Nevada rancher fights federal government

His family has grazed cattle on the same land for 128 years. But now Ruby Valley rancher Cliff Gardner is facing possible jail time for running cattle there.

"This land that I am on has been in the family since 1872," Gardner said. "That was long before the Forest Service was ever established."

As part of a six-year legal battle with the U.S. Forest Service, Gardner, 62, was convicted on two counts of federal trespassing and prosecutors have vowed to seek jail time in the sentencing hearing scheduled for Feb. 21.

Gardner was raised in the valley nestled at the foot of the Ruby Mountains and lives in the same house where he grew up.

It is a quiet valley where "neighbor" refers to people living up to 50 miles away and calving season is as easily defined as autumn or spring.

Most can explain exactly why they believe in God and just as surely tell you why they distrust the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Stories circulate of offenses committed by federal agencies to ranchers in neighboring valleys and states but few cases have reached the level of Gardner's.

When Gardner was young, there were five elementary schools scattered throughout the valley, so there was a school easily accessible to all the children.

Gardner remembers a year when he was one of only two students attending his school in south Ruby Valley.

After the eighth grade, students were - and still are - sent either to Elko or Wells, 60 to 90 miles away, to attend high school.

In Gardner's time, students went to town at the beginning of the year and came home around Christmas, then went back.

Now, when students complete their eight years at the three-room Ruby Valley School, they traditionally car pool to school on Monday mornings, stay with families in town, then return home for the weekends.

However, Gardner and his wife, Bertha, decided to home school their four children rather than send them away from home to attend high school.

"It was my experience that, for a lot of kids, being away from their parents at that age is not a good idea," Gardner said.

And for him, family has always been important.

"The greatest time of my life is when we were raising our family," Gardner said. "We like doing things together."

And mostly, they worked together.

"What else do you do on a ranch?" he asked.

Ranching is a way of life for most in Ruby Valley, a way of life they want to preserve.

But it is getting more and more difficult. Nevada ranchers are largely dependent on federally owned land, and restrictions on its use keep growing.

"One of the reasons we are able to compete in the arid West with those in the Midwest and East, where there is more abundance in rainfall, is that we have developed viable ranching operations through the use of public range," Gardner said. "Without use of the public range, overnight, the ranches are no longer economically viable. The agency people know this."

Gardner said he noticed a change taking place in the way federal officials treated ranchers about 40 years ago.

"In the 1960s, what we were being told about the destruction of habitat by livestock grazing and so forth did not correlate with what I was seeing on the ground," Gardner said. "It was then that I began collecting scientific studies and collecting all the information I could for the purpose of searching out the truth. It turned out to be a lifetime project."

He said he has determined that today's notion of environmentalism is 99 percent myth.

"In fact, there was almost no wildlife in the West when the earliest trappers and explorers entered the region," he said. "It has been our American system of enterprise and self-interest that created the great resource wealth and wildlife production that we have experienced, particularly in the 1940s, '50s and '60s."

In the mid-1980s, Gardner became an outspoken opponent of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management because of restrictions imposed on ranchers in central Nevada.

That was also about the time he and his wife joined the Freeman Institute and began to actively study the U.S. Constitution.

"Being so involved, the first thing I knew I became one of the most targeted people in the state of Nevada by the Forest Service," he said. "Agreements that we had with the Forest Service were breached."

In 1984, Gardner said he made an agreement with the Forest Service to voluntarily reduce the amount of livestock on his allotment by nearly half with the understanding that in a determined amount of time, he would be able to restore the original number.

He said the Forest Service not only refused to restore the original agreement but also charged him with maintaining fences that were previously the responsibility of neighbors.

In 1992, a fire burned a portion of the forest area where he grazed cattle. Gardner said officials told him he would not be able to run cattle on the burned area and he agreed.

But he was kept off of the entire allotment for two years.

That sparked his 1996 lawsuit against the Forest Service. He lost. He appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost again.

He has now been found guilty on two counts of federal trespassing for continuing to run his cattle on national forest land. Each count carries up to six months in jail and up to $5,000 in fines.

Gardner does not want to go to jail but thinks he'll probably end up there.

"I think there's a good chance I'll go to federal prison," he said.

The Justice Department sought the criminal misdemeanor charges after federal agents allegedly caught Gardner's cattle on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest near Elko again this past April and July.

''We will be seeking some jail time,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Sullivan told the Associated Press.

''That's what makes this case unusual - that someone has litigated it in a civil case in district court and then gone to the 9th Circuit and been told, 'No, they own the land and you are a trespasser,' and yet they continue to do it,'' Sullivan said.

''That's where it becomes a criminal action.''

But going to jail is a chance Gardner will have to take, he said, to preserve freedom not only for himself but for all Americans.

"I'm well aware of the effects of tyranny. Just during my lifetime, the government has killed millions of the very people the government should be protecting - in Germany, in Vietnam, in Red China, in Russia and in Cambodia," he said. "Being free is a rare situation, not a common situation, and anyone who believes this cannot happen in America or who believes the American people are not as capable as people in other nations of accepting tyranny and being a part of tyranny are sowing the seeds of future tyranny in this nation."

He said the biggest misconception surrounding his case is that people believe he is seeking private ownership of public lands. He is not.

He understands the importance of commonly owned land but argues that stewardship should fall into the hands of the state government, not the federal government.

Bertha Gardner agrees with her husband, and she says more people should take a stand.

"If we're going to continue to have the rights we've enjoyed for 200 years, we've all got to stand up and fight," she said. "It has to be more than one or two of us."

Gardner said that's the one thing ranchers have going for them.

"People in agriculture develop a habit of never giving up," he said. "They will fight for what they believe in."