Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
January 15, 2020 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 62 • No. 1
Owning The West I BY LEE PITTS
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s world powers go, the United States is in a class by itself. And yet, we don’t have as much to work with as other countries. Gosh, we aren’t even the largest country on our own continent. By the measure of our landmass, the United States is the fourth largest country in the world, behind Russia (#1), Canada (#2) and China (#3). And just think what we could accomplish if the Department of the Interior didn’t own 20 percent of the 3.5 million square miles that make up America. Almost all of it in the West, by the way. The BLM by itself controls what happens on 248 million acres of public land, 99 percent of which is west of the Mississippi. So is a good chunk of the 192 million acres that the U.S. Forest Service manages. Or, should we say mismanages? One of the secrets to America’s unqualified success is that 72 percent of our land is held in private hands. Of this land a significant chunk is controlled by a small number of people. But who are these people? From our perspective they can be divided into one of four categories: foresters; oil men and women; old money and for lack of a better term, outside money.
The Foresters
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
We got most of the information that follows from The Land Report which bills itself as “The Magazine of the American Landowner.” By far, it does the best job of keeping track of who owns what in America. For the billionaires who make their money with chain saws and two by fours, owning trees is better than money
Never approach a bull from the front, a horse from the rear, or a fool from any direction. in the bank. I’m never shy to brag that I knew the third largest landowner in America. Red Emmerson used to regularly show up at the Shasta Livestock Auction, or at one our video cattle sales. From my frequent conversations with Red, it was clear he was cut from the same cloth as ranchers and that, boy oh boy, did he love auctions! While alive, Red owned two million acres of America and ran Sierra Pacific Industries, the second largest lumber producer and the largest private landowner in California. Despite our bureaucrat’s best efforts to put loggers out of business, Red had fourteen sawmills scattered over two far western states. The fifth largest landowner in America is also a forester. The Reed family owned 1,729,232 acres as of the end of 2018 which had been put to-
gether since 1890. According to the Land Report, the Reed family’s Green Diamond Resources Company owns land in eight states across the Northwest and the South. As any profitable forest company must be these days, the Reeds are into sustainable forestry and conservation, harvesting less than two percent of their timberland a year. At number six is the Irving family with 1,247,880 acres. The Irvings are Canadians and they are the only non-American landowners in the top 30. Besides the land they own in the U.S, they own another 1.9 million acres in Canada. Some of the other foresters in the top fifty landowners include the Westervelt heirs, 518,000 acres, (#19); the Stimson family 552,000 acres (#18); the Martin family 570,000 acres (#16); the Ford family, 580,000 acres
(#13); Wilks brothers, 702,367 acres (#11); and the Pingree heirs, 830,000 acres (#10). As you can see, “Thar’s gold in them there trees!”
The Oil Men (And Women) The oil folks tend to own smaller chunks of land individually than the foresters and they also seem to be a bit more diversified. Take Philip Anschutz for example. With 434,500 acres owned at the end of 2018 that “only” puts him in 22nd place amongst landowners. But it also helps put him near the top of the Forbes 400 List as one of the richest people in America with a net worth of eleven and a half billion dollars. Although he calls himself an oil man he has diversified into railroads, fiber optic networks, tungsten mines, movie theaters, professional sports teams and recently, an eight billion dollar wind farm, the largest in the country. Another huge landowner I got to meet one time at a video sale in Cheyenne was Robert Earl Holding whose family is now the 26th largest landowner in the country. You may have stayed at one of his Little America motels or fueled up at one of his huge gas stations. Earl Holding died in 2003 but continued on page two
Border Patrol Agent Nick Ivie Was Killed By Smugglers, Not Friendly Fire BY RACHEL ALEXANDER / TOWNHALL.COM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com or this publication.
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nvestigative journalist Huey Freeman has written a compelling book challenging the notion that Border Patrol Agent Nick Ivie was killed by friendly fire. In Who Shot Nick Ivie?, Freeman lays out the case that contrary to the government’s claims, smugglers, probably from the Sinaloa cartel, shot Ivie in an ambush of him and two other agents. And he explains why the Obama administration put that spin out there. While working one night in October 2012, Ivie was dispatched to check out a sensor alarm that had been tripped near the border between Arizona and Mexico. Two other agents followed him a bit later. They were in constant contact through their radios so they knew where each other was. Agent Graciela Borjas saw Ivie’s light and then gunshots as the smugglers attacked Ivie and fatally shot him in the head. They shot Agent David Johnson, but he was able to keep going. Johnson shot back at the smugglers. Borjas said later that she thought she had fired her gun, but it turned out she did not fire any shots at all. Borjas told investigators afterward that she
saw three or four suspects, and that one had a long firearm. She heard them talking after they fired the shots, and thought they were speaking Spanish. Johnson told the FBI he saw someone wearing a blanket, something typical of a smuggler. But the FBI claimed that Ivie had shot at Johnson, so Johnson responded back and fatally shot him. The FBI twisted what Borjas said, reporting that she had only heard the suspects and their long arm, so they designated her an unreliable witness. Freeman says the FBI documents are riddled with inaccuracies. Freeman has obtained all the FBI interview transcripts with her. Tellingly, the FBI has never released the interviews of Borjas and Johnson to the public. Even if it was friendly fire, which it wasn’t, they’re lying about the fact that no one else was involved. Freeman believes the FBI falsified ballistics tests. The FBI announced that Johnson’s M4 had shot Ivie — before they would have had a chance to do a ballistics test on the gun. Freeman believes based on his investigation that the murder weapon was probably a revolver. The evidence shows that a smuggler seized Ivie’s pistol from him and fired shots from continued on page five
by LEE PITTS
could never be a homemaker. It’s waaay too much work and too much of it is of a repetitive nature. Take dusting furniture, washing dishes and vacuuming the carpet for example. You do it once and six months later you have to do it all over again. The problem is I’ve always been a dirty person by nature. I swear, I can get dirty taking a shower. And everything I like to do makes one filthy, from working in the shop to working cattle. I can even get dirty eating a sandwich and like the polar bear I do my washing up after I eat, not before. I think the worst job a homemaker has is washing clothes. You get them all clean and before the day is over already there’s a bunch more multiplying in the hamper. This would drive me nuts. When I worked in an oilfield compressor plant I got so dirty that during the week we’d all throw our jeans and tee shirts into a bucket of a foul smelling concoction that I think was a mixture of turpentine and gasoline. This got the oil stains out but left the clothes a little scratchy and stinky. The only time I took the clothes home and washed them in my mom’s washing machine she hit the roof because evidently I’d left behind a strong petrochemical residue in the machine that left its mark on all the clothes she washed for the next 25 years. For the first three years my wife and I were married we couldn’t afford a washer and dryer so we had to wash all our clothes in a laundry mat that was dirtier than a bus stop bathroom. The management there had the gall to complain that my manure-stained clothes were fouling their machines. They asked us to take our business, and my smelly clothes, elsewhere. The day my wife and I bought our first washer and dryer was probably the happiest day in our married life. The problem was I made my living working ring at cattle sales for 40 years and there’s no dirtier job in America. I’m surprised Mike Rowe never featured the occupation on his Dirty Jobs TV show. It was way more dirtier than cleaning hog pens. Unknown to most ranchers, we ring men performed a vital service. We were the only thing standing in the way between the bull’s mop-like, manure-loaded
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