It was just before noon on a Saturday in April when the armed men started taking up positions in the high desert sun.
Kitted out in camouflage and tactical gear, they had driven hundreds of miles across the country to make a stand in a dry stretch of scrubland in southeastern Nevada.
Men calling themselves Oath Keepers had come from Arizona and New Hampshire, joining a militia group from Montana, Operation Mutual Aid; and members of the Three Percenters from Idaho and Oregon. This was the first time these self-styled âpatriotsâ had come together in one place, to confront what they all believed was the growing tyranny of the federal government.
Brandon Rapolla, a Marine veteran from Oregon, was one of them. âIâm a devout Christian,â he said. âI prayed upon it very heavily. And within less than a 24-hour period, I got my gear ready and headed down there.â
They had come to defend Cliven Bundy, a longtime Nevada rancher who had declared a ârange warâ against the federal government. Bundyâs cattle had grazed freely across public lands near the town of Bunkerville for more than 20 years, in defiance of orders from the federal Bureau of Land Management. Bundy had ignored penalty fees and three court orders requiring him to remove the animals. Now, the bureau had begun impounding the cattle to auction them off.
The bureau had expected resistance from Cliven and his sons, who had vowed to defend a livelihood their family had maintained for generations. They even thought there might be protests from local friends and family.
âWhat we really did not anticipate is hundreds of militia members, many of them armed, coming from around the country,â said Steve Ellis, then the BLMâs deputy director of operations, who was watching the situation unfold from his office in Washington, D.C.
The standoff had been coming to a head for several days, and by that Saturday morning, the BLM estimated, hundreds of militia and other supporters had gathered â some on horseback, many of them armed. They vastly outnumbered the federal agents on the scene.
It was the largest gathering of militia anyone had seen in decades, and it sent shockwaves through the land management agency. Like most of his colleagues at the BLM, Ellis, a soft-spoken forester from the midwest, spent his time thinking about how best to manage public lands, not armed standoffs. Now, some of his officers in Nevada were worried they might never see their families again.
To the FBI, who had sent two agents to the scene, the gathering was more familiar, but no less concerning. They knew what had happened in the past when armed extremists confronted federal agents, and they were sobered by what they saw unfolding in Bunkerville. The message that got back to the BLM was chilling: We hunker down, people die. We go back to gathering [cattle], people die. We extricate ourselves immediately, people die.