The Bloody History That Nurtures the Freemen’s Hatred of Authority

On the wind-swept Montana plains, by the shores of the upper Missouri River, a heavily armed party surrounded a hut filled with desperate men. Two or three were picked off as they emerged; “the rest,” wrote one observer, “barricaded themselves in and fought until the great log hut was set on fire, when they broke forth in a body, and nearly all were killed at once.”

A possible outcome of the current siege of the freemen? Perhaps. But the words belong to Theodore Roosevelt, and the events took place 110 years ago, not far from where at least 10 freemen are today holed up on a farm.

For the last 20 years, the northern Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states have been the focal point of violent, right-wing extremism--from Posse Comitatus to Randy Weaver to the Montana Militia, and now the freemen. All these groups share a common philosophy of hate, racism, hostility toward the federal government (or all government, in the case of the freemen) and the economic establishment, and faith in arms and violence. They share something else as well: deep roots in a land with a bloody history.

It is no accident that such anti-government extremism blooms on the plains and mountains of Montana and Wyoming. No part of the nation has had a more bitter and violent past. In the 1880s and ‘90s, it was the scene of a virtual civil war fought among ranchers, homesteaders and marginal types who settled the region. On one side was the frontier establishment, composed of wealthy mining and railroad corporations, along with big ranchers. Roosevelt was one of them, living just across the border in the Dakota Territory. His fellow cattlemen “compare very favorably with similar classes of capitalists in the East,” he wrote. An apt choice of words, for the rich men of Montana and Wyoming were well-connected to the East, with close ties to banks, businesses, and federal and territorial authorities. On the edges of their ranges lived small farmers and ranchers, trappers, and cattle and horse thieves. Hailing primarily from the South, they flourished in places like the Missouri Breaks and Johnson County, Wyoming. By the early 1880s, the big ranchers wanted them out.

“During the last two or three years,” Roosevelt wrote in 1888, “the stockmen have united to put down all these dangerous characters, often by the most summary exercise of lynch law.” The leader in this effort was Granville Stuart, an early Montana statesman and head of the Montana Stockgrowers Assn. He organized a party of cowboys who conducted a “war of extermination,” as lawman Frank Canton called it. Roosevelt wrote that Stuart’s men “shot or hung nearly 60--not, however, with the best judgment in all cases.” In Wyoming, Canton led a force of 50 men into Johnson County in 1892 to drive out the big ranchers’ foes--only to be surrounded and defeated by the locals. The Wyoming Stockgrowers Assn. struck back by hiring Tom Horn as an assassin.

Most residents of the northern plains were happy with the results of this bitter, unheralded war; outlawry dissipated rapidly in its wake. But a legacy remains--a legacy of personal violence, of deep suspicion of outside authorities, of hostility to the business establishment. The men who died at vigilante hands were hardly angels--but Westerners noted that the wealthy stockraisers could hunt them down and kill them with impunity. After murdering upward of 60 men, Stuart became a state official and a United States ambassador.

This history helps explain the differences between present-day groups like the freemen and violent, right-wing extremists elsewhere in the country. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan emerged not in opposition to authority, but as an extension of it. In response to federal enforcement of Reconstruction in the 1860s, the Southern establishment organized the KKK to preserve its oppressive racial order. In the 1870s, Reconstruction governments were overthrown by violence carefully coordinated with election campaigns. To this day, KKK rhetoric is white supremacist and authoritarian--not libertarian. By contrast, the forebears of the Great Plains extremists were hunted down by local leaders; it is no surprise the ideology of today emphasizes a pseudo-libertarian hostility to government.

Echoes of the gunfire that erupted in the days when Roosevelt rode the range can also be heard in right-wing denunciations of the business--especially the banking--establishment. Huge railroad and mining corporations, together with wealthy ranchers, overshadowed life on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains from the 1860s on. They dominated territorial and state legislatures, and suppressed strikes as violently as they dealt with Missouri Breaks horse thieves.

This legacy--or at least perception--of outside economic control roared to life again in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargo and a fierce recession punished farmers and ranchers. Foreclosures shot up, and a deep sense of insecurity pervaded the plains. Few institutions were more unpopular than the national banking system; traditional suspicion of the central government became focused on the Federal Reserve. At the same time, a new conservative wind was blowing: Christian fundamentalism. Religious activists increasingly turned to politics in the 1970s, establishing an influential bloc within the Republican Party, particularly at the grass roots. During this period, the Christian Identity movement also took hold and spread on the fringes of Western society. This deeply anti-Semitic ideology proclaims that people of Northern European descent are the Old Testament Hebrews (God’s Chosen People), and that today’s Jews are barbarians who control and manipulate the banking system for their own ends.

As far-right groups have splintered and multiplied in recent years, many have grown more extreme even as some of their ideas have caught on elsewhere. Participants in the Sagebrush Rebellion in rural Western counties claim control of national forest land; federal employees have received numerous death threats. U.S. Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho has aligned herself with such forces, proposing that federal law-enforcement agents be required to register with the county sheriff wherever they go. The freemen are just one offshoot of this trend, one peculiar to this region.

When Roosevelt applauded the slaughter of the horse thieves, trappers and small-timers who haunted the banks of the Missouri River, he hardly imagined that he was witnessing the birth of a deep political rift. The vigilantes’ victims had no organization or ideology such as that of today’s freemen. But the fighting of that era stamped the character of this sparsely settled region. The vast majority of Montana residents despise the freemen, much as their ancestors despised the shady characters who were shot and hanged 110 years ago. But if we are to understand why these groups continue to exist, we must look past their crackpot philosophy and see the shadows of violence that still haunt the northern plains.