THE WEST IS WILD AGAIN

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Just whose land is it anyway? in the West that question is pitting citizens, counties and states against the Federal Government--in more ways than one. Two weeks ago, Roundup, Montana, saw more action than it has in quite a spell. The first arrests took place when two men showed up at the sheriff's office and tried to file some homespun legal papers on behalf of their fellow "freemen," a loose group that opposes taxes, gun restrictions and federal regulation. Both were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Then three more men drove up to the office, and one opened his coat to display a holstered pistol. All three were jailed. Finally, two men waiting in a nearby car (guns and cash were later found in its trunk) were forced out of their vehicle and jailed. One turned out to be John Trochmann, co-founder of the Militia of Montana, an armed, conspiracy-loving group opposed to "one-world government" and the federal bureaucracy.

Freemen and militias are only extreme examples of an antifederalist insurgency spreading in Western states-one that takes up legal briefs as well as arms and is quite willing to flout the law. Emboldened by the Republican takeover of Congress, a growing number of ordinary citizens, as well as local and state government officials, are rejecting federal authority and fighting for what they believe are their property rights. Last week the Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Nye County in Nevada from taking over federal lands and intimidating federal officials. Associate Attorney General John Schmidt said the Justice Department suit was intended to send a signal to other rebel movements in California, Idaho, New Mexico and Oregon and "put to rest the idea that any county has the right to enact laws to override the Constitution."

By one count, some 75 counties have already adopted or are considering measures that contest federal rights over public land within their borders. The new push for local land control resembles the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, when Westerners fought the Federal Government over land-use issues. The new drive, however, is better organized and more widely supported. The Western States Coalition, founded only 13 months ago, advocates local land control and has the support of hundreds of county and state officials and private interest groups. The coalition is pushing to give ranchers and others greater access to federal lands, and for the Bureau of Land Management to return land holdings to the states. "The Federal Government has a stranglehold on the rural West," says Met Johnson, a G.O.P. state legislator in Utah and a co-founder of the coalition, "We are not the reactionary right wing. We know that we can manage these lands better than they can from inside the Beltway."

To prove that, however, local land-control advocates must wrest power away from the feds-and that can lead to bitter confrontations. In New Mexico's Otero County, 600 angry people packed a civic center recently to rail against Washington and plan a strategy for combatting the Endangered Species Act. Otero has now formed a public lands committee to fight for its rights, and has hired a Los Angeles-based legal group, the Individual Rights Foundation, to press its claims in court. In Idaho's Lemhi County, 2,500 citizens turned out at a local fairground on a sub-zero day to protest a judge's injunction against commercial activity in the state's national forests because of endangered salmon in area waters. Among the leaders of the demonstration were several county officials. In January, the Lemhi County sheriff, Brett Barsalou, fearful of violence, threatened to keep federal authorities from trucking in wolves-a species being reintroduced in the nearby wilds.

Tensions have been running highest in Nevada. In 1993, Nye County adopted two resolutions asserting state ownership and control of public properties in its borders, including all roads. Last July 4, Nye County commissioner Richard Carver, flouting federal law, used a bulldozer to break open a road in a national forest and then filed a criminal complaint against forest-service workers who tried to stop him. Last week, even in the face of the federal suit, the Nevada state senate passed a measure that sought to strengthen the state's claims to federal lands.

"The paranoia is so deep," says Jay Printz, sheriff of Ravalli County, Montana, another hotbed of militia activity. "I just hope it doesn't deteriorate into armed confrontations." Others, argue that the new antifederalists are a mostly responsible lot. "These aren't survivalist wackos," says John Howard, president of the Individual Rights Foundation. "A lot of them are prominent people in their communities who do believe the Federal Government has gone too far." Even as the Westerners fight for local control, they are struggling just as hard to retain the huge federal grazing, farming, irrigation and mining subsidies that the Clinton Administration tried to cut. Either way, they are mad as hell at Washington.

--Reported by Pat Dawson/Roundup and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by PAT DAWSON/ROUNDUP AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER