After Freemen Standoff, It’s Back to Life and Death

It’s been a year since the FBI laid the bait on a blue tarp on a hilltop and sprang its trap, setting off the 81-day standoff with the extremists known as Freemen.

Even now, folks in Jordan don’t talk much about the group. Still, divisions are beginning to heal as ideology is overtaken by the reality of daily living in Montana’s thinly populated “Big Open.”

It’s hard to stay mad at the guy who pulls your truck out of the ditch, or hoists your cow out of a frozen stock pond, or shows up at your brother’s funeral.

And there were a lot of funerals in Garfield County this winter.

“Our undertaker over in Miles City said he buried 32 people out of Garfield County last year,” said Ruth Coulter, who ranches near the former Freemen compound. “It seems like here for a while we all went to a funeral every other week.”

With only 1,400 people in the county, a single death touches a lot of people, the Rev. Helen Young noted.

But out of death comes healing, she said: “The issues of last spring are not the priority now.”

For a couple of years before the standoff, the Freemen had annoyed and frightened their neighbors with talk of setting up their own courts, threats against local officials, and attempts to pay taxes and other bills with dubious “warrants” of their own invention.

Sheriff Charles Phipps, outmanned and outgunned, could do nothing despite state charges against members of the group. Meanwhile, hundreds of people from around the country flocked to the Freemen “Justus Township.”

The standoff began about dawn on Monday, March 25, 1996.

The Freemen, who used shortwave radios to communicate nationwide, wanted an antenna on a ridge overlooking their complex of farm buildings 30 miles northwest of Jordan. An “installation crew” laid the materials on a blue tarpaulin on the hilltop on Monday morning. Would the Freeman leaders come up and approve the location?

That FBI sting captured Freemen leaders LeRoy Schweitzer and Daniel Petersen Jr. Then an army of FBI agents sealed off the compound and settled in to wait.

The last holdouts surrendered peaceably 11 weeks and four days later, on June 13.

Sixteen members of the group are jailed at Billings, 174 miles to the southwest, on federal charges ranging from fraud and conspiracy to threatening to kill a federal judge.

One of them, Russell Dean Landers, was convicted last month of fraud and conspiracy in Raleigh, N.C., and testimony there stunned people in Garfield County.

An FBI undercover agent testified that Landers delivered a big motor home and a Chevrolet Suburban to the Freemen, who planned to use it to kidnap county officials.

“I think people were shocked that these people were considering the violence that was portrayed in that trial, arresting county officials and hanging them,” said Ruth Coulter’s husband, Kenneth Coulter.

Coulter hears that some of the jailed Freemen are beginning to question their ideology.

Others think differently, including rancher Cecil Weeding, whose brother-in-law, Emmett Clark, was one of the last to surrender.

“I did go visit Emmett one time, and he was very angry and hostile to me,” Weeding said. “The reports I get from other visitors [are] much the same thing. As far as giving up any of their beliefs, it doesn’t appear they have relented one bit.”

Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network doubts the Freemen will ever relent, and prison would probably only harden their resolve. They are the theorists in what he calls the revolutionary right wing, which includes militias and skinheads.

The Oklahoma City bombing and the Freemen arrests have forced them all to be less conspicuous in their recruiting.

He predicts they all will feed off each other in prison.

“We now are going to see Freemen-types cropping up” in prisons, he said.