BUNKERVILLE, Nev. — The words “Revolution is Tradition,” stenciled in crisp blue and red paint, mark a concrete wall in a dry river beneath a remote highway overpass in southern Nevada, where armed protesters and federal agents stared each other through gun sights a decade ago.
It was just before noon on a hot and sunny Saturday when rancher Cliven Bundy’s backers, including hundreds of men, women and children, forced the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to stop enforcing court orders to remove Bundy cattle from the vast arid lands surrounding his modest land. family farm and melon farm.
Witnesses later said they feared the sound of a car backfiring had sparked a bloodbath. But no shots were fired, the government withdrew and about 380 seized Bundy cattle were released.
“We’ve lived in relative peace since then,” Ryan Bundy, the eldest of 14 Bundy siblings, said in a telephone interview. “The BLM is not contacting us, talking to us or bothering us.”
“The BLM has no comment on this subject,” agency spokesman John Asselin said in response to email questions about the standoff, the Bundy cattle grazing today in Gold Butte National Monument and the more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and fines imposed by the BLM. Bundy said owed in 2014.
At the ranch this week, Cliven Bundy greeted guests as he cradled one of the 74 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren he has with his wife, Carol Bundy.
“We’re all a little older,” he said, “but we’re still doing the same thing: ranching.”
Later, as he watched two of his sons and a friend secure yearling bulls in a pen, the outspoken and photogenic farmer — who that day rallied his followers via megaphone and said, “Let’s go get those cattle” — remembered that he was arrested and spent almost two years in prison. and was brought to trial that was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct.
“I’ve had that dot on my forehead and on my chest, and I’ve had my family with dots on their foreheads,” the 77-year-old family patriarch said of the feeling of being in the crosshairs. Evidence in court later showed that federal agents with rifles had camped in the hills around Bundy’s ranch for days before and during the showdown on April 12, 2014.
His family and followers were wrongly targeted by heavy-handed government agents, Bundy said, but were rescued by backers, including militia members and supporters he calls “we the people.”
“They announced on their megaphone, ‘You are defying a federal court order. We demand that you disperse or we will shoot you,” said Mike Bronson, 68, a family friend from Midway, Utah, who remembers kneeling in a prayer ring in front of the corral under the overpass. ‘That’s exactly what they said. Time after time.”
The outcome of the tense confrontation reverberated. In January 2016, Bundy’s eldest sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, and several other men who were at the Bundy ranch in 2014, led a weeks-long standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. It ended with their arrests after a protest spokesman, LaVoy Finicum, was shot dead by state police at an FBI roadblock.
Some heard echoes of Bunkerville and Malheur when rioters clashed with police outside and in the halls of Congress on January 6, 2021, temporarily blocking the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
“Bunkerville was an early warning sign for the MAGA/Trump movement,” said Ian Bartrum, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has studied and written about the standoff and federal land policy. He mentioned “a growing militia movement looking for someone to fight.”
“I think it’s safe to say that 10 years later, the Bundys won that battle, and federal regulators don’t seem at all eager to try again,” Bartrum said. “We have bigger problems right now than livestock on public land. ”
In court, federal prosecutors characterized the Bunkerville confrontation as an insurrection against the U.S. government. Nineteen people from eleven states, including Bundy and four sons, were arrested in 2016 on charges including conspiracy, assault on a federal officer and firearms counts. Most were in prison for almost two years.
Five suspects pleaded guilty before trial, several were acquitted of all charges and some were convicted of lesser charges. One is still in federal prison. No Bundy family member was convicted of a crime.
Today, family members estimate that more than 700 Bundy cattle graze extensively in the scrubby Virgin River valley surrounding the 64.7-acre Bundy ranch and in Gold Butte, a scenic and archaeologically rich Mojave Desert half the size the vastness of the Mojave Desert. state of Delaware that then-President Barack Obama designated a national monument in December 2016.
Conservation groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, have filed a lawsuit to push the government to remove livestock and protect the desert tortoise, a species that was deemed endangered by habitat loss in 1990 and that advocates grazing.
“The desert tortoise is at the heart of it,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds. “Cattle continue to graze illegally, causing irreversible damage to ecological values.”
“I think you can look at the January 6 Capitol insurrection and draw a straight line to Malheur and Bunkerville,” Molvar added, “as emblematic of insurrectionary movements in the United States and the inability of federal prosecutors to fully enforce the laws. ”
Bundy argues that the federal government does not have the authority to regulate the lands where his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints family settled about 150 years ago. He insists that questions about local sovereignty have never been answered to his satisfaction. He says he believes a jury will agree.
Arden Bundy, the youngest son at age 26, has a social media following with YouTube videos titled “The Bundy Ranch.” He wears body cameras and rides hard on horseback with his brother Clancy Bundy and cow hand Cache Burnside as he chases bulls through the rugged terrain, aided by the family dog Kaylie. They call it ‘trench jumping’.
The April 2014 standoff was a victory, Arden Bundy said, because “no one was killed and the cows came back.”
When asked what would happen if the government tried to round up the Bundy cattle again, he was direct.
“If we have to call people, we call all of our YouTube and social media followers,” Arden Bundy said.
“There were a thousand last time,” Cliven Bundy said. “Next time it will be 10,000.”
