Spanning across the high desert mountains of central Nevada stretches an old cow outfit steeped deep in western tradition – tough horses, good cow hands, and family. Although Pine Creek Ranch is still one of the most remote spots in the nation, it has not escaped the ills of environmentalism. Instead, it has found itself a primary target of their agenda, and the subject of one of the most important cases of our time.

My family purchased Pine Creek in 1978. It was my father’s dream. He had worked several old-time cow outfits like the PX out of Elko, Nevada as a young teenager and had his eyes set on a place of his own ever sense. Dad was self-made. He started earning his own living at the age of 15 and put himself through undergraduate and graduate school. He thrived on subjects like biology, chemistry, history, and law. He earned a masters degree in organic chemistry with honors, which is no small feet for a young cowhand.

My mother came from a well respected Nevada family. Her father died when she was sixteen leaving her, her two younger brothers and mother to run a small prosperous farm and ranch where Sparks, Nevada now sits. She was raised on hard work but was polished with the best manners of society. I think Grandma always meant for her to marry a preacher. But instead, she had her eye on that self-made young man who walked a different path.

With five young children, the oldest 14 and the youngest four, Wayne and Jean Hage moved into the Tonopah community in the spring of 1978 and began managing the 2000 head operation. The ranch was made up of 7000 private deeded acres which held most of the productive meadows and hay fields. There were two rugged mountain ranges, Jefferson and Table Mountain, where the cattle summered on the ranches private grazing allotments, and a vast desert where the cattle grazed during the winter. The ranch spans 80 miles from North to South and covers over 1100 square miles. It takes a lot of acres to feed a cow in that country which accounts for its size.

All of the surface and groundwater within the boundaries of Pine Creek belong to the ranch. The mountains are fed by springs and winter snow pack, while the winter range is primarily watered by wells scattered across the Ralston desert. No drop of water is spared in this country. The naturally dry climate makes water as precious as gold.

The property is ideal for a cow-calf operation. The rugged mountains provide ample green feed during the summer. The desert, where the cattle winter, is flush with white sage, shad scale, Indian rice grass and other forage which is rarely covered by the areas light snows. The cattle migrate twice a year from end to end. As soon as the desert begins heating up in the spring, the older mother cows move their calves north through Belmont pass into Monitor Valley where they disperse into either the Table Mountain or Jefferson ranges. Monitor Valley sits at 7000 feet elevation while the two mountain ranges reach 11,000 and 12,000 feet respectively. The cold fall air and threats of snow chase the cattle out of the mountains by thanksgiving, back to the desert. They make a good living at either end.

Working with the seasons, moving the cattle is fairly simple. We did everything horseback covering an average of 25 miles a day, usually working the rear of the herd or holding up the lead until the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management determined the beginning and end of the grazing seasons. Before modern bureaucracy, you did not have start and stop dates on your allotments, you followed the natural cycle governed by the seasons.

Many things were simpler before the federal land management agencies began stretching their authority implementing the environmental agenda. Over the past 50 years, they have even changed how we think about the western lands. Most Americans would tell you today that the western lands belong to them, they are "public." But the old-timers still alive who came from the families that first settled these lands will tell you a different story. Most of the surface of these lands are covered by property rights that are entitled to full protection under the Constitution. How the West changed from an area governed by state property law to one strangled by federal rules and regulations is a lesson to the rest of America. How the West and America climbs out of this hole, is what Hage v. United States is all about.

The West is ideal for livestock grazing which the early settlers took advantage of. The land disposal laws followed this pattern of settlement. As in the East, western settlers established homesteads of small acreages, which they put to beneficial use. The homesteads were usually established around a fresh water source where settlers cleared the sage and desert forage and irrigated for hay meadows. Before American settlers there was very little green feed or wildlife in the West as is noted by Lewis and Clark who almost starved to death before reaching California. These homestead claims were validated by Congress and the settlers owned these portions of land in their entirety. Unlike the East, the homesteads were not productive enough alone to provide for a family. So, settlers made use of the bordering rangelands usually by grazing cattle and sheep. Congress followed with the appropriate disposal laws validating the use of the surface estate but retaining the mineral estate to be disposed of through mining laws. The surface estate rights that were privatized were predominately the water, forage and access rights, as is the case on Pine Creek Ranch. These rights were defined by allotment boundaries marking where one settler’s rights ended and another’s began.

Pine Creek Ranch is the combination of four original homesteads. The headquarters are tucked at the base of the Jefferson range next to Pine Creek, and look across Monitor Valley at Table Mountain which earned its name from its deceiving flat appearance. There are no roads, only four cow trails that wind their way up the rugged mountain and across the twenty mile top. If you’re not careful you can easily get trapped in the deep canyons and tangled in the mahogany and aspen groves.

We were a working family. Young and old alike earned his keep. By age twelve I was cooking for ranch crews of up to 20 and fast becoming a good cowhand as it was with my three sisters and brother. There were no weekends, only occasional trips to town which was 65 miles away at the end of a long and dusty road.

We minded our own business, earned a good living, offered jobs to many people, and at the end of a good year, the ranch would have contributed over 1 million dollars into the local economy.

But even in our remoteness, we were not missed by the rabid environmental agenda that was spreading across the nation. Two months after we purchased the ranch, the National Park Service offered to buy it at half of what we had just paid. One of the reasons the prior owners sold the ranch was because of the incredible harassment they were getting from the land management agencies. When we purchased the ranch, the Park Service set their eyes on us.

In the twelve years that followed, we faced relentless harassment from the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) encouraged by several major environmental organizations. They fenced off a major spring from our cattle and piped our water into their Ranger Station without our permission. In 1979, over a period of 105 days we received 70 visits and 40 certified letters from the forest service citing us with various violations, most of which did not exist or were created by the forest service themselves. I remember how one of these accused us of not maintaining our drift fences on Table Mountain. After two days riding the fence, one of our hands found the forest service flag marking a single missing staple. We were also charged with over 45 trespass citations where they claimed our cattle were in locations not permitted. They dropped these charges once they realized we had eye witnesses watch forest service employees move our cattle into these areas and then within hours notify us of the alleged offense.

We filed three administrative appeals against the forest service and BLM during this period and won each case. The problem was that none of these cases stopped them from finding new ways to harass us. By 1991, they had cancelled, suspended and burdened the grazing permits to the point that we could no longer economically operate. The forest service had also filed claims over many of our water rights forcing us to also defend these before the state water engineer.

We knew we were out of business. In the spring of 1991 we began gathering and shipping our entire herd as soon as they migrated into Monitor Valley. In July of 1991, the forest service brought in over 30 riders and gathered every cow they could find, which only amounted to 104 head after two separate gatherings. Half the riders were armed with semi-automatic rifles and wearing bullet proof vests. Clearly unskilled at handling wild cattle, they ran a bull and cow to death. They contained the cattle on our private meadows and when finished handed my father a bill for their confiscation expense.

They believed they had seen the last of Wayne Hage. They were mistaken.

On September 26, 1991, we filed a takings case in the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington D.C. with the help of a small circle of friends and neighbors who believed this case could change regulatory land use policy. That small circle shortly thereafter founded the organization, Stewards of the Range, with the primary task of ensuring the case was supported through the courts.

Hage v. United States is important to American landowners because it strikes at the heart and core of the environmental movement. The founders of America meant for us to secure our property rights against all causes. If the public believed there was a cause worth confiscating property, then the government would have to pay. That was our safeguard against the government getting too ambitious at stealing.

When we filed the case in the Claims Court, we forced them into a court they fear, defending an issue on which they are desperately weak – property rights.

But this case is about more than just property rights. It is also about government accountability. The land management agencies have gone virtually untouched even though they violate laws daily. The employees know that before a landowner can file any substantive action against the agency, they will most likely be transferred to another area and never be affected by the outcome. However, one of the advantages of filing in the Claims Court is the ability to depose, under oath, the individuals involved in the action. And as we found in our case, once this happens it becomes a feeding frenzy as bureaucrats scurry for cover pointing at someone lower on the food chain, which for once was not us.

After filing the case, we were immediately met with a motion to intervene by the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and others. Their motion was denied since they did not own any property at issue in the case. They were allowed only amicus curie status.

Four months after the filing of the case, the forest service filed two felony charges against my father and one of our employees for cleaning trash Juniper out of a ditch right of way. The action they cited took place a year earlier and was already a part of our takings compliant as an example of how the government had denied the use of our property. The forest service filed the felony charges in an effort to side step the Claims Court and force us into Federal District Court where the odds favored their position. We lost at jury trial, but the 9^th Circuit Court unanimously reversed the decision on appeal.

The government soon filed a summary judgment motion and on March 8, 1996 the court issued a 41 page decision in our favor. The decision is landmark in many respects and true to Chief Judge Loren Smith’s style -- it is as much a lesson on property rights and constitutional principles as it is on federal lands issues. Since then, the government has tried five additional summary judgment attempts and failed.

My mother passed away shortly after we received the summary judgment victory. The stress of carrying the case had long before taken its toll on her. She had suffered a heart attack and stroke at the height of the battle with the forest service. It was a second stroke the ultimately ended her life, but thankfully, she died knowing that the stand she had taken for constitutional principles would continue and very likely prevail.

Trial is scheduled to take place less than three months away on September 28, 1998 in Reno, Nevada. The court will examine three questions: is there property involved; did the government take it; and if so, how much is it worth?

If we prevail, we fully expect to fight appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, and vice versa if we lose. A win will send a resounding message and set powerful court precedent that the environmental agenda is no longer exempt from Fifth Amendment review, the supremacy of state property law will be restored, and landowners will have a clear path of recourse in the event they find themselves in the same position. Also, westerners will finally have the answer to a debate between property rights and privilege that is almost as old as the West itself.

One thing is certain. If Americans are to survive the rabid environmental agenda, we must protect property rights. Americans across this nation need to make environmentalists pay for what they take. We must make certain not one acre, not one parcel of American soil is available to steal.

When I hear people ask if this is a case about grazing, I always have to chuckle. It is about grazing as much as environmentalism is about protecting the environment. There is a much larger precedent involved. Hage v. United States is about Americans regaining control of their government.