Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), led by Secretary Brooke Rollins, held an unusual press conference before its headquarters on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Alongside her were folks not usually seen in those parts — the cowboy hats were the giveaway — Charles and Heather Maude and their kids, from Scenic, South Dakota.
They were there for the Trump administration to end the Kafkaesque nightmare visited upon them by the lawless Biden administration, its ruthless officials, and covetous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The Maudes are both fifth generation ranchers from beyond the 100th Meridian in western South Dakota in Pennington County, the State’s second most populous, which includes Rapid City, Wall — with its infamous Drug Store, and Mount Rushmore National Monument.
The county is bordered on the west by Black Hills National Forest along the Wyoming border and on the east by Badlands National Park.
In addition to the Black Hills National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service, part of the USDA, manages Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, which sprawls across 600,000 acres south of Badlands National Park east of Wall and then meanders west and south bordering and intertwining with federal, state, tribal, and private lands.
Therein lies the problem for the Maudes and their 400-acre Maude Hog and Cattle.
The Forest Service, however, is not only the Maudes’ neighbor; it is also their landlord because Congress decreed those federal grasslands are available for livestock grazing.
In fact, long before the federal government acquired those lands during the Great Depression, the Maude family, specifically, great-great-grandparents, owned and grazed there, at about the time of the Forest Service’s 1906 creation.
Moreover, a Maude family member has held a U. S. Forest Service National Grasslands grazing allotment in good standing since its inception.
In late March 2024, the Forest Service notified the Maudes of a complaint it received regarding public access to Buffalo Gap; three days later the Maudes met with Forest Service officials, agreed to a new survey by the agency that might take a year to complete, and discussed various administrative steps to follow.
Five days later, without incident, a Forest Service crew conducted a survey, in which the Maudes did not participate, but the Forest Service did not provide the family the results.
Nonetheless, in late June, the Biden administration filed criminal charges against Charles and Heather Maude separately — each had to retain an attorney — for which both faced up to ten years in prison and fines of $250,000.
Westerners remember another occasion when President Trump, early on, came to the rescue of beleaguered ranchers in the middle of nowhere, specifically father and son, Dwight L. Hammond, Jr., and Steven Dwight Hammond of rural eastern Oregon.
The Hammonds set a legally permissible fire on their own property, which accidentally burned out of control onto neighboring federal land, which is usually considered a trespass; however, the Obama administration charged them with terrorism and demanded that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit send them to prison.
Fortunately, President Trump pardoned them.
After my three decades representing westerners unable to hire attorneys to fight injustice at the hands of the federal government, neither what happened to the Hammonds nor the Maudes surprises me.
Federal attorneys persecuted my client John Shuler of Dupuyer, Montana, for eight years after he killed a grizzly bear in self-defense; it cost them nothing but they could have bankrupted him.
Federal lawyers threatened to send my client, Larry Squires of Hobbs, New Mexico, to prison for using dry sinkholes on his arid property that they called “wetlands;” they destroyed his business.
Federal lawyers tried to imprison my client, race car driver Bobby Unser who, lost in a deadly Colorado blizzard, entered a wilderness on a snowmobile; they made him a federal convict.
In these and other cases, as well as in those of the Hammonds and Maudes, westerners battle, not just government officials and lawyers operating without adult supervision, but also strident NGOs warring against private property rights and federal land uses with which they disapprove.
Senators and Representatives are of little help. (“It’s in litigation; I can’t get involved,” I was often told.)
Nor can the Supreme Court of the United States end the madness, as when it failed to do so when the Bureau of Land Management ran “amuck” and threatened “war, a long war” against a Wyoming “man standing up for his property rights.”
Thank goodness for President Trump and the Maude’s friends and neighbors, their local ranching community, and property-rights-supporting South Dakota legislators.
*William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based, public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump.
