The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West

Eminent Domain and Land Use: Cattle Free in ’93

Eminent Domain and Land Use c a t t l e f r e e i n ’ 9 3 Iwas born to ranch people. They were among the earlier settlers in eastern Oregon. My father’s father ran his sheep and horse band in the rim rock country of Rudio Mountain, above the John Day River. My mother’s family had a small ranch on Butter Creek about sixty miles to the north. They met at a rodeo and were married the next spring. My parents were born to people of the land who invested their effort in what the land could produce for their living. The effects of the Depression came slowly, like a wind you hear high up long before it stirs the trees. There was no cash money in the country. Three-year-old steers sold for four dollars if they could find a buyer. One rancher shipped his wool to New York and got a bill for the storage. Young and sick to death of watching their parents living on cream and egg money and feeling depression poor, Mom and Dad moved away from the isolated plains of eastern Oregon. It was a September afternoon when they brought me home, still mewling from birth. The smell of sage came in the open window of their car. Did I know it then? No. But when John Hussa invited me to help gather the Hussa Ranch cattle from their range on the Sheldon Antelope Game Range in Nevada, sage moistened by the dawn stirred a deep memory. Seventy miles from the nearest town, a hundred years from commute traffic and a job, I rode into a country I didn’t know existed. There I fell in love with cows I would know through the years of their lives, and their heifer calves after them, ranch horses as tough as the lava tablelands, and a man who would teach me his ways and want to learn mine. When we married, I made my Eminent Domain and Land Use | 23 life around the thing my parents ran from, a cattle ranch in an isolated valley on the edge of the high desert. in the mid-1930s, at the height of the Depression, a federal biologist wandered into the same sector of northwestern Nevada where the Hussa Ranch cattle would summer after 1938. When the biologist first laid eyes on it, the high desert was all but empty of people. The broken land teemed with antelope, mule deer, cattle, horses, and bands of sheep in a flowing pattern like the crosscut of tides. Sage grouse sounding like b-52s flew in by the thousands to water on the meadow where he unrolled his bed. While the country was mired in financial ruin, he had stumbled into a place without breadlines or broken men, as if he’d entered paradise. He found sheepman Tom Dufurrena, a Basque immigrant, who owned the deeded parcels that gave him control over more than a half-million acres. At Tom’s campfire the biologist told Tom if he didn’t sell to the federal government , “they’ll just take it anyway.” Tom didn’t understand his rights or the concept of eminent domain. He was an immigrant who did not speak the language well and feared that if he turned the sale down he would be deported and sent penniless back to the Pyrenees. Tom was pressured to sign the sales agreement that would turn the lands over to the government. By order of fdr, the U.S. Department of the Interior (with the cooperation of the Boone and Crockett Club and the National Audubon Society) converted the Dufurrena holdings into the Charles Sheldon Antelope Game Range and Refuge: thirty-four thousand acres in 1931 and an additional five hundred thousand acres in 1936. The following spring the Fish and Wildlife Service (fws), administrator of the Sheldon, offered a sixteen-hundred-head cattle grazing permit on that same land to offset operational costs. Three ranchers from Surprise Valley, just over the state line in California, filed an application. John’s grandfather, W. H. Hussa, was one of those permittees. In the early years permittees and refuge employees worked together for the betterment of the system, probably because they grew up in the same 24 | t h e fa m i l y r a n c h area...