I have no idea what the term “militia” conjures up inside the minds of Americans. But outside of the US, it tends to make us think of crazy right-wing extremists, the kind of gun-loving red blooded American who genuinely believes that it is essential to own a gun as a last resort to protect the American people from the tyranny of their own government. This lets us easily dismiss the recent actions of the so called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom and their occupation of the wildlife refuge in Oregon as actions of some ring-wing nut jobs. At first we’re shocked. Then we scoff. Then we send them a box of dildos. And then we move on with our lives.

Nevertheless, whether these groups are crazy or not (and make no mistake they are crazy), there are always reasons that their apparent craziness takes that particular form. With one member of the militia shot dead by police, and another four still occupying the facility, it is worthwhile to ask how have we ended up in a situation where a wildlife refuge is worth dying for.

In essence, the conflict is about land—who owns it and how they can use it. Currently, the US government own almost 30% of the land in the United States. However, the vast majority of this is concentrated in the West with the government owning as much as 85% of some states.

As the federal government basically operates out of the East Coast of the US, this leads to more than a few conflicts over how the land should be used. Specifically, conflicts between the needs of ranchers and conservationists; but we’ll get to that later. The first thing we need to look at is how the federal government ended up with such a disproportionate ownership of the West.

The secret is that the federal government never set out to own so much land, it simply couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. The US was colonised from the east.¹ It took colonists about 160 years to move inland from the Appalachian mountains, somewhere between 400-500km from the coast. In this time, settlers tended to run ahead of the government (still the crown, at this stage). First some settlers who were trying to escape the law would settle down somewhere beyond the reaches of the government, but then the law would inexorably catch up, like a colonial T-1000. So they would have to move again.

In fact, the British had signed treaties with the Native American population guaranteeing them everything west of the Appalachians. Subsequently, they deployed the army in an attempt to stop settlers moving over the mountains. In spite of “burning cabins and herding inhabitants eastward” (p. 156), settlement continued in waves until settlers were piled up against the banks of the Mississippi river in the early 1800s.

This is a distance of some 600km in about 40-50 years, so you’ll notice this is getting faster; although at this stage it is the settlers who are still leading the (now) US government in a merry chase. The final push was effectively lead by the government, however. Firstly, the US government constantly renegotiated treaties with Native Americans, pushing them further and further West, or isolating them in pockets of unwanted land and building the basis for much of the United States’ agricultural wealth. Secondly, the US “bought” much of its lands off Mexico. These two prongs of expansion let Americans tell themselves “We take nothing by conquest… Thank God” (p. 169). Of course, the fact that the deal was signed as part of the conclusion of the US-Mexican War and Mexico ended up ceding half its territory was purely coincidental.

Therefore, by 1853, the mainland of the US had finally assumed its present boundaries. Considering the last 2,500+ km between the Mississippi and the West Coast were covered in the space of about 40 years, the government was now left with so much land it had no idea what to do with it. So like someone who’s just won the lottery, the US government did its best to give away the land as fast as possible. With the Homestead Act of 1863, Americans were able to claim 160 acres of cheap land, so long as they occupied it for five years. Whilst this did spark a massive wave of migration westwards, proper government divestment was thwarted by the sheer size of the US and the unsuitability of the western states for farming. What the government wanted, was an enormous number of small-holding individuals; however, the geography of the West simply didn’t allow for this style of land-intensive farming. Instead, you ended up with cattle, lots of cattle, being grazed over huge tracts of land.

As the majority of farmers could afford to purchase sufficient land to graze cattle, they leased the rights of the federal government. A system that has by and large continued to this day.

The final piece of the conflict is conservation. Slowly, as the US finally filled out its borders, it slowly came to realise it was going to have to come to terms with “a closed space existence” (p. 755). You can see the first signs of this change with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first national park in the US and possibly the world. Of course, the further down the road of conservation the US government went, the more difficult the livelihoods of ranchers became. Even on the great swathes of land ranchers were allowed to lease, the restrictions were ever growing.

And so we arrive at the present day conflict. Just as the ranchers were once the first wave of a new philosophy of land management, displacing the Native American ways of life with treaty after treaty, now they find themselves as a holdout against yet another new philosophy, with their own ways of life being threatened by legal restriction after legal restriction.

One has to wonder whether they see the irony in it.

Academic Sources

Anderson, TL & Hill, PJ 1975, “The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West”, The Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 163-179.

Billington, RA 1949, Westward Expansion: a history of the American frontier, The Macmillan Company, New York.

Zinn, H 2010, A people’s history of the United States, HarperCollins, New York.