In Nevada in the summer of 1979 the Sagebrush Rebellion began its long sweep across the American West. Five years later, like a stream that overflows its banks, spends itself, recedes, and dies, it was gone. In its brief life it constituted a virtual war between the federal government and insurgent westerners over the question of federal ownership and regulation of western public lands. In a region where the government owns a landmass larger than western Europe, and where massive regulation goes hand in hand with ownership, the rebels of '79 simply came to believe that federal "landlordism" was destroying their economic lives. By eroding the economic development of western people, they also believed the government crippled the states in which they lived. Attacking "federal colonialism" and "boodle-passers" who had "taken charge of our assets," they insisted, like the Idaho Cattlemen's Association, that they had become "serfs" in their own homes, unable to control their "destiny" while, as one said, "Washington controls the land." As Governor Ed Herschler of Wyoming expressed it, "the system is badly out of kilter. Federal encroachments on state and local governments are at an all-time high."
From the beginning, the heart of the rebellion was the belief that excessive federal control and regulation of the western public domain stripped people and states of their rights — rights to graze cattle on the public domain, rights to mine it, rights to generate tax base from it, rights, echoed Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, to control their own "destiny." To reverse the trend, to regain lost "rights," the Sagebrush Rebellion attempted two things: in the short run, improved, "fairer" federal management of the public domain, and in the long run, cession of federal lands to the states in which they lay. In the end, it got neither; the question of rights remained as unresolved as before, and the rebellion ultimately flared out and died. In its brief life, however, it stunned all who witnessed it, and it set all its observers to wondering where it had come from.
In fact, it came from the past. It was not the first Sagebrush Rebellion, it was the second — a distant echo of an earlier conflict that crisscrossed the West in the 1890s.
In 1979 it was as if an old script had been found, dusted off, and transported into the present for another reading. On one side, once again, was the West, and on the other the federal government. In the middle were the familiar old questions about land, rights, and power. In 1979 westerns spoke of an excess of federal sovereignty in their midst, mostly on and around the land, and a hundred years earlier they said the same thing. In 1979 they warred with the government to correct the problem, and in the 1890s they did the same thing. Ten decades passed between the two rebellions and nothing was learned and nothing changed — proving, if nothing else, the relentless redundancy of history and the inability of people to profit from lessons before them.
