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BLM Sued for $30 Million For Rustling Another Nevada Rancher’s Cattle

By Steve Straub

Another case of the federal agencies, like the BLM, running wild in the West.

Via Fox News:

Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, fellow Nevada rancher Raymond Yowell, an 84-year-old former Shoshone chief, watched as the BLM seized his herd.

Adding to that, since 2008 they’ve taken his money as well — in the form of a piece of his Social Security checks.

Yowell’s 132 head of cattle had grazed for decades on the South Fork Western Shoshone Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada until 2002, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the same agency at odds with Bundy — seized them. The federal agency sold the cattle at auction and used the proceeds to pay off the portion of back grazing fees it claimed Yowell owed. Once the cattle was sold, the agency sent Yowell a bill for the outstanding balance, some $180,000. They’ve been garnishing his monthly Social Security checks since 2008 to satisfy the debt Yowell says he does not owe.

“There’s a definite pattern in the West, beginning in the 1990s, maybe in the late ’80s, of what I feel are illegal cattle seizures,” Yowell said. “[Bundy’s case] is the latest example of that pattern.”

While Bundy is defying the federal agency over fees for grazing cattle on government-owned land, Yowell’s cattle had roamed reservation land. But a 1979 Supreme Court decision held that even land designated for Indian reservations is held in trust for them, and thus subject to BLM regulation. Yowell says treaties that led to creation of the reservation granted him and other herdsmen the right to graze cattle on the land, which they did successfully for decades. The Western Shoshone say they have never relinquished their right to the territory.

Yowell represented himself in a successful effort to win a federal injunction to stop the BLM from impounding his cattle, as well as a subsequent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that reversed the lower court. He’s again representing himself in a petition to have the U.S. Supreme Court hear his case, in which he argues his cattle were taken without due process and in violation of multiple treaties.

“Certainly, due process of law has not been followed in my case,” Yowell told FoxNews.com. “When we were kids going to school, learning the white way, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and one of the things I remember saying is ‘equality and justice for all.’ Well that’s certainly not the case.”

Celia Boddington, a BLM spokeswoman, said she had no comment on the pending case. But the BLM has previously said the tribe’s Te-Moak Livestock Association held a federal permit to graze cattle on the public land from 1940 to 1984, but had stopped paying required fees in 1984, when it asserted the tribe rightfully owned the land.