22
Wednesday, January 13, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Harney County
blues
“The perceptions of any
people wash over the land
like a flood, leaving ideas
hung up in the brush, like
pieces of damp paper to be
collected and deciphered.
No one call tell the whole
story.”
— Barry Lopez
Nobody is winning in
Harney County. Not the
Hammonds, certainly, who
by some strange judicial leg-
erdemain — and one can’t
help but believe it is likely
vindictive — are now back
in prison.
Reasonable people
might come to the conclu-
sion that they have already
done enough time for the
convicted offense which,
given the scale of it, wasn’t
much at all. A hundred acres,
more or less, and a rickety
fence burned. The citizens
of America, let alone Harney
County, don’t gain much by
jumpsuiting the Hammonds
back into a Federal prison
with cartel dope dealers and
human traffickers.
And the unwanted Bundy
outfit, many of whom
appear to have stumbled
out of Ted Kaczinki shacks,
have exposed themselves as
knee-jerk charlatans with-
out a plan, without a sym-
pathetic message, and more
importantly, without a rea-
sonable clue. Meanwhile,
the kids are out of school,
the townfolk are fed up, Fox
News and CNN blather on
relentlessly, and the only
ones worthy of any praise
are Harney County Sheriff
David Ward and the FBI,
who have learned enough
about Direct Action failures
elsewhere to refuse any at
the Malheur Refuge. Good
on them.
Buried beneath all of
this are real issues. There
are some who wail about
the abuses of “subsidized”
ranching, and would like
nothing more than to see
families like the Hammonds
and their livestock thrown
off the range for various
offenses, real or imagined.
Others expect public lands
ranchers to behave dispas-
sionately when confronted
by bureaucracies that have
become increasingly hos-
tile, and by environmental
groups that sue them into
oblivion no matter what
improvements they make in
their practices, and no mat-
ter how much good faith
they show.
In a reasonable discus-
sion, it seems that we might
remember that these are
people whose livelihoods
are tied to their use of public
land, and who take tremen-
dous pride in their steward-
ship of the resource. Are
there scofflaws? Bandits?
Some outright bad people?
You bet, and that’s true of
any industry, and any busi-
ness in America. It’s true
of government, cops, the
military, environmentalists,
priests, big business, small
business, and everywhere
else.
If you want to open the
door on the room of unrigh-
teousness, don’t be surprised
by the people you find sit-
ting in there. But thankfully,
they aren’t the majority
among us, in any enterprise,
and never have been.
It is just as wrong to
decry the efforts of environ-
mentalists whose efforts are
most often made in equally
good faith. These are pas-
sionate people and orga-
nizations, who cannot be
faulted for their convictions
any more than the folks who
have ranched a few sec-
tions of desert for a hundred
years. Often, when seated
at the same table, they find
that their goals, extracted
from the heated rhetoric of
politics and media, line up
squarely.
Sagebrush rebellions are
as old as the West. In recent
memory I can cite the Dann
Sisters, the Nye County
revolt in Nevada, and the
recent serious resurgence of
the State of Jefferson move-
ment in northern California.
There are many more. And
I could tell you privately,
preferably over a Hoodoo
Voodoo at Three Creeks —
and only after my horses
are fed — of any number of
alleged government abuses
and the subsequent sage-
brush partisan sabotage.
This has been going on for
years, and isn’t likely to go
away, so long as the present
atmosphere of extremism,
partisanship, and the percep-
tions of disenfranchisement
remain.
We can do a whole lot
better.
Once, when I was a
working buckaroo in north-
ern Nevada, I had an MC
horse in my string. A son of
that outfit, Bill Kittridge has
written brilliantly about the
decline and fall of the MC,
and fans of Ian Tyson might
know his brilliant ballad on
the sale of the MC horses.
The MC is all gone now,
broken apart and sold off to
various interests.
But no one can tell me
we are better off because of
it, that something precious
was somehow preserved by
killing something else that
was equally precious. That
smart and energetic palo-
mino I rode with an MC iron
on his hip, just the two of
us working great circles in
the great American outback,
under bluebird skies and far
out in the rocks and the bit-
ing flies, is long dead, but I
learned this: it’s a great big
desert out there, a desert that
will still be there long after
we are all gone. It’s a blues
joint, in fact, singing a song
we all appreciate, and there’s
room enough for all of us to
grab a chair and sit down
to listen: the righteous, the
unrighteous, the cows, the
cowboys, the wolves, the
wild horses, and whatever
little frog you’ve got.
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