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http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/02/ammon_bundy_to_appeal_to_anoth.html#incart_maj-story-1
Velta Mack
In 1980, bird-watching visitors to Malheur National Wildlife Refuge complained
that the cows were destroying critical wildlife habitat. So Nancy and Denzel
Ferguson, the husband-and-wife naturalist team who lived just down the road
from the sanctuary headquarters, started a letter-writing campaign to draw
attention to grazing abuses.
They got some cattle off the refuge, but ranchers were furious. The Fergusons
received telephone death threats on many nights. A group of ranchers threw them
out of a local dance in the early '80s.
That night, a caller told Nancy that "a bunch of us guys are coming over to get
you." She politely asked who was calling. "Dwight Hamm—" she recalls the caller
stammered, before being drowned out by other voices in the background.
Dwight Hammond Jr., the same rancher whose prison sentence for arson sparked
the militants' recent takeover of the refuge's headquarters, had been one of
the people whom Nancy says pushed the Fergusons out of the dance. (Hammond and
his son Steven Hammond are in federal prison. Larry Matasar, the Hammonds'
attorney, declined to comment.)
The claims of the armed men now occupying the federal building in Harney County
would be all too familiar to Denzel Ferguson. After earning a Ph.D. from Oregon
State University in zoology, he spent a quarter-century fighting to protect
public lands from ranchers who thought they had a right to use them however
they pleased.
For an aging group of Western natural history buffs, Malheur will be forever
linked to Denzel and Nancy Ferguson. For most of the 1970s, the Fergusons ran
the Malheur Field Station, an environmental education outpost housed in a
former Job Corps center at the edge of the sanctuary.
Twenty-two colleges and universities funded the station, which offered summer
classes for budding biologists, botanists and birders. Nancy and Denzel lived
at the station as resident faculty, while visiting students bunked in nearby
dormitories. The beer-soaked parties held in the drab, tin-sided building
called the Greasewood Room were legendary among baby boom-era college kids.
But the Fergusons were serious about protecting the southeastern corner of
Oregon they called home. Their time at Malheur exposed them to the
environmental degradation caused by a century of unrestricted cattle grazing.
Much of the refuge land was devoted to either grazing or growing hay, and the
wildlife supposedly protected in this special place was often killed by farm
machinery or displaced by cattle. More than 400 miles of barbed-wire fence
snaked across the refuge, and the Fergusons often found the desiccated remains
of deer and other animals caught in the jagged strands.
The Fergusons' outspoken criticism of what they called "hooved locusts" on the
refuge and other sensitive public lands took a toll. After a decade of running
the field station, they left in 1982 and moved to rural Grant County. Nancy and
Denzel wrote Sacred Cows at the Public Trough, the first book to challenge the
myth of the Western rancher and seriously question a century of unrestrained
grazing on public land.
Denzel Ferguson ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1992 but lost to incumbent
U.S. Rep. Bob Smith (R-Ore.) in the mostly Republican 2nd District. Ferguson
called Smith "a tax-supported beef lobbyist" for his efforts to keep grazing
fees down, and quipped, "I hold no grazing permits on public land, so you will
only have to pay me once."
The Fergusons' book details how "welfare ranchers" profit from federal
subsidies and public spending. The current standoff is about money, too;
federal officials say the Bundy family owes $1 million in unpaid grazing fees,
and the Hammonds have a history of running cattle on public land illegally.
Denzel died in 1998, to the very end ranting about the cows tearing up the
landscape he loved. Nancy still lives in Eastern Oregon. She says Denzel
wouldn't be surprised by the militants now holding the refuge hostage: "It's
just like what he'd seen before."
And for the protesters' claims about returning the land to the original owners?
"He'd laugh at them," she says, "and he'd say, 'Let's give it back to the
Paiutes.'
