Greedy Bastards

Why Nevadans Hate Washington

The rancher dustups of recent years are the latest in a long history of animosity.

By Michael Green

When anti-government activists took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon last month, it came as little surprise that they had close ties to the State of Nevada. Cliven Bundy—a Bunkerville, Nevada, rancher who had made national headlines in 2014 after refusing to pay grazing fees on federal land—voiced support for the Malheur occupation, and two of his sons helped to enforce it.

The FBI arrested Bundy earlier this month, indicting him and his sons on federal conspiracy charges related to their standoff with the government two years ago. But the radical, libertarian movement they stand for—resisting federal ownership and use of state lands, or resisting the federal government altogether—is alive and well in Nevada. A quirk of history going back to Abraham Lincoln has left the federal government in possession of about 85 percent of Nevada’s land, more than any other state, and has helped to sustain decades of distrust between Nevadans and the federal government.

Now, as the state prepares for its GOP caucuses on Tuesday and the candidates compete for Nevada’s overwhelmingly Republican rural voters, this anti-government sentiment will surely play a role in the outcome. It’s no coincidence that Ted Cruz has the endorsements of the state’s most right-leaning Republicans, including some who have played a role in Bundy saga, or that the leader here in the polls, Donald Trump, believes the federal government is so far gone that a non-politician must fix it.

The political right’s adoption of this issue is a recent phenomenon. It was Abraham Lincoln’s reelection campaign that laid the groundwork for decades of anti-government insurgency here. In 1864, Congress permitted Nevadans to seek statehood so long as they banned slavery and granted religious freedom. According their new state constitution, Nevadans would also have to “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” in their territory, which would “remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.” With approval from voters in the state, Lincoln signed the statehood proclamation on October 31, just in time for Nevadans to vote for his reelection.

Another section of Lincoln’s proclamation declared that Nevada would enjoy “equal footing” with other states, as the U.S. Constitution mandates. Nevada was neither the first nor the last state whose land ownership was restricted by the federal government; 30 states have at least some restrictions on their land ownership. But it wasn’t long before Nevadans began to feel that the federal government wasn’t treating them so equally. In 1873, Congress passed the Mint Act, which demonetized silver in an effort to reduce the money in circulation and help gold owners. To Nevadans, it was the “Crime of ’73”—a direct assault to cripple the Comstock Lode’s booming silver mining industry in the state. Nevadans would spend the rest of the 19th century fighting, unsuccessfully, for the re-monetization of silver.

In the coming years, Nevadans’ struggle to get federal support for dam and irrigation projects widened the gap between Washington and the West. Agriculture in the region floundered without such help, until President Theodore Roosevelt finally threw his support behind a 1902 reclamation law named for a congressman from Nevada, Francis Newlands. But before long, Nevadans found themselves as national pariahs for a whole different reason: the state’s approval of gambling and easy divorce in 1931. The federal government didn’t take any action, but the disdain toward Nevada was palpable. The Los Angeles Times called the state “a vicious Babylon,” and the Kansas City Star deemed Reno a combination of “Sodom, Gomorrah and Hell.”

The Great Depression began a period of federal largesse for Nevada, as Washington looked to the state for infrastructure and military investments. In fact, during the New Deal era, Nevada was the top state in per capita federal spending, with the construction of 133 public buildings, 50 bridges, and additional streets, sewers and roads—not to mention Hoover Dam. The federal government would build military bases near Fallon, Las Vegas, Reno and Tonopah during World War II, as well as a magnesium-processing plant in southern Nevada. During the Cold War, the government constructed an aboveground atomic test area, known as the Nevada Test Site. Nevadans welcomed the testing, which brought both economic development and favorable attention to the often-maligned state; Las Vegas even marketed atomic cocktails and hairdos.

Still, most residents had mixed feelings toward the federal government at best. Part of the reason for this period of federal investment was Nevada’s election of a series of high-powered U.S. senators who made sure Washington was paying attention to the sparsely populated state. But another reason was the abundance of federal land that Lincoln had enshrined within the state’s borders. As the federal government expanded during and after the New Deal, politicians in Washington realized they could use this land to just about whatever ends they wanted. Even when the government’s intentions were benevolent—for instance, in the 1960s, when the Department of the Interior began creating national parks in the West as part of the environmental movement—they often felt less like largesse and more like an affront to states’ rights, and particularly to the livelihoods of ranchers.

An early milestone that helps explain why Washington so roiled Nevada’s population and politics was the Taylor Grazing Act, a 1934 New Deal project that expanded federal oversight of federal land and imposed fees for grazing on it. Western ranchers objected strenuously, and while their elected officials managed to reduce funding for the act, its basic restrictions still stand today, rankling many Nevada ranchers. A little more than a decade after the grazing act, in 1946, the federal government formally created the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency charged with administering public lands. Nevadans now had a specific enemy to which they could direct their rancor over the following decades.

For example, BLM and the U.S. Forest Service both took a beating in what became known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. In the wake of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which reasserted federal control of public lands throughout the country, the Nevada legislature demanded that the federal government hand over nearly 50 million acres of land to the state, and several states followed suit. The leaders of the Sagebrush Rebellion, mainly ranchers and state legislators from throughout the West, argued that the original cession of that land had been extorted in return for statehood, and that “equal footing” was impossible when Nevadans lacked power over so much of their territory. When Ronald Reagan, during his 1980 campaign, declared, “Count me in as a rebel,” hopes in Nevada ran high. But soon after he took office, his administration instead proposed to sell the land not to the state but to private developers, disappointing the Sagebrush Rebels. In the end, the lands remained under federal control.

The Sagebrush Rebels’ efforts continued nonetheless and, in some cases, they intensified beyond legislative lobbying to defying existing law. In a battle that began in the late 1970s, the federal government charged several Nevada ranchers with trespassing when they grazed cattle on BLM and Forest Service land without a permit. One of them, Wayne Hage, countered that the agencies had filed a claim on water to which he had vested rights. He sued the Forest Service for the water, to no avail, and the BLM denied renewal of his grazing permit. But after Hage’s death in 2006, his son kept grazing cattle on public land. Earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the federal government in the Hages’ grazing case. This threw out a decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Clive Jones, a Las Vegas native who had summed up many Nevadans’ feelings about the BLM, which he said came into court “with the standard arrogant, arbitrary, capricious attitude that I recognize in many of these cases.”

At times, Nevadans have become so hostile as to pose a threat to those who work for federal agencies in the state. In 1995, for instance, when a flood washed out a road near Jarbidge River in Elko County, an environmental group objected to rebuilding the road, so the Forest Service recommended creating a walking trail. The outraged response to this federal involvement prompted the local Forest Service supervisor to resign; a subsequent by federal officials found that Forest Service employees felt threatened by local residents. When the federal government finally agreed to build a new road and even pay for it, some in the area objected even to that. In 2000, a group of 300 residents, calling themselves the Shovel Brigade, moved a boulder to block the road; that they did so on July 4 was no coincidence. On the suggestion of the county’s assemblyman, Elko County residents built a 30-foot statue of a shovel in front of the county courthouse in commemoration of the act of defiance. The battle over rebuilding the road, and who controls the land in the area, continues in the courts.

In certain cases, Nevadans’ defiance has caused significant property damage—and endangered lives. In 1993, the BLM building in Reno was bombed; no one was injured, but no perpetrator was ever caught either. Two years later, two men from nearby rural Douglas County were arrested for planting a bomb in the Reno IRS building after clashing with the agency, and a pipe bomb, planted by an unknown assailant, damaged the U.S. Forest Service office in Carson City. It was the same year that Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City; Nevada’s problems, while not unrelated, paled in comparison.

To this day, no dispute over public lands in Nevada has received more public attention than that of Bundy, the Bunkerville rancher who quit paying grazing fees more than 20 years ago. When BLM officials seized some of his cattle in 2014 for trespassing on public lands, his ranch attracted anti-government activists and a swarm of media. Bundy briefly became a hero to conservative news outlets and to Nevada Republicans; Gov. Brian Sandoval, a GOP moderate by most measures, criticized the BLM for creating an “atmosphere of intimidation.” When Democratic Sen. Harry Reid likened Bundy’s supporters to terrorists, Reid received death threats. His GOP Senate colleague, Dean Heller, countered, “What Senator Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots.”


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Why does all this matter for the caucuses on Tuesday? The truth is that this fight is about much more than land ownership. The Nevadans who deal most directly with federal land management agencies amount to only about 10 percent of the population. But many others in the state, even some Democrats, see Washington’s involvement in state matters as destructive for other reasons.

For starters, the act that gave Nevada its statehood also says, “no taxes shall be imposed by said state on lands or property therein belonging to, or which may hereafter be purchased by, the United States.” The State of Nevada, in other words, cannot tax the federal land within its borders, and its revenue base suffers for it. The state’s social and cultural standing—from education funding and achievement to suicide rates and health issues—has long been near the bottom of most national rankings, making it harder for Nevada to build new industries outside of tourism and mining. Seeking to make up ground, Sandoval recently pushed a controversial $1 billion tax hike through a Republican legislature. The party’s right wing, which appears to hate higher taxes more than it hates Washington, is pushing for a 2016 ballot measure to repeal Sandoval’s tax increase.

Nevada has also battled the federal government for three decades over one particularly controversial proposed use of a small corner of that federal land—a fight with implications for not just for ranchers but many Nevadans concerned about the environment, security and the economy. In 1987, Congress passed legislation designating Yucca Mountain, on the Nevada Test Site, for a new national high-level nuclear waste repository. Residents called the nuclear dump legislation the “Screw Nevada” bill. At the time, Nevadans still favored the underground testing that continued at the site until 1992. But as more of them learned of the health and environmental effects of the approximately 100 aboveground tests that took place between 1951 and 1963, including radiation-related diseases, they doubted federal claims that the nuclear waste at Yucca wouldn’t harm them, the land, their water supply or even the state’s tourism industry. Interestingly, although many of the most fervently anti-government voters in Nevada are Republicans, Democrats have been more willing to block the nuclear dump than Republicans.

That a good chunk of the American population—not just Nevadans—is angry at the federal government seems beyond dispute in this election. Just look at the success of Sen. Bernie Sanders so far in the Democratic race and Donald Trump among Republicans; the two obviously have differences of opinion, but they share an apparent displeasure with how Washington does too much—or not enough, as the case may be—in the lives of average Americans.

In Nevada, Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who has built his campaign on hating big government in D.C., have been leading the few polls preceding the GOP caucuses, with Sen. Marco Rubio gaining ground as the lone “establishment” candidate with any hope in the race. Most leading Nevada Republicans have endorsed him by now, but Cruz has won backing from local legislators farther to the right—“Bundy Republicans,” let’s call them. Every Republican candidate who has addressed the issue of federal land ownership, though, has sounded like a Sagebrush Rebel—which these days isn’t much different from other Republicans around the country. Even the more moderate Rubio, for instance, said the Malheur takeover was wrong, but sympathized with the occupiers’ basic belief that the federal government owns too much land.

Nevada reflects such attitudes, but also magnifies them. After all, as vocal as Nevadans have been in opposition to the BLM, neither Democrats nor Republicans here have demanded the closure of the old Nevada Test Site or Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. In this way, Nevadans are like the rest of the country: Americans love to call for federal spending cuts—as long as they’re not in their own state.

(This is the thing, the Federal Government owns the Public land of the US. That is the plain truth. Since the second the land became American, it belonged to the Federal Government. This is how it worked: The western US was purchased and seeded via treaty to the US by France and Mexico/Spain. The lands became US Territories and was controlled and protected by the Federal government. The people in those areas petitioned the government for statehood and under the terms of admission, all non-spoken for land would be designated Public land and controlled by the Federal Government. The government gave away a lot of Public land so people would move in and developed the land, more of the Public land was then leased to Cattle, Farm, Mining, and timber companies to generate income and allow the land to contribute to the local economy. The people living near the Public land do not own or have a say in how the land is managed other than give input just like any other US citizen. The problem is the locals now think they are entitled to take the land for their own good, without any compensation to the government whom owns the land in the name of all people. It is basically stealing from the American People, they are criminals, end of story.)