Sagebrush Rebellion
The Rebellion Lives
The Sagebrush Rebellion lives on:
The state is asking the justices to declare that the federal government’s ownership of millions of acres of public lands in the state’s borders is unconstitutional. The United States currently holds title to more than 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” public lands within Utah’s borders, meaning that it is not currently set aside or designated for any specific purpose.
Utah’s stance is remarkably similar to Nevada in 1979, when the state legislature passed Assembly Bill 413 attempting to seize the public lands and place their management under the control of the state. The movement among western ranchers in the 1970s and 1980s appeared poised to succeed, particularly after President Reagan’s appointment of James Watt—a native of Wyoming with a long history of legal disputes with the federal government’s land agencies—as the Secretary of the Interior, which housed the Bureau of Land Management.
The Rebellion had its roots among miners, loggers, and ranchers across the American West who decried the “federal colonialism” of the government’s ownership of public lands. This was particularly pronounced across the Intermountain West, where Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming led a grassroots movement outlining a state’s rights argument towards the public lands. The argument centered around new environmental regulations, particularly those outlined in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which mandated the public lands would be managed “in perpetuity” by the federal government.
Western ranchers had well-earned attachments to the land, and any possibility of those lands facing outsider intervention would be met with consternation. Nor was the Rebellion the first time western ranchers turned to collective power to assert their property rights. But federal regulators were understandably concerned about the ecological health of the federal lands.
Total Federal Land in the American West and Great Plains, 2018
| State | Total Federal Acreage | Percentage Federally Owned |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska | 222,666,580 | 60.9% |
| Arizona | 28,077,992 | 38.6% |
| California | 45,493,133 | 45.4% |
| Colorado | 24,100,247 | 36.2% |
| Idaho | 32,789,648 | 61.9% |
| Kansas | 253,919 | 0.5% |
| Montana | 27,082,401 | 29.0% |
| Nebraska | 546,852 | 1.1% |
| Nevada | 56,262,610 | 80.1% |
| New Mexico | 24,665,774 | 31.7% |
| North Dakota | 1,733,641 | 3.9% |
| Oklahoma | 683,289 | 1.5% |
| Oregon | 32,244,257 | 52.3% |
| South Dakota | 2,640,005 | 5.4% |
| Texas | 3,231,198 | 1.9% |
| Utah | 33,267,621 | 63.1% |
| Wyoming | 29,137,722 | 46.7% |
The Rebellion failed to achieve its goal in the 1980s, but that didn’t mean the politics of the land exited as well. Having failed in achieving the goal of transferring public lands to private hands through executive power, the Rebellion turned to new avenues: more forceful direct action (including stand-offs with government agents in Nevada and Oregon) and legal action. Thus, Utah v. United States is a continuation of political energies that began to coalesce in the 1960s and 1970s but expressed in a new way: the policy arguments are not new, but the legal ones are.
Yet even as these legal arguments make their way through the courts, the emotional appeal remains similar. Utah’s congressional delegation have referred to the dispute as being “held captive” by federal policies that denied them an “equal” statehood. “The reduction in Utah’s effective congressional power,” the legislators argued, “reduces the state’s effective representation as compared to other states, undermining the state’s equal representation.” Hardly a novel emotional appeal. As Nevada state senator Normal Glaser, an Elko cattle rancher instrumental in Nevada’s 1979 legislation, argued: “We’re tired of being pistol-whipped by the bureaucrats and ambushed and dry-gulched by federal regulations.” The idea that western states bear an overwhelming burden of far-eastern government meddlers is an old tale.
The Legacies of the Bundyville Stand-off
Leah Sottile, host of the fantastic Bundyville podcast and contributor to High Country News, writes on the continuing legacy of the Bundyville stand-off.
When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West. It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda.
She includes some citations to recent important work by Benjamin Park, Sam Jackson, and Jessica Pishko.
One of the things I’m tracking in my new research on the Sagebrush Rebellion is how the rebellion played out in the northern Plains and Canadian prairies. There is, undoubtedly, a continuing legacy of far-right, anti-government ideology underlying its legacy.
But, at least so far in my work, I don’t see this same ideology expressed so forcefully on the plains and prairies. Yet, I still see the importance of ideology, or perhaps identity, in the plains version of the movement. After all, the movement on the plains dealt with considerably less actual public lands—you can combine the entirety of federal lands across the Great Plains and come nowhere close to the percentage of land the federal government manages in Nevada alone—yet the movement still finds purchase. The thread I’m currently following: how much does the ideology and identity of the rebellion define how it acts on the plains? If the plains-style movement is less concerned about federal land, then it must be concerned with something else.