Libertarian fairy-tales
AARON BADY
7 HOURS AGO
... Before seizing the refuge, the Bundy brothers first appealed to the Harney County Sheriff on November 12th, urging him to defy the Federal government as the true representative of the people. Like their father, Cliven Bundy, who defied the Federal government because he regarded it as a "foreign court," the Bundy brothers belong to the "county supremacy movement," who regard the only legitimate policing power as the County Sheriff ...
For the Bundys .. nothing really happened before the 1870s. They do not mention Spanish explorers in 1532, or French Canadian trappers, or the British occupation after the war of 1812, or Oregon statehood in the 1850s. Their story most definitely does not begin thousands of years ago, when the first people settled the region. They have no time for how the U.S. Army resettled the northern Paiute in the Malheur Indian reservation in 1872 — emptying Harney County for settlement by white people — nor how those same white settlers demanded (and got) the reservation dis-established in 1879 so they could have that land, too.
But history didn’t begin in the 1870s. A lot had to happen before rancher-settlers could run hundreds of thousands of cattle in Harney County, and so a lot has to be forgotten by ideologues like the Bundy family. In part, this is because most of the pre-1870 erasures was done by the federal government. Obviously, the U.S. military first had to ethnically cleanse the land, getting rid of the various native peoples that had lived in these stretches for thousands of years. But even after the land had become "free" to white settlers, prospective ranchers still needed markets for their cattle, especially once their primary market for meat, the U.S. Army, had moved on to other territories. It was the federal government that stepped in and bailed them out, taking on debt by an act of Congress to finance and build a railroad system. Without the Central Pacific Railway, those thousands of cattle could never have been sold.
Despite the Bundy mythology of family farming and homesteading — individual homesteads headed by patriarchal Free Men — cattle ranching in Harney County was first and foremost a corporate concern ... When Peter French first came to Harney County in 1872 .. he represented Hugh J. Glenn, a businessman in Sacramento, acquiring land and cattle for what he would eventually incorporate (in California) as the French-Glenn Livestock Company .. one of the two major corporations that owned the vast majority of the ranchland in the county. Peter French acquired his land by any means necessary, but all of it had originally been acquired by and then from the federal government. Sometimes French bought it from discouraged family settlers, who were looking to move on; sometimes he forced them to move on, so they would sell their land to him. Sometimes he quietly fenced off and seized what would have otherwise been public rangeland; according to a General Land Office report of 1886-87, around 30,000 acres of commons had somehow found itself enclosed by French-Glenn fences. Another means of sidestepping the law was for his own employees to file homestead claims and then immediately sell the land to their employer ...
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/libertarian-fairy-tales-of-the-bundy-family
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