The 32nd National Cowboy Poetry Gathering opens today in Elko, a rural community halfway between Reno and Salt Lake City that is similar in its turbulent history to the place about 200 miles away in Oregon where a national wildlife refuge has been seized by armed men protesting federal ownership of land.
The ongoing standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., was organized by the sons of Cliven Bundy, a southern Nevada rancher who staged a similar show of force in 2014 at his ranch where he continues to graze cattle on federal land without a permit. They urged Oregon ranchers to renounce U.S. ownership of public land at a ceremony over the weekend and plan to open up the 300-square-mile refuge for cattle this spring.
Such conflict is nothing new to the people of Elko County, or as the leaders of the “Shovel Brigade” called it nearly two decades ago, the “Republic of Elko.”
In January 2000, the same week as the 16th annual Cowboy Poetry gathering, more than 1,000 people marched through town with parade floats and pickups filled with 10,000 shovels in a protest against the Forest Service in a battle over who should control a remote gravel road in a national forest — a legal fight that continues 16 years later in federal court in Reno.