Range War

Let's say your ancestors put up a fence 75 years ago, and your neighbors never said anything about it in all that time. So you put up a 'No hunting/trespassing' sign on the fence, some hunter comes by and sees it, and complains about it because he has permission to hunt on your neighbor's land and he thinks your fence is in the wrong place. You and your neighbor get together and agree to survey the land and determine where the boundary really is, and move the fence if necessary.

Then your neighbor sends an armed man to threaten you with ten years in prison.

A South Dakota ranch couple is fighting federal indictments served to them by a U.S. Forest Service agent who allegedly showed up unannounced on their front steps — armed and in tactical gear. The agent was there to serve them with indictments in a modern-day range war between the ranchers and feds.

“It’s is stressful, financially and mentally. It’s something nobody should have to go through,” rancher Charles Maude of Caputa, South Dakota, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.

He and his wife Heather, who is a Wyoming native, were served with separate federal grand jury indictments June 24, for alleged theft of government property. The government claims the fence put up by the ranchers is over a boundary with federal grasslands.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

If it sounded to you like they had a good-faith agreement that shouldn't be occasion for indictments, it sounds that way too to some retired rangers the paper interviewed about it. 

[T]he situation in South Dakota might have been one in which the old standard of a “common sense, reasonable interaction” would have been more effective — and not left the Forest Service looking bad, he said.

Brauneis said that in the wake of what happened in South Dakota, and similar incidents eroding the Forest Service’s relationship with the public, some soul-searching might be in order for the agency.

To illustrate how things used to work, he recalled an incident from his career... “I drove out to talk to the land owner who was an elderly lady. She invited me in and we had coffee. I explained what happened and she understood,” he said.

“We concluded that if we burned the slash on her property along with ours and planted trees the same as on forest that we were all good to go,” Brauneis said. “We shook hands and I left. Old-school community in a Christian culture.”

Another ranger they spoke to wasn't surprised, and said he would have expected the agency to send armored vehicles and a dozen agents to deliver the indictments. The culture of the agency has changed, he said.