Author James Pogue reads tonight at 7:30 pm, Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside.
It started off as low-stakes as revolutions get. Instead of taking over a busy federal building or seizing a seat of government, the Bundy brothers and their supporters squatted on one of the most remote federal outposts in the entire country. Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge—located 150 miles from the nearest interstate highway and near-abandoned in the dead of winter—was where Ammon and Ryan Bundy, LaVoy Finicum, Shawna Cox, Ryan Payne, and others made national headlines in January 2016 when they occupied the facility in protest against federal regulations regarding public lands.
It’s easy to dismiss their motivations as crackpot militia fantasies, but in his new book, Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, James Pogue explains how the standoff fits into a longer narrative of ranchers and miners throughout the Great Basin coming into continual conflict with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and, to a lesser degree, the US Forest Service. For decades, these ranchers and miners eked out tough livings on properties near or adjacent to federal land. They relied on those public spaces to run their cattle and access their mines. When pesky things like grazing permits encroached on their perceived freedoms, they took to their guns and roused a sympathetic, Libertarian-tinged rabble.
Pogue was embedded with the militia during the Malheur standoff, and his book is a critical, firsthand look at the attempted uprising.