HOUGHTON – One of the key claims of armed protestors occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon – that the federal government unfairly took the land away from ranchers – simply isn’t true, according to Michigan Tech environmental historian Nancy Langston.

She should know. In 2006 Langston published a book on the Malheur Basin’s land-use history, “Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed,” that traces changes in ownership, use and ecological consequences of the nearly 190,000 acre refuge.

“What you hear from people like (occupation leaders) the Bundys that hate the feds is ‘just give it back to us, to the ranchers,'” said Langston. “But it wasn’t owned by the ranchers.”

At least not by any ranchers connected to those protesting, or those who currently graze legally on the refuge or nearby. About 100,000 acres of the refuge was sold to the federal government by the Swift Meat Packing Co. in 1935 Langston said, after it was owned for decades by a single huge landowner rancher.

At that point, Langston said, between drought and land deteriorating due to overgrazing, the Swift Co. had to beg the government to take it.

In the following decades, federal land managers allowed large-scale grazing on the land. Grazing fees supported both land management and local government, she said, and while ranchers often paid lower rates than they would have paid to graze private land, they did so on annual contracts with no long term guarantees.

In the 1970s, when land managers realized overgrazing was again beginning to damage the ecosystem and they needed to reduce the acreage being grazed, they were mostly able to do so without disrupting active ranches, Langston said.

“They mainly reduced it when old ranchers retired – they just didn’t replace them,” she said.

The land was once stolen by the federal government, Langston added, but the ranchers may need to go to the back of the line.

“The land was taken away from people, but those people are the Paiute tribe,” she said. “The Paiute had been there for 6,000 years.”

Langston said the federal government signed a treaty with the Paiute tribe in the 1800s that included today’s Malheur Refuge as part of a reservation, then reneged on the treaty and evicted the Paiute after ranchers who wanted the land incited conflict.

“They were forced to march 360 miles to home of their enemies,” she said.

Anti-federal activists may also point to another group, squatters that moved onto the then-dry Malheur Lake bed after the Swift sale to the government. They were evicted, Langston said, after a Supreme Court ruling that said they had been there illegally, but should receive some compensation from the government due to their length of residence.

Langston said she thinks the men occupying the refuge have little connection with local ranchers or others in the community, most of whom are happy with the refuge.

Refuge managers, she noted, have no interest in ending grazing, which is currently allowed on about one fourth of the refuge. They see it as a valuable management tool, even if used less than in the past.

Some residents may agree with the armed protestors’ arguments that the federal government has exceeded its authority in terms of land ownership and management, Langston said, and the resentencing of two ranchers to five-year prison sentences for setting a grass fire on public land is widely seen as prosecutorial overreach. Few see the armed takeover as reasonable response to those issues, however.

“There are arguments, but most in the west think these should be solved by political means,” Langston said.