cliff Gardner declares he can find "no authority whatsoever" for the federal government to "hold and manage lands within an admitted State" aside from the power granted in Article I Section 8, to purchase specific parcels "by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings," which would hardly seem to apply to the millions of acres of western grazing land.

It was "for these reasons, in 1994, that the Gardners chose to turn their livestock out upon their allotment without a permit -- just as he and he forebears had done prior to the establishment of the Forest Reserves," Gardner explains in the two-page written summary of the case which he'll hand to anyone willing to read it.

All Americans should be concerned, Gardner warns in the prepared summary, that "more than a third of the land surface of the United States of America is now being policed under Article IV jurisdiction" -- never intended for use within the 50 states, and under which the courts will not acknowledge any obligation to grant accused citizens their constitutional rights, including their "sixth amendment right to be informed of the nature and cause of a prosecution ... in order that they may prepare a defense."

(As a matter of fact, if the current governor and attorney general of Nevada really want to stop the proposed federal nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain -- if Gov. Kenny Guinn really means to leave "no battle unfought" against the waste dump, as he declared in his State-of-the-State speech last week -- one has to wonder why they're not joining this suit on Gardner's side. No private landowner would ever be allowed to set up a nuclear facility within the state's borders without state permission. It's only this presumption that the federal government has unlimited, extraconstitutional, territorial jurisdiction over 87 percent of Nevada -- precisely the presumption Gardner is fighting to expose and refute -- that makes such federal arrogance even remotely thinkable.)

"This question is of particular concern now that the federal government is poised to buy up all the remaining rural lands within our state," Gardner concludes. "With the money the feds will be receiving from the CARA legislation and the Southern Nevada Public Lands Act, they will have more than enough money to purchase all the remaining ranch and farm lands that lie within the State of Nevada."

---

It was this time of winter, two years ago, when I toured the Mesquite Allotment -- 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas -- with one of Clark County's last two cattle ranchers, blue-eyed Cliven Bundy. (Needless to say, the federals have been working to drive Cliven out of business for even longer than they've been after Cliff Gardner -- seven years for Cliff; eight years for Cliven. Cliven responded by "firing" the BLM -- "I don't sign their contracts and I don't pay their fees and I don't expect any services from 'em," he declares. And these guys all know each other; Cliff refers to Cliven having dropped by to do some deer hunting a few years back.)

At the time, Cliven and I squatted to examine some mighty spindly ground cover, the third-generation rancher explaining to me how the browsing of the plant by cattle clears room for the new, green shoots to come in each spring.

I must have expressed some amazement at the idea that cattle could survive by eating such stuff in the first place.

"A calf only learns what to eat out here because his momma shows him what to eat," Cliven responded, seriously. "At one point the tortoise people came in here and said I should just pull my cattle off the range for a few months in the spring, when the tortoises were breeding. I told them the only way I could do that would be to haul my herd to St. George and sell it, and then buy new feed-lot cattle and put them out here come summer. They couldn't see why that would be a problem. I had to explain to them that when you put cattle out on land like this, if their mommas haven't taught them what they can eat out here, they starve."

Cliven showed me areas where he'd bulldozed dirt across an occasional wash, which then filled up and became a muddy watering pond not only for his cattle, but for the quail and other wildlife that subsequently thrived there in much larger numbers than had been seen before.

Left in its natural state, the salt cedar will move in and clog a spring till there's no more surface water for wildlife or cattle, Cliven explained. Only the rancher has the incentive to dig the spring back to bedrock, install piping, and run the water to a tank where it can then be used by deer and wild sheep, as well as domestic stock.

Cliven explained to me how the process works now, if a farmer grazing the public lands tries to follow the rules when he brings in his own bulldozer for such a one-day job -- or even to run a piece of galvanized pipe under a dirt road. He must call the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management, asking for an officer to come out, do a survey, and sign off that in performing such a "range alteration" he will not be dangerously infringing on the habitat of any threatened or endangered species.

(596 species were listed as "threatened or endangered" by the federal government in 1990. By 1999, the list had grown to 1,205, many of them weeds and bugs.)

Having won an "endangered species sign-off" for his one-day culvert project, the naive rancher might then assume he could proceed to do the job (at his own expense. of course.)

Oh no.

"You can't do a thing till they send out another guy, who has to do another survey to find out if you might be 'damaging any potential archaeological sites.' " Cliven explained. "I used to ask them, 'Gee, couldn't that guy have come along with you at the same time?' But no, you have to wait more weeks before you see that guy."

Back up near Elko, Bertha Gardner tells me they've been waiting "10 years" for a simple adjudication of the water rights to one of the seasonal creeks that flows under the road near their ranch in the Ruby Valley. Trying to play by the bureaucrats' rules is like Chinese water torture for such can-do folks. One might even begin to suspect the slow-downs aren't part of some calculated plan, as the federal government systematically reduces and abrogates grazing allotments across the West.

"They'll put me on the stand and ask how many years I have studied ecology, what college degrees I have," says Cliff Gardner, both describing his past treatment and predicting the way things are likely to go, come February in Reno.

"I'll tell 'em I've got a high school education so they'll discredit me, see. But what I plan to testify is these people here -- there'll be a lot of ranchers in the audience -- are my peers, they have the know-how to manage the range and make it pay or they'll be put into bankruptcy and driven off the land. But these BLM and Forest Service people, they get their degrees and then they come out here and they're the experts -- they don't have to test their theories against reality the way we have for three and four generations, that's the real teacher. They can be wrong and it doesn't matter. All they have to do is get more money for their department, grow the bureaucracy. And the way to do that is to create a villain, which is the rancher, and drive him off the land.

"So they become spin doctors. If the studies show what would really help the deer and the sage grouse is more predator control, that the wildlife does better when there's cattle on the land and their so-called preserves go to waste when they fence the cattle off, they just bury those studies, they never see the light of day if they don't match up with their theories.

They say we can't know what we're talking about because we don't have any 'peer-reviewed studies.' Well there can't be any 'peer-reviewed studies' because any of the ones that didn't fit their theories were all suppressed and hidden. I've had a lot of people sneakin' me studies who worked for the BLM and the Soil Conservation Service, because the agencies didn't want the public to know about 'em."

Cliff will stage his slide show at the drop of a hat, documenting the way Western wildfires have become more severe of late -- not only larger and more frequent, but burning hotter and destroying even mature plants that might have survived earlier, milder fires -- a phenomenon that Cliff links directly to the ever larger areas now closed to cattle grazing, thus allowing excess plant growth to go unused, the excess drying into fuel, awaiting the first lightning strike or careless campfire. (He might add the vast expanses now closed to logging -- even to clear away deadfalls.)

"And will they ever admit, 'Gee we made a mistake?' " Cliff asks. In answer, he shows slides of the impromptu truck parking lots and tent cities that spring up as federal contracts feed the growth of the new Western "fire suppression industry," whose participants he and Bertha describe as often more interested in lackadaisical "fire-watching" than fire-fighting.

Bertha relates the story of a young woman of their acquaintance who was hospitalized for third-degree burns, acquired saving her ranch from a wildfire which Cliff had helped the new firefighting teams "knock down the night before," but which sprang back to life when the government contract laborers failed to watch it through the night, as the local men had advised.

"The plants developed in an ecosystem where they need to be browsed to clear room for the new growth each year and all the studies show this, so they bury the studies and just declare, 'The cows cause erosion; the cows drive the deer and the birds away,' " Cliff continues. "Well, why do they need to keep buying up more land to expand their preserves? The birds abandon their preserves and go where the cows are grazing, because the cows fertilize the water and churn the sediments and stir them up, and that's where you get your insect growth; ungulates are a vital part of the ecosystem. (But) do you think they'll let me testify to all that?"

---

What Cliff Gardner is insisting on is that - even if we agree the federals are to "administer" all these lands , punishing "trespassers" like Cliven Bundy and Cliff Gardner -- we must still ask under what jurisdiction their courts and other officers are to operate as they do so: under Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court "and such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish" ... in which case defendants like Cliff Gardner have a right to a trial by a jury of their peers, a right to due process and equal protection -- all the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights?

Or is the federal jurisdiction over these lands in fact a "territorial" jurisdiction, as established under Article IV of the Constitution, which would appear to set no such due-process restrictions on the power of Congress to "dispose of and make all Needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State."

(Such "territories" being originally assumed to contain little but ... not to put too fine a point on it ... rogue French trappers and rascally redskins.)

Most Nevadans -- most Americans -- would doubtless respond that folks like Cliven Bundy and Cliff Gardner (Americans born and bred) are citizens of both the United States and the sovereign state of Nevada, and that in any action brought against them by the U.S. government of course they enjoy all the Constitutional rights to due process guaranteed by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Amendments.

Cliff Gardner keeps trying to get Judge McKibben to confirm that. But for some curious reason, whenever Gardner makes a court filing asking for just such a confirmation of his due process rights, Judge McKibben -- he just lay low and don't say nothin'.

Motion denied without comment. Motion denied without comment. Motion denied without comment.

"Before we can argue about how many cows are on the land, we need to know whether we have constitutional rights under the Sixth Amendment; Is this an Article 3 or an Article 4 court?" Gardner says. "We need to know the rules and the jurisdiction.

"I ask: 'Will Gardner's constitutional rights be respected?' They respond: 'Mr. Gardner has what he has and I'm not going to get into that.' ... They don't want to rule that Constitutional rights don't apply; they just keep denying motions to answer that question. They certainly don't want to say it's an Article Three court, because then statelaw applies. And the state recognizes grazing rights; we wouldn't then be under the Taylor Grazing Act, et cetera.

"So how can I prepare a defense?"

It sounded to me like a question the judge should be able to answer -- after all, how can any government agency commence exercising its powers without first agreeing to cite chapter and verse of its constitutional authority and jurisdiction; without first clarifying the extent -- and limits -- of its authority?

I called Judge McKibben. The judge explained he had taken my call as a courtesy, but that he couldn't answer any questions about a pending case. "You could present to me a summary of his concerns, and I could take them under consideration, but I wouldn't be able to comment," the judge explained.

"And that would include the jurisdiction?" I asked. "Mr. Gardner says he can't get an answer as to whether his case in your court falls under Article III jurisdiction or Article IV jurisdiction. So when you say you can't comment, would that include telling me whether this case falls under the jurisdiction of Article III of the Constitution or Article IV of the Constitution?"

"What it includes is that I can't comment on the case," Judge McKibben replied. "You have expressed to me what his concerns are. I can tell you this, that if you file something in court, I always prepare an order and you can read that order. But I don't want to be quoted on that."

"So you can't even say whether -- just speaking in general now -- all defendants have their due process rights under Article 3 and the Bill of Rights when they appear in your court?"

"The canon of ethics prevents me from speaking about a pending case, and we have an ethical obligation not to do that," was all the answer Judge McKibben would give me.

And I'm quoting him on that.

Tim Findley, former chief investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and assistant editor for Rolling Stone, who for more than a year has been covering the Gardner case for Reno-based Range magazine (for a sample copy, dial 1-800-range4U), says the struggle between ranchers like Cliff Gardner and Clark County's Cliven Bundy on one side -- federal regulators and "land managers" on the other -- amounts to a war of religions.

Gardner and his Clark County counterpart Cliven Bundy -- one of only two ranchers remaining out of more than 50 only a generation ago -- are Mormons, Findley points out. They believe that taming the wilderness is a noble cause, and raising their children close to the land has been good for their families and their society.

"On the other side we have the arrogant practitioners of an environmental religion, endeavoring to use federal force -- in blatant violation of the First Amendment -- to 'establish' and impose across the West the religion of environmentalism, which holds that cattle -- and lumbering and mining, for that matter -- are unnatural desecrations of nature's temple, a wilderness from which all human activity must be banished so that the lands can be held in permanent trust in their wild splendor."

I mentioned to Findley the fervor with which Cliff Gardner will present his slide show at the drop of a hat -- it's the first thing he did when I arrived at the Slash-J ranch for a visit over New Year's weekend, the ranch's muddy turn-in looking like market day in the county seat as a free-lancer for "Range" magazine also showed up to take some photos of Cliff for the February issue and got offered a chair -- showing the photographic evidence he's gathered over the decades, before-and-after photos demonstrating that the lands are in better shape where they've been grazed by cattle then where they've been fenced off for years as sterile "wilderness."

"Cliff has more than anecdotal evidence for his claims," Findley responds. "He's been out there taking pictures for more than 20 years and he had built a very convincing case. Cliff contends these forage plants evolved to need large ungulates to graze them, whether that be cattle or some other animal, and the cattle are a vital part of the ecosystem. They can demonstrate that. Where the cattle graze you see an enormous beneficial growth of the game species, the deer herds and so forth. Where they fence the cattle off the land you see the land go to waste; you see a build-up in fuel so you get more and harsher range fires.

"It becomes a kind of matter of faith to these (government) people. They really don't understand what they're doing to destroy the lives of people with equally good hearts. The Nature Conservancy had grabbed off two-thirds of that land (near the Gardner Ranch in the Ruby Valley) and they desperately want Cliff's chunk. It's really extortion.

"With Cliven and Cliff you have the Mormon influence, and they're going up against an equally strong belief on the part of the government types in an environmental faith that all the cattle should be off the land and everything should be preserved. So what's underlying this is a really cynical kind of land grab and Cliff doesn't mention that much; I don't think he gives enough emphasis to the way the Nature Conservancy is behind all this, using everyone's good intention for a really cynical land grab."

I asked Findley what he expects to see in Judge McKibben's court on Feb. 21.

"McKibben isn't going to be kind. He isn't going to allow Cliff to present either his constitutional case or the environmental case he wants to present. I have a lot of sympathy for Cliff. People saying he's making a martyr of himself but I don't know, I think there's something else going on here. He used to have dinner with these guys; when he was a kid on the ranch the forest rangers would come visit his father and stay overnight at the ranch and Cliff really respected them and looked up to them, so I think there's a lot of personal disappointment now in the way they're acting and the fact they won't look at his evidence and listen to folks who have been on the land for generations and learned how to manage the land and are willing to share that knowledge; instead all you get from the federal side is arrogance.

Findley, the transplanted Californian, has been in Nevada for 10 years. "I came here looking for a place to raise a young son and moved to Fallon and got caught up in the water wars," he explains.

"Ranchers like Cliff remind me a lot more of the Black Panthers. Those were also people who tried to stand up for their rights but they were pushed around because they were minorities. I try to explain to my friends (back in California) that these ranchers are now being pushed around and terrorized and threatened with jail and the loss of their livelihoods for standing up for their rights in exactly the same way the Black Panthers were; I don't see any conflict between what we used to write about back then and what I'm doing now.

"What drew the Black Panthers to public attention is one day they went to Sacramento to the state capitol and walked around carrying shotguns, which it was perfectly legal for them to do. We didn't know then and we will never know whether they were loaded. But because they were all black and all dressed the same the police then started to terrorize them -- they were all arrested, and the state terrorism against them began.

"The Black Panthers were never charged with robbing banks or anything like that. They said 'We have these rights,' and the state said, 'Not to exercise them when you're all black and you all dress the same, not to exercise them in this militaristic fashion.' So the police terrorized them. If you start with people like Cliff Gardner becoming political prisoners then that's when you're going to see more resistance and more real tragedy . They're saying we have constitutional rights and the government is saying well, you have to give up your livelihoods if you try to exercise those rights. ... I don't know what the others will do if they put Cliff Gardner in jail."

Does Findley think McKibben will jail Gardner?

"I think what McKibben will do is impose some kind of house arrest or some form of economic restraint that'll cripple what Cliff can do. I doubt he'll risk going so far as to put him in jail and give this movement its martyr and its political prisoner.

---

Spending a weekend at the Gardners' Slash-J ranch is like stepping back 40 years in time -- except for the cordless phones, of course, and the fact that everyone in the household seems to have his or her own personal computer.

This city slicker was pretty proud of himself, rousing out of bed and brushing my teeth soon after first light. The dawn was barely breaking as I reached the kitchen ... to find half the household chatting about a proposed coyote hunt over the fast-cooling remains of breakfast. (Bunny-huggers can relax -- our wily brothers sang back to Walt and Harry, but none loped near enough to come to harm.) Bertha graciously handed me the last of the sausage and fried eggs, though she warned "I can't guarantee they're still warm." City boys: sleeping in till almost dawn.

By 10:30 the woman of the house had finished doing her accounts at the kitchen table and moved on to preparing lunch -- three huge hot meals being the order of each day. She chatted with me as I jotted a few notes at the table, but not about her elder son -- though the Gardners are obviously proud of Charley, the champion rodeo cowboy, whose trophies crowd the house till there's no place left to hang the huge poster for last summer's Reno rodeo, which featured a picture of Charley himself, on a bucking bronc.

No, as I made friends with the gray cat, sole survivor of a long-ago litter, Bertha fell to talking about her younger son Walt, who now bears the major load of helping his dad with the ranch, what with Charley being away on the rodeo circuit.

Walt is a big, healthy lad who not too long ago brought home a lovely bride with a 15-year-old stepdaughter, both of whom the Gardners treat as their own. The family shares stories of Walt and Charley racing each other "up the hill" behind the ranchhouse -- the "hill" being one of the larger peaks in the 11,000-foot Ruby Mountains, which stretch both north and south outside the window and just across the road, as far as the eye can see.

"One day Charley says he ran up the hill so fast his heart stopped," Walt says with a smile.

"What did he do?" I asked.

"Oh, you just wait for it to start again."

Walt guided me and Harry Pappas on an impromptu late afternoon drive through 7,200-foot Harrison Pass, spotting at least 80 deer through Harry's binoculars -- only three or four of them bucks, and among them only one which would have been suitable for harvest, by Walt's standards -- they prefer to wait till a deer's antlers are over 20 inches.

Walt, in his element, spotted a set of lion tracks from the moving car. As we emerged to join him, he told us how long ago the 150-pound lioness had crossed the road.

"Now, how do you know she's a female?" asked a skeptical Harry.

"Well, do you see any marks where his balls were dragging?" answered Walt, his sly smile following his punchline by a few seconds, as usual.

Walt speaks offhand of a hunter who -- it turned out -- couldn't hit a tree at 50 yards with either his rifles or his guides', emptying the magazines of two rifles before one particularly lucky mulie managed to get away unharmed. He recalled another fellow for whom Walt had worked all day, positioning him for a clear shot at a trophy buck.

"Now, in a minute here, there are four deer going to come over that ridge," Walt recalls instructing the fellow. "I've been watching them, and if you'll shoot the second deer, that one's your trophy."

Sure enough, the four bucks soon came strolling up over the rise, the second of the four sporting an enormous rack of well over 20 inches.

The hunter fired, and the third deer in the group -- a legal prey but with a pitiful six-inch rack -- tumbled down the slope.

"I got it ! I got it!" the hunter yelled, literally leaping up and down.

"Yep, you shot it," Walt recalls, deadpan. "But you shot the wrong deer. I said to shoot the second one."

"That WAS the second one!" the hunter insisted.

"Counting from the front ... or the back?" Walt asked.

"From the back!"

His mom is doubly proud of Walt, who hires out to guide lion hunts in the mountains, speaking with awe of old-time hunters who were known to "walk down a cat." (While mountain lions can demonstrate awesome bursts of speed for short periods, a man and a dog can exhaust them till they have to either tree or turn, if they can just demonstrate the persistence -- and endurance -- to stay on their trail for enough days and nights in the frozen mountains.)

Bertha's pride in her second son comes in part from the fact things didn't look so good for him when he started out in life.

"He was born allergic to milk, and they didn't think he was going to make it. They handed him back to me in that hospital in Reno and said 'We've done all we can for him; you need to take him home now.' "

As farm folks, the Gardners had no medical insurance. The clear message was that there was little else the doctors could -- or would -- do. Nature was supposed to take its course with Little Walt at home, out of sight and out of mind. These things happen.

"My pediatrician said to put him on Coca-Cola. That was all he could tolerate, so we did. He's only alive today because of Coca-Cola." Later, more competent specialists in Salt Lake found the boy could indeed tolerate soy milk, though the folks at the Reno hospital had scoffed at the idea.

Walt was also born with club feet, which required surgery. "He didn't go to sleep without shoes on till he was nine years old," Bertha relates. "He still doesn't have the flexibility in his ankles that most people do. But he can jump up into the bed of a pickup truck from a standing start."

Walt also progressed slowly at school. Bertha decided to tutor him at home, long before most folks had even heard the term "home-schooling."

I believe there is a point to Bertha's story of her younger son turning out fine.

In some big city school, Walt could have slipped through the cracks -- who knows, maybe even been doped up on Luvox or Ritalin before he was through.

Farm and ranch families like the Gardners know that raising their children close to the land, in an environment where the harsh necessities of nature provide the best task-master, breeds sturdy men of strong character from even the most unpromising of material.

Bertha Gardner raised up strong sons. But it is also the land that raised these children -- the very land from which the federals would now push the small ranching families -- and all other Americans, truth be told.

I asked Cliff whether he thought his four kids -- both girls have now married and moved out of the county -- would have turned out as well if they'd been city-bred.

"Of course not. There's nothing like the opportunity for children when they're being raised, learning to be around cattle and do chores, to be around wood and land and iron at a young age, learning to work. That's probably the biggest reason that we stay in the ranching business, is that reason.

"That's why I want my grandkids around. ... It's pretty hard for a government agent to pull the wool over someone's eyes that's ever had to deal with fire and rain and wind and snow and all the other elements. My kids started working right at my side fighting fires, moving cattle at 11 or 12 years old. ...

"You don't just feed cows or chickens; you have to feed 'em right or they don't produce, and that a discipline that's learned, that's what they learn very young. Not like a bunch of bureaucrats who live in an imaginary, abstract world. We have to live in the real world. If we don't adhere to and work with nature we get cold pretty danged fast. Someone who works for the government because they've got a degree might get away with ignoring the truth, but anyone in the ranching business, we haven't been here for four generations because we ignored the truth and didn't work with nature."

"There's a philosophy of life that I have," adds Cliven Bundy of Mesquite, blue eyes sparkling beneath his Navajo silver hatband. "All these resources -- the brush, the game -- are put here for man's use. If you don't get any use out of it, what use is it? They say they want to protect the ecosystem, but man has to be part of the ecosystem. If man manages the predators so they only eat half the quail, and half are left for man, think of all the dutch oven meals that makes. Everything here on the earth is made for man. This land would be better off if you let people use it and work it and improve it."

In the snide phrases of the coffeehouse environmentalist, these families that have worked from dawn to dusk for 130 years -- no "calling in sick" when it's 30 below -- are "welfare ranchers," taking advantage of the rest of us by leasing federal scrubland for "less than market rates" ... as though anyone else is chafing at the bit to pay good money to use this God-forsaken scrub, risking their savings against the bank, the sheriff, and the bankruptcy court.

I didn't see any welfare cases on the Gardner ranch.

---

Cliff's theme doesn't change as he's bidding me goodbye on Sunday morning -- our route about to take us past miles and miles of the fenced off, cattle-free Franklin Lake "waterfowl sanctuary," where we manage to spot precisely one bird, a majestic blue heron.

"Thomas Jefferson's vision of happiness was being able to devote your life to your livelihood, not having to fight the government all the time. He said if we could get that kind of freedom the country would grow rich. ... Government is set up to resolve disputes between individuals, but now 90 percent of the disputes are between individuals and the state. Bertha and I are now enemies of the state. ...

"How can they say there's equity in these courts when they won't even answer my questions about jurisdiction and the Constitutionality of the statute? Those are the first questions they should answer, before they move on to anything else. Instead they say, 'You can bring that up on appeal, at the appellate level.' But what good does it do, even if the high court does finally remand these questions back to the lower court and tell them to answer them, if by that time I've expended my resources, and then I face another five or six years of working my way back up through the system? How can they say there's justice there? How can they say there's equity?"

Some say the wealth of America lies in her coal mines and her forests, her wheat fields and her factories. But they are wrong.

I have seen the wealth of America. It lies in the hearts of Cliff and Bertha Gardner. It lies in the spunk with which they will continue to fight their hopeless fight for as long as they draw breath. It lives in their naive faith that some judge, somewhere, will hear them out, answer their questions, acknowledge the limits of his jurisdiction, search his conscience, see justice done.

They're wrong, of course. There will be no justice. They will be beaten down, and driven from the land.

But the funny thing about their kind of faith and strength is that you cannot steal these things away. You cannot load them up in a trailer and alter their brands and claim them for your own.

Instead, when they have finished driving the Cliff and Bertha Gardners off this land, they will find the America they claim to be "protecting" ... is gone.

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Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 252-0655; or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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