Tweet
BLM releases Bundy cattle after protesters block southbound I-15
BUNKERVILLE — More than a 100 head of Cliven Bundy’s confiscated cattle were released from a corral outside of Mesquite after angry ranchers and and other supporters, some of them armed with pistols and rifles, descended on the pen Saturday afternoon nearly 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
The mid-afternoon release by the Bureau of Land Management, hailed as a victory among Tea Partiers and Contitutional rights activitists, after hundreds of them started to worry sheriff deputies and federal agents, leading the Nevada Highway Patrol to shut down a portion of southbound Interstate 15 so that law enforcement vehicles could respond to violent outbursts.
The BLM, upset that Bundy has refused to pay federal grazing fees for two decades, had seized at least one-third of his cattle earlier this week in a raging debate that has captured national attention and whose purpose was also to protect a critical habitat of the endangered desert tortoise.
But on Saturday the BLM decided to halt the roundup, fearing for the safety of its agents, the public and the non stop amassing of protestors who were showing up with firearms on the doorstep of the open range, invoking the Second Amenment more often than the government wanted to hear.
Bundy, who owes the government, at the very least, $1 million, was overcome with joy earlier Saturday by BLM’s decision to pull out, which was quickly seen as a setback among environmentalists, who called Bundy supporters “anarachists.”
Bundy’s enthusiasm was catching as he addressed a cheering crowd just outside his ranch, yelling — “Good morning America! Good morning world! Isn’t it a beautiful day in Bunkerville?”
Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie served as a negotiator between Bundy and the BLM late Friday night.
But neither said they anticipated protestors to suddenly make a beeline for the pen.
Gillespie just moments earlier had told Bundy supporters to remain peaceful. It’s something he’d been saying all week as a fraction of Clark County’s countryside, known as Gold Butte, suddenly became fodder for conservative talk show hosts. The fued was held up as just another example of how the federal government takes its actions to an extreme, infringing on landowner rights — “come hell or high water,” noted Cody Stewart, a 24-year-old taylor who traveled to Nevada from Portland.
“I can’t believe there’s this ‘no fly zone” and all of these government agents out here,” he said.
But in Gillespie’s short speech to the crowd on the banks of the Virgin River, where Bundy’s cattle once gazed, but were not visbily absent, Gillepsie failed to elaborate on what federal agents planned to do with the penned up cattle, all told 170 head in a field of some 500.
So after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem and saying a few prayers, they took matters into their own hands and mobilized in an attempt to free them. But they were kept at bay by sheriff deputies and an array of federal agents in what turned into a tense standoff for more than an hour, with reports that officers were yelling from a bullhorn to keep away or they’d be shot.
“There have been no shots and nobody has been injured and my men are working real hard to keep the calm,” Gillespie said by telephone from the scene. “But emotions are high, and we’re going to make sure that it ends peacefully.”
Protesters’ actions cap a weeklong fight that has pitted armed federal agents against Bundy, a 67-year-old rancher who claims the land is either his for his cattle to graze on or it belongs to the state of Nevada. But it certinaly doesn’t belong to the federal government.
Bundy’s son, Ammon, 38, eventually got caught up in the mantra and on the wrong side of a stun gun earlier in the week in a scuffle that broke out between Bundy family members and federal agents, who, themselves fearing for their welfare, had to hold German shepherds back from a crowd of protesters six miles outside of the Bundy ranch.
The video, which documented the standoff for more than five mintues, quickly circulated on YouTube and the story exploded.
“I don’t think the federal government is liking social media all that much these days,” quipped Sheri Olson, 51, who made the journey to Bunkerville from Portland, Ore., with her daughter, Breanna, 24, to support Bundy.
Theresa Casella, who came to Nevada from Phoenix to protest, said she couldn’t believe that the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service were pouring millions of dollars into impounding Bundy’s cattle, which is, for all intents and purposes, his livelihood, she said.
“Wasn’t that a hangable offense back in the day?” she said, half jokingly from the passenger seat of her pickup. “And now we have the federal government doing it? Back in the day, that was called rustling, I think.”
And this so called “cattle rustling” in what the federal government has referred to as “trespass cattle” was occurring in Southern Nevada in an area that spans 1,200 square miles in Clark County. The land is so sparse of forage that an estimated 900 head of Bundy’s cattle have had to roam far and wide to nourish themselves in a desert climate that isn’t the ideal location for grazing. Especially if there’s no water.
Moved to tears, Ammon Bundy told hundreds of supporters Saturday how federal agents used backhoes to dig up important water lines. The end result is that cattle and calves were deprived of water in a tactic that was designed to make the round up easier, he said.
But it came at a cost of the federal governmrent turning the landscape into nothing short of a military zone, he said.
“We the people in this area have nothing to fear,” said Bundy, wearing a cowboy hat and a T-shirt bearing his family name. “We can carry our weapons if we like because we have Second Amendment rights, and those are God-given rights. Those Second Amendment rights are our rights. But, and I say ‘but,’ because we don’t have to carry them right now because we’re afraid. I’m telling you that right now. Because there’s been a lot of people who’ve been afraid, and I know that feeling. Just yesterday evening I was really afraid. ….Today, we have been confirmed by our creator that we do not have to be afraid.
“This is his battle. This is his battle.”
For its part, the BLM released very little information once the round up got underway a week ago Saturday, and mostly it did so on its terms, often canceling press conferences at the last minute. Mostly the message was the same: it was seizing Bundy’s cattle because it has tried time and again to get Bundy to pony up his debt or suffer the consequences.
It’s tried time and again to resolve the matter with Bundy, both “judicially and administratively,” but to no avail.
Cathching wind of the fight between the lone rancher and the federal government, protestors started showing up in legions to voice their support. Some of them carried pistols in holsters. Others carried rifles. Many dressed in camouflage in a scene that could have been mistaken for a Third World country.
The Bundy ranch itself, whose cattle operations have existed since the late 1800s, became a fortified compound overnight, courtesy of militias who came from Montana and the greater Rocky Mountain West to protect Bundy from what they perceived as “government tyranny.”
Locals who make a living on the range and own horses showed up on horseback.
Nearly all of them defended Bundy’s actions and spoke about how tired they were of the federal government micromanaging the ways of the people, including passing too many regulations, not just in Nevada but across the country; not just in cattle ranching, but in all facets of life, from Obamacare to the too meticulous Environmental Protection Agency.
Comment