Elko County activists ties to region go way back

Scott Sonner

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000 | 4:41 a.m.

ELKO, Nev. - Grant Gerber's great-grandfather worked in the gold fields of California and drove cattle in Oregon.

His grandfather used a team of horses to help clear the grade for the Western Pacific Railroad across most of Nevada at the turn of the century.

So the Elko lawyer doesn't take kindly to federal bureaucrats who tell him they know what is best for a threatened fish and a washed out road that runs along the Jarbidge River in northeast Nevada.

"My ancestors settled here in the mid-1800s," Gerber said in a recent interview.

"We know this land and the wildlife are in so much better shape now because our fathers and grandfathers developed the land and the water," he said.

"Then we have people come from the outside and say 'You are ruining the land."'

Gerber is among the ringleaders of a revolt against the Forest Service's refusal to rebuild the South Canyon Road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest based on concerns the road will push the threatened bull trout past the brink of extinction.

His connection to the land is a constant theme in the stories of local citizens who share his disdain for federal environmental policies they believe increasingly ignore the interests of rural Americans.

"The Endangered Species Act needs to be rewritten. That fish could be raised overnight in a hatchery," Gerber said.

He said all Westerners dependent on natural resources for their livelihood are under attack - loggers, miners, ranchers. It's especially a problem in states like Nevada, where 87 percent of the land is controlled by the federal government, he said.

"I've been in this fight for 20 years," Gerber said.

"I've listened to ranchers who have had their grazing cut by one-third, and then cut again. It destroys them and they go into bankruptcy."

Gerber, State Assemblyman John Carpenter and O.Q. "Chris Johnson" organized the work party in October that announced its intention to rebuild the washed out road in defiance of the Forest Service.

He rejects suggestions that they are part of a rebellion.

"At the Boston Tea party, they dressed up like Indians and snuck around in the dark, throwing tea into the harbor, destroying a private company's property," Gerber said.

"At Jarbidge, we were doing what 90 percent of American's would applaud - repairing a campground and a road to a campground. What is wrong with that?" he said.

In his law office in downtown Elko, a variety of topographical maps and drawings are taped to the walls of the conference room and strewn around the floor of the Jarbidge River and South Canyon.

The first accounts of trappers who arrived from Utah in the 1820s described a landscape void of wildlife.

"The entire time in Nevada, the biggest animal they got to eat was a dog they bought in the Ruby Valley. There was not a deer, not an elk, no big horn sheep. They were shooting their horses to get out of here because there was virtually no big game in this area.

"My father cowboyed a lot in northeast Nevada and he says they never saw a deer until the late 1930s," he said.

"So why are people upset? The old ranchers, the sportsmen, the snowmobilers who live here all understand that.

"It's hard to get people to understand that level of frustration."