Of bull trout and bulldozers: Nevadans’ ire spooks federal workers

David Foster and Scott Sonner

Sunday, Feb. 20, 2000 | 8:59 a.m.

ELKO, Nev. - This story can be told the cowboy way: How local folk, bullied for years by the biggest landlord in town, finally seized control of what they believed was rightfully theirs.

Or it can be told the government way: How veiled threats and naked hostility have made northeastern Nevada one of the toughest spots in America to be a federal employee.

The story is told both ways in Elko County, though seldom in the same company. Across this wide and empty landscape, there's little room for middle ground, and a feud between local leaders and the U.S. Forest Service has escalated into a fist-shaking, shovel-wielding rebellion.

What started as a homegrown dispute over a washed-out road has become a rallying point for rural Westerners who feel hemmed in by environmental regulations. It's also a source of worry for Forest Service workers, who fear the inflamed rhetoric may inspire violence against them.

"I want to welcome you all to the Republic of Elko," shouted O.Q. "Chris" Johnson, chairman of the Elko County Republican Party.

It was Jan. 29, a chilly Saturday morning, and Johnson stood outside the county courthouse, telling a crowd of 4,000 that they - not some far-off bureaucrats - should control the public land all around them.

"I think you are making history," Johnson said.

They had gathered to support the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, a band of Elko County residents who tried last October to rebuild a washed-out road that the Forest Service wanted to keep closed.

A 30-foot-high shovel fashioned from wood and metal loomed over Johnson on the courthouse lawn. Earlier in the day, a parade of 1,000 people on trucks, horses, burros and homemade floats rolled through town.

Toddlers waved plastic sandbox shovels and American flags. Teens threw candy from the backs of pickups. Shovels were everywhere, piled in truck beds, waved by marchers and tied to roof racks - 10,000 in all, collected from around the West to support the shovel brigade.

As usual in Elko, the festivities had a bite to them.

An all-terrain vehicle pulled a trailer with a tombstone reading "U.S. Forest Service." A teen-age girl's sign declared "Tree Huggers: the other red meat."

Conflict over control of the land is as old as the West itself, but this particular battle began in June 1995, when heavy rains in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest flooded the Jarbidge River. The swollen river washed out parts of the last 1.5 miles of the South Canyon Road.

After three years of study, the Forest Service proposed that the road be replaced by a trail to keep soil erosion from harming the river's bull trout, now listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

But when the agency sought public comment in June 1998, this was Elko County's reply: We'll rebuild the road ourselves.

Elko County, after all, is at the heart of the long-running Sagebrush Rebellion, in which state and county officials battle for local control of the West's vast federal lands.

County commissioners ordered a road crew to start work immediately, claiming the road belonged to the county, not the Forest Service. They argued that the road was in use long before the national forest was established in 1908.

State and federal authorities halted the road work a day after it began, but the arguments have continued ever since. An attempt to reach a compromise broke apart last April, and last summer the Forest Service billed the county for $420,000 in damage to the road.

The county reasserted its claim to the road, and last September, an "independent citizens work party" led by Johnson and Nevada state Assemblyman John Carpenter announced plans to reopen the road frontier-style, using shovels and horse-drawn equipment.

The shovel brigade called off its Oct. 9 work party after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order. They held a barbecue instead, with federal land policies the main item on the grill.

All this may seem a lot of fuss over a road that's remote even by Nevada standards. Tucked into a canyon south of the tiny mining town of Jarbidge, the South Canyon Road leads only to four campsites and two toilets before it ends at a trailhead into the wilderness.

Everyone agrees, however, that there's more than a lonely dirt road at stake.

"This harassment and discrimination against rural people must stop," said Carpenter. "Those who would destroy our Western way of life must be confronted and backed off. We are tired of being treated as second-class citizens."

Carpenter, 69, wears cowboy boots and a gray cowboy hat, his reading glasses and a pen tucked into his white shirt pocket. His grandfather came to Nevada from Sweden in the late 1800s to work in the mining business; his family has owned and operated ranches since the turn of the century.

Now Carpenter runs Ranchers Realty in Elko, working out of a small office at the back of a Texaco station. First as a county commissioner and now as a seven-term state legislator, Carpenter has long been a champion for those who live and work close to the land.

Often that land is public land. Despite the popular image of rural Westerners as rugged individualists, many are tenants of the federal government, which manages 87 percent of Nevada's land. The Humboldt-Toiyabe, the largest national forest outside Alaska, is dotted with mines and grazing allotments.

In recent years, environmental protections have increasingly limited what ranchers, miners and others can do on public lands. Frustrations have grown into anger and defiance, Carpenter said.

"There have always been issues, but we were always able to sit down and do the right thing," he said. "The last few years, since the Clinton administration, we have not been able to work with these people in charge in Washington. It's either their way or no way."

It's not easy working for the Forest Service in Elko County.

"Abolish the fednazis before they murder your wife and children!" exclaimed a letter to the editor last month in the Elko Daily Free Press.

At the Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest headquarters, a squat white building on the outskirts of town, employees keep their heads down. Public affairs officer Erin O'Connor asked 25 colleagues if they'd be willing to speak to a reporter. Each refused.

"They'd just as soon not talk about it," O'Connor said. "It could come back and bite them."

Federal employees who have moved out of town are less reticent.

"Elko is the most difficult place I've ever lived," said Kathy Ramsey, who transferred last year to a national forest in Oregon after more than five years working in fisheries and range management on the Humboldt-Toiyabe.

Government workers in the West have to expect conflict, Ramsey said, but not to the extent she found in Elko. She tried to make friends but found herself rebuffed by misunderstandings and distrust.

"Finally I gave up," she said.

Forest Service biologist Jay Frederick said that when he moved to Elko County five years ago, one of his neighbors predicted a civil war someday between citizens and federal employees. At South Canyon Road, he said, a Jarbidge resident vowed to use a bulldozer to bury Frederick and his pickup truck in the river.

Frederick now works, more peacefully, in Montana.

"I think it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt down there," he said. "It's just a matter of time."

Forest Service investigators spent two weeks in December interviewing agency workers in Nevada and issued a report on Feb. 7 detailing dozens of claims of harassment, intimidation and threats.

One worker told the fact-finding team that a bulldozer operator at a mine tried to run her over. Others told of being denied service in a restaurant, refused admittance to a club, cursed at a bus stop and ridiculed at a public banquet. Many said they avoided wearing their green uniforms or driving marked vehicles to be less conspicuous.

"When I travel in a Forest Service vehicle in central and northeast Nevada I often feel like a 'sitting duck,' a target," one employee told investigators.

The report concluded that no prosecutable threats had been made in recent years, and sagebrush rebels deny any suggestions that their tough talk has ever turned physical.

But Forest Service employees here can't forget the 1995 bombing of a district ranger's office - and four months later his van - in Carson City. No one was injured and the bomber was never caught.

Gloria Flora, who resigned as the Humboldt-Toiyabe's supervisor in October to protest the mistreatment of her employees, said "irresponsible fed-bashing" is accepted and even encouraged by county and state officials.

"There is a slowly escalating acceptance of a very uncivil attitude and behavior," she said.

Flora worries that an angry, unstable person may see the fiery public rhetoric as permission to cross the line from verbal to physical attacks.

Critics accuse her of overreacting with her resignation. But Flora said Nevada's volatile atmosphere left her little other choice to protect her employees.

When letters to the editor urge Elko residents to "remember Waco," what Flora remembers is Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

"The last person who remembered Waco in a vivid way killed over 160 people," Flora said. "They didn't get any prosecutable threat. How do you determine what's going to push somebody too far? Was I going to wait for an actual threat or bomb so I could say 'See? See?"'

January's parade of shovels coincided with Elko's annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of a gentler side of the Western mystique.

Charlie Seemann, its organizer, said "the shovel thing" put him in an awkward position, but he said he understands the frustrations of cowboys, miners and others who work the land.

"Just living in this open space, doing the job they do, they have to be self-reliant," he said. "They don't like to be told what to do."

Some people, even shovel-brigade supporters, have grown tired of the bluster.

"Somebody had to go and push their chest out over this thing with the road. Now nobody wants to back down," said Debbie Giebel, who hunts, fishes and drives around Elko with a shovel tied to her Jeep. "I think they should stop calling people names and sit down and act like adults."

Matt Holford, a representative of Trout Unlimited and the closest thing to an environmental activist in Elko County, said he's waiting for the county-supremacy rhetoric to fade.

"Eventually, this will end up in court, and it will solve itself," Holford said. "We'll end up talking about the effects of the road on the fish. When they're ready, we'll be here to talk about it."

But Carpenter said the shovel brigade is far from done. At the courthouse rally, he promised an Independence Day next summer that Elko County won't soon forget.

"We are determined that our cowboys are not going to be a dying breed," he said. "The road is going to be opened on the Fourth of July.... God Bless America."

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