Velta,
This article truly tells it like it was. I'm old enough to have enjoyed a few
late nights in the "Greasewood Room" drinking cheap beer and listening to
heavily-scratched LPs (long-playing albums for you puppies in the forum)
featuring the music of the day along with some outlaw country classics like
Johnny Russell's "Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer." My memories of
those days still resonate, marking a period when my love affair with Malheur
and the Great Basin first blossomed and when I first came to appreciate the
impact that livestock makes on the high desert landscape.
I've been a guest in Denzel and Nancy's home and I still laugh any time I think
of Denzel using a bull horn to try to wake up Ron Holloway–the maintenance man
at the Malheur Field Station–after Ron passed out in the middle of the Ferguson
living room during a party. "WAKE UP RON, WAKE UP!" That same evening, C.D.
Littlefield, a long-time biologist, who studied Sandhill Cranes on the refuge
and later published "Birds of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (1990), crawled
across the floor to where David Fix and I were sitting and admonished us for
not making more of an effort to publish articles about what we were learning
via all of our birding experiences. Apparently we both took C.D.'s beer-fueled
challenge to heart, for over the subsequent years we have both written and
co-authored a number of bird articles and worked as authors and editors on more
significant collaborative works relating to birds.
The threats that were made towards Denzel and Nancy back then were very real
and they took them seriously. As I recall, at one point they were worried
enough that they invited a group of friends to come out and stay with them at
the station so that they wouldn't be left all alone as sitting ducks for
potential violence. Denzel was not one to mince words or mutter under his
breath about the damage he was seeing from cattle on the refuge. He spoke
loudly and often and potentially put himself in harm's way with his
locally-unpopular opinions on this topic.
Running for Congress as an anti-cattle Democrat in Oregon's 2nd Congressional
District was as much a fools errand back then as it would be today, but it did
provide Denzel with a pulpit to preach his message, at least for one election
cycle. His was a courageous stand and while a political victory was not in the
cards, his efforts coupled with those of others, seem to have precipitated some
of the improvements in federal rangeland management that we see today. As
outspoken and vehement as Denzel might have been in his opposition to cattle on
the refuge, so far as I know he never resorted to violence, the threat of
violence, vandalism of federal or private property, or any illegal action. If a
protest can be simultaneously loud and peaceful, Denzel's was. The mere mention
of his name probably still elicits some angered responses in Harney County.
The Malheur Environmental Field Station (MEFS, as it was called then) was a
vibrant place under Denzel and Nancy Ferguson's stewardship, which spanned most
of the 1970's and into the early 1980's. It benefited from financial support
that came from many colleges and universities around the Pacific Northwest. It
also benefited from the back-to-nature culture and environmental activism that
came in response to the widespread realization that DDT, oil spills,
strip-mining, intensive logging, monoculture forestry practices, pesticide
usage, overgrazing and other environmental catastrophes were major threats to
the future of the planet and its wildlife. College students gobbled up
opportunities to study earth sciences and the station offered a remarkable
array of upper division college-credit field classes each summer. Enthusiasm
for such things waned in subsequent decades and various budget crises gradually
eroded the financial support that fueled the glory days of MEFS. Although the
money doesn't seem to be available, I have to think that if the Malheur Field
Station was again able to offer the sort of educational experience that it once
did, many today's college-age students, who are essentially the progeny of the
first generation MEFS alumni and their peers, would jump at the unique
opportunity to learn about this landscape the same way their parents did.
If there is a silver lining to this occupation, I hope it comes in the form of
renewed support and appreciation for the refuge and the unique educational
opportunities that a well-funded Malheur Field Station might provide. I never
took a summer class at the station and it remains one of very few things in my
life that I truly regret.
Dave Irons
Portland, OR
From: velta@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [boo] Some history - Nancy and Denzel Ferguson at Malheur
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2016 20:48:52 -0800
To: boo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Copied from comments to Oregonian report -
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.'
