Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bundy lied, and Fox let him.

My great grandpa bought the rights to the Bunkerville allotment back in 1887 around there. Then he sold them to my grandpa who then turned them over to my dad in 1972.

Background History:
Nevada joined the Union in October 1864. The Bundy family began ranching in Clark County, Nevada, where they currently still ranch, in 1877.

The US Constitution is very specific on the requirements it takes for a US territory to appy for statehood and join the Union. Once those requirements are met, the state can be formed and accepted into the Union. Such was the case in Nevada in 1864.

However, as was the case in several western states, when Nevada became a part of the Union it ceded control of vast areas of its territory, which was to become part of the soverign state of Nevada, over to the Federal government. Back then, most of that land was considered waste lands and not worth monitoring or maintaining. Of course, now we know that was not the case.

Just the same, beginning in 1933-1934, during the Roosevelt administration, the Federal government (who at the time, like the rest of the country, was in need of operating funds), decided to cause ranchers in these western states to pay a lease to the Federal government for the use of that land as an avenue to increase revenues. The leases were low, and the ranchers did not envision the government of the United States ever considering to take away their property rights and freedom. Almost all ranchers, including the Bundy family, complied. But, as we shall see, it was a mistake to pay those leases just the same. As far as I can ascertain, the leases were renewed every ten years. So, right up through 1993, the Bundy family paid the Federal lease for 60 years, nearly the same length of time they had lived on and operated their ranch without any lease before the 1933-1934 time frame.

So, after living on the land, ranching it, earning their livelihood and providing for the family, and raising a good product of beef cattle for the market, and doing so for upwards of fifty-six years, the Bundy family began paying a lease for land that they had lived on. worked, and ranched as their own.
And they did so, for sixty years.

Through the end of the Depression in the 1930s, through World War II in the 1940s, through the Korean War and the 1950s, through unsettling times and the Vietnam War (though out in Nevada, such social upheavels were of little impact) in the 1960s and 1970s, through the Reagan years in the 1980s, and finally into the 1990s, now under the Clinton Administration.

That was when things changed.