BURNS, Ore. – The armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is by no means unprecedented. Nor is it the worst such conflict to happen, either recently or in Oregon.
In fact, the fairly loose organization, which has resulted in the almost circus-like environment captured on film here has more hard-line anti-federal government activists irked with the occupiers of the bird sanctuary buildings.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia called it “an armed standoff that’s being manufactured by potheads who want a fight.” He predicted it will be a “bad fight,” not a conflict ascending to “a righteous moral high ground.”
Now this may raise a few questions for readers, such as 1) who is Steward Rhodes; 2) what is Oath Keepers; and consequently, 3) why did veteran standoffer and current ringleader Ammon Bundy feel obliged to reply to Rhodes through social media?
Oath Keepers is a much more regimented, hard line militia that had great success in Oregon near Grants Pass. The Bureau of Land Management tried to shut down the Sugar Pine gold mine over a lack of paperwork. The militia viewed this as an unconstitutional incursion on the rights of hard working Oregonians. They were willing to do something drastic about it.
According to a report by journalist James Pogue, who is on the ground in Burns, Oath Keepers put up “a defensive encirclement of the mine itself, where dozens of heavily armed men and women were encamped” as well as a “five-acre logistical staging area and basecamp on a very visible piece of real estate just off Interstate 5, where trucks were loaded with supplies, plans were made, and even more volunteers were processed.”
Local Oath Keepers chapter leader Joseph Rice even confronted a bunch of activists appealing for peace. He all but chased them into a courtroom in Josephine County. The BLM folded. The agency dropped its efforts to evict the miners. The militia celebrated victory and dispersed until next time.
The Sugar Pines conflict all went down not at the turn of the century but last year, in 2015. The courthouse confrontation happened in April. None of this made much of a splash in the national media.
The year before, 2014, saw the more famous armed standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM, which resulted in the bureaucrats not only backing down from pushing him off federal grazing land but also returning his already seized cattle.
Cliven’s son Ammond cut his teeth with that protest but if he hadn’t there would have been plenty of other opportunities to do so. According to Pogue, the BLM and the Forrest Service together have racked up 50 serious confrontations with civilians between 2000 and 2014 — many of them involving firearms and, of course, crowds.
