“UNCLE SAM is rich enough to give us all a farm.” So runs the refrain of a popular song of the mid-19th century, when America’s government began dispensing homesteads in the newly opening West. Sometimes, impatiently, the settlers took the land, or its resources, without permission: their families’ sweat and guts entitled them to, and there was more than enough to go round. This outlook combined fierce individualism and egalitarianism; as Patty Limerick, of the University of Colorado, puts it, the pioneers were at once advancing civilisation and rejecting it.
That romanticised past is the backdrop of a seemingly eccentric stand-off that began on January 2nd when armed militiamen seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. The pretext was the plight of two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond. Convicted for setting fires that ignited federal land and endangered firefighters, the pair were harshly resentenced and returned to prison after the government appealed against their original punishments. But the real issue is the land itself: specifically the fact that the federal government still controls so much of it in the West,...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1PM0ser
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