Federal Court Overturns Nevada Grazing Case: Gov. Can & Will Enforce Conservation Rules

AN FRANCISCO (AP) — America's sagebrush rebellion has suffered a major setback far from the western rangeland where a modern battle was joined over grazing rights on public lands. Over the past 21 years, firebrand Nevada rancher Wayne Hage and his survivors waged a legal war against federal land managers who were seeking to restrict cattle grazing on public lands and became a heroic symbol for those who yearned for bygone days and bridled at the growing reach of government.

Then in a little noticed decision on July 26, a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., overturned Hage's hard-fought multi-million-dollar legal victories. It was a quiet rebuke to a legal saga that began in 1991 after the government impounded some of Hage's cattle. The rancher had defied grazing restrictions in Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, and refused to pay fines for grazing permit violations.

Challenging the government in court was a costly and time-consuming endeavor that Hage threw everything he had at, including the ranch for which he was fighting. With his ranch house stuffed full of legal tomes as he became immersed in the case, the suit-clad, salt-and-pepper-bearded Hage became the epitome of the sagebrush rebel — the ideological forefathers of today's tea party — and breathed life into a movement that captured the rebel spirit of the Old West.

"Hage is a hero in the sagebrush rebellion. He bet the ranch, literally and deliberately, because he believed passionately in this cause," said Jon Christensen, executive director of Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the American West. "The tragedy is that so much intelligence, creative passion and love for the West ... were wasted on such a doomed dead end," he said.

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