Newly freed, Cliven Bundy gets a hero’s welcome in Montana
PARADISE, Mont. — Cliven Bundy was fresh out of jail, and so the nation’s most controversial rancher strode into the frontier town of Paradise and called on hundreds of supporters — a sea of cattlemen, timber workers and star-struck children — to follow in his footsteps.
“Go and read your Constitution,” he said, telling the crowd a week ago today to reject federal control of millions of acres of American landscapes. Washington, he declared, has no business “telling you how to graze your cattle, cut your timber, mine your mines.”
In 2014, when his fight over cattle grazing led to an armed standoff with federal agents, Bundy became a symbol of defiance for rural Westerners angry over the government’s management of public lands.
By the time he walked free this month, that issue had become a national flashpoint. The Trump administration has moved to open more lands to mining, drilling and logging, to the cheers of landrights activists and commercial interests and the dismay of environmentalists.
Bundy’s case has also become a study in government wrongdoing. After declaring a mistrial, Judge Gloria M. Navarro of U.S. District Court in Las Vegas said prosecutors had willfully withheld a trove of potentially exculpatory information from Bundy’s legal team, committing “flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.” The Justice Department opened an investigation into its attorneys’ actions, and Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and a supporter named Ryan C. Payne were released. Navarro dismissed the charges against them “with prejudice,” meaning they cannot be retried.
Now, the Bundys’ freedom is playing out on parallel tracks in the West. On one track is Bundy, 71, who went on a victory trip this past weekend, driving some 15 hours from his ranch in Bunkerville to give a speech at the request of a group called the Coalition of Western Property Owners.
Paradise, Mont., is a slip of a town between snow-dusted mountains north of Missoula. It is a place where people have long said that restrictive federal land policies were strangling their livelihoods. On Saturday, at least 300 people crowded the town schoolhouse, declaring that the judge’s blistering critique was proof of what they had said for years: The federal government is corrupt and out to destroy rural people like Bundy.
“He’s my idol,” said Chaleen Hill, 38, who runs an operation that rescues unwanted horses, and said that her family gave up its ranch after conflicts with the U.S. Forest Service made running it too difficult. She stood by Bundy and vowed to “stand up beside him with a gun on my horse” if the government returned to take his cows.
“Clive,” she said, pressing a pocket Constitution into his hands, “do you have a second to sign this for me?”
On another track are environmentalists, government workers and many others who worry that Bundy’s freedom will embolden people who oppose a federal land policy — the designation of a new national monument, for example, or a ban on mining by a national park — to mount an armed protest.
“The legacy of this is going to persist,” said Mark Fiege, a professor of Western history at Montana State University, who said that much of his anger fell on the fed-