The domestic terrorists occupying the Malheur National Widlife Refuge Building near Burns, Oregon justify their actions with a highly selective – and largely fabricated – history of the federal lands they’ve seized. The truth is a lot sleazier.
In the revisionist histories of Al-Shabubba, Malheur was turned into a useful resource by hardworking smallholders who used pluck and determination to improve the land, until Theodor (sic) Roosevelt seized it from them to turn it into an “Indian reservation (without Indians)” which morphed into a wildlife preserve.
The reality is that the Paiutes who lived there were ethnically cleansed by the US Army, who then sold some of the land to speculators from out-of-state, who were dominated by a couple of crooked megabosses who used trickery, bribery, coercion and fraud to get the land at discount prices and force out their competition. Those welfare capitalists then made a killing by using heavily subsidized US federal infrastructure, such as railways, to get their products to market.
When those cattle-barons ran their business into the ground, they got bailed out by the federal government. The feds bought the land that they’d sold at subsidy prices to rich speculators, and ended up with a big piece of territory that, having been purged of its original residents, and having been worked to ruin through mismanagement and greed by unscrupulous robber-barons, turned into a wildlife preserve.
