KVIG Informative

Nevada’s longest fight over who controls public land did not start with a monument. It started with unpaid grazing fees and a rancher who ignored a federal court order for 18 years — and the legal question his case raised about the government’s enforcement power was never actually decided.

The Bureau of Land Management canceled Cliven Bundy’s permit to graze cattle on the Bunkerville Allotment, a stretch of federal rangeland in the Virgin Mountains of Clark County, on Feb. 17, 1994, according to the agency’s final grazing decision entered into the record of the resulting federal case. Bundy had refused new herd-size limits tied to protections for the threatened Mojave desert tortoise. He kept his cattle on the allotment regardless.

U.S. District Judge Johnnie B. Rawlinson permanently enjoined Bundy from grazing the Bunkerville Allotment on Nov. 3, 1998, court records in United States v. Bundy show. Her order gave him until Nov. 30, 1998, to remove his animals and set trespass damages at $200 a day per head for any cattle left behind. Bundy did not comply.

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The standoff dragged on for 15 more years. Senior Judge Lloyd D. George granted the government summary judgment and issued a fresh injunction against Bundy’s trespass grazing on July 9, 2013, and Judge Larry R. Hicks authorized federal contractors to seize and impound the cattle that Oct. 8. The Interior Department closed Gold Butte, Mormon Mesa and Bunkerville Flats to the public starting March 27, 2014, to carry out the roundup, citing public safety in its Federal Register closure notice.

Contractors impounded close to 400 head of trespass cattle over five days in early April 2014, nearly all carrying Bundy’s brand. Armed supporters converged on the Gold Butte entrance on April 12, and then-BLM Director Neil Kornze suspended the gather that day, citing the safety of agency employees and the public. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Deputy Chief Tom Roberts announced the cattle’s release, ending the standoff.

The criminal case that followed collapsed in federal court. U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro dismissed all charges against Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and co-defendant Ryan Payne with prejudice on Jan. 8, 2018, ruling that prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal on Aug. 6, 2020, closing the door on any retrial.

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President Barack Obama designated 296,937 acres of that same rangeland as Gold Butte National Monument on Dec. 28, 2016, under the Antiquities Act, according to the presidential proclamation published in the Federal Register. The proclamation places about 285,158 acres under Bureau of Land Management administration and roughly 11,779 acres under the Bureau of Reclamation, pending transfer to the BLM. Its text states that livestock grazing has not been permitted in the monument area since 1998, the same year Rawlinson’s injunction took effect, and it bars the Interior secretary from issuing any new grazing permit there.

The proclamation protects the Falling Man petroglyph site, agave roasting pits, a Civilian Conservation Corps-era dam and camp at Whitney Pockets, and the Gold Butte townsite, a mining boomtown that dates to the early 1900s. It also directs the Interior secretary to protect Southern Paiute sacred sites and traditional cultural properties and to preserve tribal members’ access for ceremonies and the gathering of plants, seeds and stone-tool materials, consistent with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

The BLM’s own interim management guidance for the monument, issued Dec. 13, 2024, confirms that two grazing allotments on its eastern boundary, Lime Spring and Mesquite Community, remain active under permits that predate the 2016 proclamation — permits the agency cannot renew once they lapse and cannot replace with any new one. More than a quarter-century after Rawlinson ordered Bundy’s cattle off the land, and eight years after Obama signed the designation, Gold Butte’s federal managers are still administering the compromise that one rancher’s refusal to leave helped force into existence.