Klamath wayne hage 060506

     To all who cherish liberty, we have lost a great man.
     It was my great pleasure to have worked with Wayne for many years, primarily on grazing and property rights issues.
     His mind was top notch, usually many steps ahead of all those around him.
     Not only was he brilliant, he also had the courage of his convictions.
     The many transgressions against him and his family by Federal officials never once resulted in a step backwards or an inclination to relinquish his rights.
     Wayne was also an educator. He did not seek to keep his knowledge to himself, but chose to share it with all who had similar interests.
     Many who do not even realize it, owe a great debt to Wayne Hage.
     He has cleared a path for all owners of property, all grazing permittees and all proponents of limited government.
     That path was cleared with moral courage, legal finesse and a gentleman's demeanor.
     Lord how I wish he had lived to see the fruition of his property claims in court.
     I will never forget him, or the many things he taught me, or his constant fight for liberty.

This book cannot be praised too highly. Wayne Hage, gone to glory today, understood property rights as do few others. The book is the main course for those seeking the answers to all the questions about split estate, adjudicated rights, water rights, and so much more. It is a book that should become worn with use, for it is an indispensable reference and resource. It's not only a keeper, it's also the perfect gift for others that need to know more about property rights and fighting successfully for them. Again, it would get a 6-star rating if that were an option! No, I won't loan my copy!
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Cards may be sent to Stewards office at P.O. Box 490, Meridian, ID 83642
To send flowers, call Gunter's Funeral Home in Hawthorne, Nevada - Phone # 775-945-2047

Wayne Hage Memorial
Noon Saturday, June 10th, at Pine Creek Ranch, Monitor Valley, Tonopah, Nevada

Yesterday afternoon, we lost a great hero, a great father, and a great patriot. Wayne Hage passed away at home on Pine Creek Ranch.

On behalf of the Wayne Hage family, I want to be certain you know how much he appreciated your years of support for his fight. He was honored to be surrounded by such good Americans, and to fight side by side with you for the right to own private property.

We invite you to join us this Saturday, June 10th, at Pine Creek Ranch in Monitor Valley, Nevada, for a service celebrating the life of this great man. The service will begin at noon in the meadows of Pine Creek, his final resting place on Earth.

Dad left this world in peace. He was proud of his family whom he loved and cherished, was honored to have been involved in some of the most important challenges of our time, and was humbled by the generosity and goodness of the people around him He knew the battle would continue, but was satisfied that his work here was complete. He was ready for the next phase of his life.

Dad told us as children that life on earth is like Boot Camp. It is our training ground where we learn hard lessons, our character is molded, and we are prepared for the afterlife. He often ignored birthday’s because to him they were not the moment of life that should be marked. Moving on to Heaven was the day that should be celebrated.

It is in this sprit that the family prepares to say goodbye to Dad. Whether you knew him personally or through his work, we hope you feel welcome to join us in remembering one of the greatest men to have walked this earth, that we were blessed to know and love.

PS. Cards can be sent to the Stewards office at P.O. Box 490, Meridian, ID 83642. Some of you have asked where contributions can be sent in memory of Dad. Those contributions made to Stewards on his behalf will be applied to the litigation expense of the Hage v. United States case. As always, we appreciate everything you have done for our family.

(Note: Wayne was sixty-nine years old, but accomplished more for the freedom and property rights of America during those years than almost anyone. No matter what the media says, he did a great deal to educate people on the fact that "public lands" are extinct. They are, in fact, federal lands -- and are often off-limits/closed to the public.)

Reno, Nevada - Wayne Hage, who battled the federal government for decades over public lands and private property rights, has died.

Hage, who came to epitomize Nevada's Sagebrush Rebellion, had been ill and died Monday at his Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah, friends said. He was in his 60s.

"He actually successfully beat cancer a number of years ago," said Bob St. Louis, and longtime friend and fellow rancher. "In the past couple weeks, it came back in really aggressive form."

Hage, who married former Republican U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho in 1999, had battled the government since the Forest Service started scaling back the number of cattle allowed to graze on national forest land in the early 1980s.

In 2002, U.S. Claims Court Judge Loren Smith ruled in Washington D.C., that Hage had a right to let his cattle use the water and forage on at least some of the federal land where he formerly held a federal grazing permit north of Tonopah, in central Nevada.

A longtime state's rights activist and author of "Storm Over Rangelands," Hage filed a claim seeking $28 million in damages in 1991 after Forest Service officials suspended his grazing permits on parts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, saying overgrazing was causing ecological damage on the high-desert range.

Hage said the water rights came with the Pine Creek ranch when he bought it for about $2 million in 1978 and those rights carry with them the right to the associated forage.

"If you don't have the water rights, you don't have a ranch," he said during a 2004 court hearing.

(Note: Wayne was explicit -- and right -- when he said there are no "public lands," only federal lands.)

Reno, Nevada - Wayne Hage, who battled the federal government for decades over public lands and private property rights, has died.

Hage, who came to epitomize Nevada's Sagebrush Rebellion, had been ill and died Monday at his Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah, friends said. He was 69.

We shall all miss Wayne Hage, whether we were blessed to know him, simply meet him or be related to him. To be counted among his friends was nothing short of a blessing.

Our actions in the future -- to carry on the torch that is the light of freedom (i.e., property rights) -- are the best way we can honor his life and all that he stood for.

Wayne and Helen journeyed from Nevada to Ohio to speak at our Darby Farmland Rally on Labor Day of 2000 (September 2). There is actually a Nevada, Ohio, a small town about an hour north of the state capital of Columbus, but it's nothing like the real Nevada -- and I don't mean the gambling casinos and neon. The real Nevada is cow country and cowboy country, where there's plenty of space for clear thinking and a man's word is still good -- if that man is Wayne Hage.

The day after the Rally, it was my privilege to drive Wayne and Helen on a tour of this west-central Ohio farming area, on a day that the corn was at its tallest and greenest and the soybeans looked better than I've ever seen them.

For almost three hours we drove slowly, stopping occasionally to simply marvel at this area, so different from the high desert country of Nevada -- though in my eyes no more beautiful, as I love the sagebrush and Great Basin.

Wayne asked me where we could go for a latte, and this country girl had to ask him, "What's a latte?" He explained, and my weak excuse for not knowing was that "I don't get to town often!"

It was Sunday, and all Amish businesses, from restaurants to country stores, are closed, so I did not get to fulfill his wish, but I learned that the rural Nevada rancher had his own latte machine "at the ranch!"

They were newlyweds, and our Amish and Mennonite neighbors chipped in and paid for their lodging, but they came more than a 4,400-mile round trip at no charge: because they believed in our fight for our property rights. Their "honeymoon" was spent outside on the hottest, haziest and most humid day of our Ohio summer -- as distant as the moon from the arid and cool of their mountain home in the Monitor Valley, where the view goes on as far as the heart can dream. Wayne's dream had come true. My own dream, of living in another Nevada valley five or six hours' drive northeast, has yet to come true, but I've driven through it, stood and walked in it, heard its bird songs and drunk in great draughts of its snow-kissed air, and prayed that it would remain very rural cow country.

I was blessed to be invited to Pine Creek Ranch in November 2001, although the visit was cut short by the Forest Service's theft of neighboring rancher Ben Colvin's cattle and the subsequent illegal sale of them in Palomino Valley, Nevada. Both Wayne and Helen arose in the middle of a dark and snowy late November night to stand by their neighbor at the auction yard. My Blue Heeler dog and I slept 'til dawn and then headed toward Eureka and on north to Interstate 80, going home to Ohio for Thanksgiving.

Seeing the few cattle that the ranch had at that time, penned up near the ranch house, with over three-quarters of a million acres of the best grazing that cattle could hope for, was sad, so it was with great joy that I read the family-written obituary and learned that cattle are once again where they belong. "Young Wayne" continues to ranch at Pine Creek, and I am certain that his word, too, is good. It is a fervent prayer that many generations of Hages will live on and with the lands of Monitor Valley. They seem right for each other; they belong in close proximity, one to the other, just as the cattle and horses belong.

Wayne is where he belongs, too. His great heart beats in the great, wrinkled ranges of the West, in the symphony of snow-fed streams tumbling from sky-piercing peaks, and in the sounds of newborn calves and foals in Monitor Valley. His children, sprinkled with love and care like appleseeds by Johnny across the West, are raising their children, still in sight or short drive from Pine Creek and "the ranch."

As a child of the fifties, I saw Bonanza and The Big Valley on a black-and-white television. The horses I grew up loving gamboled and galloped through sagebrush in Have Gun, Will Travel. To be sure, they were just "westerns," but -- combined with Zane Grey and Max Brand books, and a Scandinavian heritage giving rise to love of places where winter is still spelled with a capital W and lasts as long as it wants -- my heart lived in the west, in rural Nevada.

I will never be able to think of Wayne without Helen, or Helen without Wayne. Thanks to them, I can never think of Ohio, without thinking of Nevada, and I can never think of property rights without thinking of freedom. They are one and the same.

Opinion, June 08, 2006

Sagebrush rebel

Rancher Hage spoke for many Westerners

Wayne Hage wasn’t a name that resonated with most Americans. But among so-called sagebrush rebels — Westerners who continue to buck under Washington’s big saddle — Hage, who died earlier this week at 69, was a hero. The Nevada rancher and author of “Storm over the Rangelands,” a defense of grazing rights and property rights in the West, waged a long-running series of legal and rhetorical battles with the federal government, making him an inspiration to those who see Uncle Sam as an obnoxious interloper and believe Westerners should have more control over the federal lands that impact them so profoundly. His second marriage, to former Washington state Rep. Helen Chenoweth, an equally staunch defender of property rights and critic of federal land policies, created a pairing of firebrands that was hard to top.

Hage is most famous for suing the federal government for a “taking,” claiming that forest service and BLM bureaucrats violated his Fifth Amendment rights when they seized his livestock and attempted to dry up his Nevada ranch. What really came of the fight is open to debate. He prevailed on some points, lost on others. But sometimes the fight itself is what’s important, when important principles are on the line. These were the stakes, as Hage described them in one interview:

His fight, he said, “goes right to the basic premise of what constitutes a free society. There are no such things as civil liberties if you do not have private property and a force of law and justice to protect that private property. The founders of this nation knew that. . . . If you’re going to stand back and let people violate with impunity, the basic premise of private property, then we may as well throw in the towel on the rest of our civil liberties because it’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when are we going to lose the rest of them. If a person’s cattle on his own range allotment isn’t safe, if his own ditches and water rights aren’t safe, if his patented private property is not safe, and if they can take those things at gunpoint, well then certainly they can take anything else they want at gunpoint.”

Though dismissed by some as yahoos and throwbacks, Hage and other sagebrush rebels are to us a comforting reminder that some parts of the West remain untamed and unbowed — and that vestiges of the rugged individualism forged in the opening of the frontier lives on. Some argue that such sentiments are based on legends and myths, which need to be shelved or stamped out in order to pave the way for a “post cowboy” West. But we find something exhilarating and reassuring about the occasional flaring of sagebrush rebellions — in knowing that there are some Americans in the Wayne Hage mold, who aren’t going to back down from what they see as Uncle Sam’s bullying ways. Theirs is a spirit that’s too stubborn to crush.

The West is changing, of course, and is in some ways becoming tame, regimented, malleable, Easternized. But sagebrush rebellions continue to flare, thankfully. In Elko, Nev., for instance — where Hage was born — local officials continue to wage a decade-long battle with the U.S. Forest Service over the use of a rural county road — a struggle which is really about who will have continued access to the public lands. That Nevada would be ground zero for such rebellions isn’t surprising, given that more than 80 percent of the state is federally owned. But the potential is there wherever in the West people are suffering under Washington’s reign of error.

Is it right that distant and indifferent politicians and bureaucrats exercise so much control over the West’s fate? Shouldn’t Westerners have a greater say in federal public lands policies, given their disproportional impact here? What can be done, if anything, to create a more equitable sharing of powers and responsibilities? Can the traditional livelihoods and lifestyles of the old West survive in the new West?

Wayne Hage may be gone. But these and other questions posed by him and other sagebrush rebels remain relevant.