by Samantha Stone…

The spring of 2014 brought a whiff of Sagebrush Rebellion to the air in Southern Nevada, as federal agents raided Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch, and armed citizens from across the nation showed up in Bunkerville to face them down. But it was only a whiff. It changed quickly to an ill wind, and blew toward the nation’s capital, where it hangs like a sour smell over the public lands debate.

The Bunkerville episode and the criminal prosecutions of the Bundy family have clouded the federal land rights issue. Certain key players in Nevada’s land rights movement anticipated the shadow Bundy would cast on them, and remained deliberately absent from Bunkerville. These are ardent activists, some of whom tipped their hats to Bundy’s backbone, and deplored the BLM’s heavy handed tactics. But they also disavowed Bundy’s tactics, and disagreed with his legal conclusions.

Bundy is an outlier in a movement whose mainstream has become uncomfortable with him as its most visible symbol. And no wonder, with heavyweights like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid implying that the Bundy ranch battle typifies the bid for local control of land in the western states.

Reid issued a statement last month scolding Republicans who support transferring federally-owned lands to the states. He also used the occasion to blur the distinction between the larger land rights struggle and the radicals in Bundy’s militia.

Reid had help with this oblique smear. A day earlier, the Center for American Progress called for a congressional investigation into “the rise of violent extremism on America’s public lands.” Then, Nevada’s largest newspaper published a piece casting aspersions on other ranchers with BLM disputes, calling their claims “fairy tales.”

With his serious, sun-ripened gaze under the brim of a cowboy hat, Bundy bears a resemblance to the heroes of the land rights movement. Those farmers, ranchers, and lumberjacks have garnered scattered media attention over the years, and not always favorable. Big media reports disparagingly, often framing their activities as environmentally hazardous. On talk radio and conservative news outlets, they’ve been portrayed as good-faith Americans hanging on to land-based livelihoods as environmental regulations choke them out.

Bundy is a different breed. In essence, he is the loser in a 20-year cold war with the Bureau of Land Management. When the BLM raided his ranch, Bundy was in contempt of court, and a million dollars in debt to the federal government for unpaid grazing fees. The BLM had issued repeated notices to remove his cattle, which Bundy had shrugged off, claiming the federal government had no such authority. When the agency finally moved in to confiscate the cattle on orders from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, protesters swarmed the property, denouncing the feds in violent terms, and packing powerful weapons, which they aimed, but never fired. The BLM mission was called off.

In the months leading up to the Bunkerville skirmish, ranchers in Nevada’s north-central region were embroiled in their own BLM conflict. They’d enlisted help from the late Grant Gerber, who for several decades had been the chief strategist behind cleverly-staged (and peacefully legal) demonstrations against intrusive federal land managers. Gerber usually stood back while the affected citizens drove the action. But he was the idea man, and he’d hatched a series of offbeat rebellions to illustrate how environmental regulations deprive locals of their rightful land use, and are often counterproductive anyway.

While the Bundy ranch was under siege, Gerber, then an Elko County Commissioner, was working with a group of ranchers seeking the ouster of BLM district manager Doug Furtado. The ranchers complained Furtado was repeatedly unreasonable in his dealings with them. Among other things, they claimed he had used faulty data to close off a grazing parcel called the Argenta Allotment.

Six weeks after Bunkerville quieted down, Gerber set out on horseback from Elko to Battle Mountain, the first 70-mile stretch in what he’d dubbed a “cowboy express.” He carried a batch of petitions for Furtado’s removal. In Battle Mountain, he handed off the petitions to other riders, who gave them to still others stationed along the route to Governor Brian Sandoval’s office in Carson City. There was fanfare and news coverage as the relay team delivered the documents to the governor. Shortly thereafter, Sandoval and federal officials inspected the Argenta Allotment, and its pastures were reopened during the same season.

Cowboy Express had helped reinstate the grazing rights, so Gerber expanded the concept, organizing another odyssey on horseback from California to Washington, D.C. The ride drew support from rural sympathizers across thousands of miles, and Gerber sought media attention for their land use struggles.

Conscious that any media coverage would place Nevada’s BLM issues in the context of Bunkerville, Gerber named his cross-country ride the Grass March, homage to Mahatma Ghandi’s peaceful 1930 Salt March. He limited his comments on the Bundy matter to respectful disagreement about the law.

These two episodes – The Bunkerville standoff and the Grass March – highlight philosophical and tactical differences between the movement’s mainstream and a new, more radical faction.

Some veteran activists who declined to get behind Bundy point to a mirror-image effect in the green movement. Mainstream environmentalists once cringed as so-called eco-terrorists grabbed headlines by burning down businesses they viewed as an affront to mother earth. Even the civil rights movement, they note, had its Martin Luther King and its Malcolm X wings.

Travis and Zack Gerber, who run the Elko law practice started by their late father, have watched the Bundy drama from the state’s northeast corner, but have remained detached from it. They grew up with land rights issues as dinner table talk. Like many others, they’re dismayed by a broad brush that paints Bundy’s army as representative of the land rights community. And further dismayed by political rhetoric that sweeps up the legitimately aggrieved parties with the “violent extremists” – a term finding favor in the op-ed pages – who declared war on behalf of a scofflaw.

Travis says he pondered what, if anything, his dad might have done during a second armed standoff staged earlier this year by Bundy’s sons at the Malhuer Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. So many people approached him with the question, he says, and most were certain that Grant Gerber would have gotten involved. (The elder Gerber died after the Grass March, on the return trip from Washington. An expert horseman and self-described cowboy, Gerber fell when his horse stumbled on a path near Kansas City. He died of complications arising from a head injury.)

Perhaps, Travis says, his father would have traveled to the edge of the Oregon refuge, set up a separate cowboy camp, and tried to persuade the militia members to go home before they got arrested. But perhaps not. Grant Gerber wanted lots of daylight between the Bundy faction and others with more righteous complaints. Most likely, he’d have stayed away from Oregon.

Bundy’s sons and others at the Oregon refuge were arrested and charged with federal crimes. The rebellion left one of the activists dead. Travis sometimes wonders if things might have turned out differently had he tried to intervene.

“I thought of riding up there on horseback,” Travis said in a phone interview. “In the end, I just wasn’t moved to do it,”

What is certain is that Grant Gerber would have provided an alternative source for reporters covering events at the wildlife refuge.

“The majority of ranchers and westerners would like to see the issue resolved peacefully, and through the political process.” That would have been the elder Gerber’s message, said his son.

Major news media are finicky about rural people and their land rights, covering some stories, and leaving others untouched. Most of the stories feature a pretty wholesome cast of characters. They’re compelling and sometimes tragic, but most go unreported by all but hometown newspapers. Admittedly, there’s little drama in watching mom-and-pop ranchers who mind their own business until they can no longer fend off the green police, and then bow out with bankruptcies or sell off at fire sale prices.

Armed standoffs make snappier headlines, even if nobody ends up dead. The Bundy family has been generating headlines for two years now. They will occupy the spotlight for months to come, as the federal prosecutions against them unfold.