Roots of Ranchers' Land Dispute Stretch Back Decades (VIDEO)

At the Wall Street Journal, "Roots of Oregon Land Dispute Stretch Back Decades":

Behind the armed protest at a national wildlife preserve in Oregon lies a decadeslong struggle between agencies that manage vast tracts of federal land in the West and the ranchers, loggers and miners who depend on access to them for their livelihoods.

The U.S. government owns roughly 640 million acres of property in the country, much of it in the West—making up the majority of land in some states such as Utah, Oregon and Nevada. Fights with the government have intensified as it has added mandates to preserve the environment and wildlife, especially in times of drought and wildfires.

For more than 70 years in north Texas, Ken Aderholt’s family has grazed cattle on lush pastureland that hugs the Red River. So Mr. Aderholt was stunned, he said, when an official with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management told him in 2013 that about 650 acres of his approximately 900-acre property was federal public land.

“This land was bought and paid for and people struggled to acquire it, so for them to just come in and swoop in and say it’s theirs is pretty devastating,” said Mr. Aderholt. He filed a lawsuit in November saying the BLM has no right to his property, to which Mr. Aderholt said his family has held a deed since 1941.

The BLM, which declined to comment on Mr. Aderholt’s suit, contends that the land in the area had long been federal property but was never actively managed by the agency.

The tensions have become a growing political issue in western states, where some communities say federal land controls hurt their economies.

“These are more localized, spontaneous protests, but the issues are all the same: dissatisfaction and anger with the federal government over what they see as unnecessarily restrictive regulations of public lands to protect environmental values,” said Gregg Cawley, a political-science professor at the University of Wyoming and federal land policy expert.

The Oregon occupation, in its fourth day Tuesday, was spurred by a dispute involving rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven. A jury convicted the pair of arson after they set fires that spread to federal lands; they said they set the blazes to protect their property from invasive plants and prevent wildfires. They turned themselves in Monday to serve the remainder of a five-year prison sentence.

The occupiers, led in part by Ammon Bundy—the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a similar standoff with federal officials in 2014—indicated Tuesday that they were making plans to go home after certain conditions were met and local residents could better stand up for themselves. LaVoy Finicum, a protester and rancher from northern Arizona, said the group would leave the when “the state of Oregon is safe from threat and intimidation of a central power.” But they didn’t detail their exact demands, and it remained unclear when the occupation would end...

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