It was just before noon on a hot and sunny Saturday when backers of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, including hundreds of men, women and children, made the U.S. Bureau of Land Management quit enforcing court orders to remove Bundy cattle from vast arid rangeland surrounding his modest family ranch and melon farm.
Witnesses later said they feared the sound of a car backfiring would have unleashed a bloodbath. But no shots were fired, the government backed down and some 380 Bundy cattle that had been impounded were set free.
"Since then, we've relatively lived in peace," Ryan Bundy, eldest among 14 Bundy siblings, said in a telephone interview. "The BLM doesn't contact us, talk to us or bother us."
"The BLM does not have any comment on this subject," agency spokesman John Asselin said in response to email inquiries about the standoff, Bundy cattle grazing today in Gold Butte National Monument and the more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and penalties the BLM said Bundy owed in 2014.
At the ranch, Cliven Bundy greeted guests this week while cradling one of 74 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren that he has with his wife, Carol Bundy.
"We're all a little bit older," he said, "but we're still doing the same thing: ranching."
Later, watching two of his sons and a friend rope yearling bulls in a pen, the plainspoken and photogenic rancher — who rallied followers through a bullhorn that day saying, "Let's go get those cattle" — recalled being arrested, jailed for nearly two years and brought to a trial that was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct.
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