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The Battle of Bunkerville

The fight for freedom is God’s fight.

—Ezra Taft Benson

On April 12, 2014, hundreds of protesters, including members of various militia groups, gathered near Bunkerville, Nevada, in the southeastern corner of the state, making their stand in solidarity with Cliven Bundy. They had gathered to shut down the court-ordered removal of the Bundys’ cattle from public lands. Many in the crowd carried guns and a few were positioned as snipers, their rifles aimed at federal agents and police. Agents aimed back. Men in cowboy hats rode on horseback with a crowd pushing along to face Las Vegas police and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officers. Some of the protesters threatened and yelled obscenities. One guy in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey asked a police officer if he was ready to die.

Cliven and Carol Bundy told me that even a backfire could have triggered another Waco. Of course, militia members and anti-government protesters say this all the time. Waco, Texas, is the town where, in 1993, federal agents, along with state lawenforcement officers and US military, led a siege of the compound in which a group, the Branch Davidians, had barricaded themselves. That siege ended in a final assault and a fire, resulting in the deaths of dozens of men, women, and children, an event that became a rallying cry in anti-government circles. Some allude to Waco as a cautionary tale, others with a kind of yearning, eager to have it out with a government they so despise.

During the Bundy standoff, Interstate 15 was shut down while north- and southbound traffic idled. On that spring day in Nevada, rifles aimed and ready, some of the protesters awaited a sign that would determine the outcome. Would the feds attack first, giving the protesters their chance to defend the Bundys? To protect them from the same evil forces responsible for the fate of the poor Branch Davidians of Waco? Or would the itchy fingers of an armed protester set off a volley of bullets? Perhaps divine intervention might take place, indicating God’s sympathy for this Mormon rancher and his family. In the minds of the protesters there that day, all scenarios were possible.

After a tense standoff, no bullets were exchanged. It was no Waco. In fact, the feds and the police relented and drove away. The retreat thrilled the protesters, but left the officers and agents shaken. Sergeant Tom Jenkins of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said, “We didn’t show any fear that day, but I can tell you, we all thought in the back of our minds, we all thought it was going to be our last day on earth.” Although the law officers weren’t interested in sacrificing their lives for cattle, many Bundy supporters evidently were.

Cliven’s son Ryan declared to the crowd, “The West has now been won.” Cliven Bundy, his family, and his followers reveled in the agents’ retreat. “If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong,” Cliven said later, “would the Lord have been with us? … Could those people that stood without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.” To the Bundys, the day validated their position and demonstrated that God was on their side.

The Bundys and their public land battles initially sounded like a fringe cause—an isolated family caught up in a quixotic battle with the government over a bunch of cows. But in fact, in their crusade, they have inspired hundreds of thousands of supporters in the years following the Nevada standoff. The Bundys, as western “everymen,” have become the heroic face of anti-government agitators. Taking a passionate battle from Nevada to Oregon, where members of the family later led an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge, the Bundys staked their own claims on American public land and traditional Native land. They have gotten away with illegal grazing, takeovers, standoffs, and expensive property damage. To some, they have become champions. And as such, their amalgamation of Mormon beliefs, libertarianism, and a right-wing reading of the Constitution continues to inform and embolden anti-government activism.

Now members of this Mormon ranching family have launched a campaign, meeting with thousands of people, including reporters, supporters, and other ranchers, urging their followers to flout government regulations and join Cliven in his crusade to take back the West. In addition, Cliven’s reach online is incalculable. So, what is his message to these rapt audiences? Essentially this: We the people get to tell the federal government what they can and can’t do. And the government cannot own public lands. Therefore, federal regulations on lands do not exist. In fact, public land is just the wrong name. Really, it’s YOUR ranch. It’s all spelled out for you in the Constitution. And if you don’t trust me, just ask God. That’s what He’ll tell you.

Hardly the first member of his faith to break a federal law in favor of God’s higher authority, Cliven Bundy comes from a long line of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, who talk to God and take His word over the law of the land. The line starts with Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, seer, revelator, and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who was arrested over forty times during his life of offenses that ranged from fraud and polygamy to conspiracy to commit murder. Smith’s loyal bodyguard, Orrin Porter Rockwell—nicknamed “the Destroying Angel of Mormondom,” because he brazenly went after enemies of the church, perceived or otherwise—killed many men in his lifetime and very probably tried to assassinate the governor of Missouri. Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith in 1844, spent decades ignoring federal laws as he established Mormon homeland in the Great Basin, while encouraging violence, fraud, and multiple deceptions.

And 172 years after Smith’s murder, and less than a year after the Battle of Bunkerville, the Heavenly Father would tell Cliven’s sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy to take up arms against an oppressive United States government. On January 2, 2016, the boys arrived with a small army of supporters, locked and loaded, to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon until their arrest six weeks later. When Bundy family members heard the heavenly call toward the righteous direction, it was game on. Thy will be done.

The Bundy family is a product of a region where the corners of southern Utah and northern Arizona abut the state of Nevada; a place where Mormon communities today are scattered among the parks, monuments, and recreational areas. In the nineteenth century, their ancestors built settlements and livelihoods across the West, within what became a mosaic of federal and private holdings. Today, these places are visited, or at the very least driven past, by millions of tourists every year. It is a multilayered landscape, considered homeland to Latter-day Saints and sacred ground to the Southern Paiute people. Hikers, mountain bikers, and climbers in the thrall of writings by Terry Tempest Williams and Edward Abbey, find in these places both sanctuary and adventure. Ranchers look out and see lifestyle and legacy. It’s desert and it’s canyon country, a home to retired snowbirds, Park Service personnel, lodge managers, and outfitters who each see their own various cosmologies and values reflected in these rocks. Some see majesty. Some see money. Some see birthright. And some see God.