John Temple - Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited Americas Patriot Militia Movement

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Praise for Up in Arms

A tale of the modern American frontier, told by one of our great independent journalists.

S AM Q UINONES , author of Dreamland: The True Tale of Americas Opiate Epidemic

With Up in Arms, John Temple delivers another fierce and searching portrait of an American subculture. His last book, American Pain, opened up the vault on painkiller pill mills, delivering a prescient harbinger of the opioid crisis. Now, his new and piercing look at the Bundy clan and the wider Patriot militia culture is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the continuing schism between rural and urban America.

A NTHONY S WOFFORD , New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead: A Marines Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

John Temples depth of reporting is nothing short of remarkable. Reading Up in Arms, I was truly immersed, as if I was witnessing the bizarre series of events unfolding in real time. Most Americans only experienced a fraction of the saga through mass medias parachute journalism. Temples in-depth approach propels you into the unbelievable story with extraordinary details, characters, history, and riveting scenes.

E LAINE M C M ILLION S HELDON , Academy Awardnominated documentary filmmaker of Heroin(e)

UP IN ARMS

How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited Americas Patriot Militia Movement

JOHN TEMPLE

Copyright 2019 by John Temple

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

BenBella Books, Inc.

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First E-Book Edition: June 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2018058469

ISBN 9781946885951 (trade cloth)

ISBN 9781948836289 (electronic)

Editing by Laurel Leigh

Copyediting by Scott Calamar

Proofreading by James Fraleigh and Kim Broderick

Text design and composition by Katie Hollister

Cover design by Ty Nowicki

Cover image by Reuters/Newscom

Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com

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To my tribe... Hollee, Gideon, Hank

CONTENTS

This book is based on notes and recordings of interviews conducted by the author with the participants as well as public statements and records. No details are invented, and no names are changed. In passages containing dialogue, quotation marks are used only when the author was reasonably sure that the speakers words were verbatim, such as exchanges taken from court testimony or captured on audio recordings. When a source recounted a conversation from memory, the author did not use quotation marks in that dialogue. These quotes are introduced by a colon and are italicized. Occasionally, a quotation was lightly edited for clarity.

I n November 1994, a young Mormon woman from Orderville, Utah, asked Ryan Bundy to a dance. Ryan was age twenty-two at the time, the eldest son of a rancher named Cliven Bundy. The Bundys lived in Bunkerville, Nevada, two and a half hours away from the dance, a journey that would require Ryan to traverse three states and some of the most perilous hairpins, gorges, and drop-offs in the West.

Ryan said yes. It didnt matter that Bunkerville and Orderville were in different states. They were sister cities of a sort, sharing a common history, culture, religion. Both straddled the Virgin River, and both were founded by Mormons as communal settlements, where all work, products, and land were shared. Also, both towns were part of the region called Dixie, an isolated slice of eastern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern Utah, cut off by canyons and deserts, where state lines didnt matter much and the old Wild West seemed not so long ago. So it wasnt strange for a nice Mormon girl from Orderville to arrange to meet a nice Mormon boy from Bunkerville whod recently come home from his two-year religious mission.

Ryan set out on a Saturday morning. It was chillier than usualblustery, gray skies. He wore a white cowboy hat and drove a powder-blue 1976 Ford F150 pickup truck, a battered and angular two-seater. He was planning to help a rancher near Orderville move some cattle before the dance, so he threw some gear into the cab: a saddle, a rope, and a change of clothing. He carried a rifle, too, and a carton of .22-caliber shells in the glove box.

He got on Interstate 15 and drove northeast, up and out of the flat desert and into Arizona, threading through cramped, shoulderless mountain passes and into Utah, all the way to Hurricane, where he filled up at a Chevron station and faced a decision. He could loop south, back through Arizona, taking a few extra minutes but navigating much easier desert terrain, or he could head straight through the canyons of Zion National Park, a route renowned for its beautiful, treacherous passes.

But Zion Canyon was faster. And Ryan wasnt thinking about which route would be the easier drive. Bundys didnt take the easiest route. They took the route they believed in.

And maybe Ryan was looking for a fight. An opportunity to test his newfound beliefs.

He pulled up to the pay booth at the entrance to Zion National Park. A ranger said it cost five dollars to enter.

Ryan said, no, he wouldnt pay the entrance fee. He drove into the park, not too slow, not too fast.

The ranger called the national park dispatcher: We got a gate runner.

D IXIE RESIDENTS TEND TO LOATHE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS GRASP ON local lands, and Ryan Bundy and his twelve siblings had a deeper connection than most to Zion Canyon.

Way back in 1858, just a few years before the American Civil War, Ryans adoptive great-great-grandfather, Nephi Johnson, was the first white man to brave the rugged Zion Canyon. After his arduous climb into the gorge, which descends a half-mile deep in spots, Johnson reported back that it looked like good farmland. Over the next half century, the Mormons cultivated and grazed the fifteen-mile-long canyon, and a trickle of non-Mormon photographers and painters visited to document its beauty. The arches and chasms of Zion National Park are stacks of sandstone, shale, and volcanic rock, ablaze with deep reds and purples and brilliant whites. Blossoming wildflowers and ferns hang from seeping spring walls. Knotty pinyon pines and junipers cover the mountainsides, and Douglas firs tower above the high plateaus.