Ammon Bundy, center, one of the sons of the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon. Photograph by Rick Bowmer/AP

On Saturday, January 2nd, a group of armed men occupied the stone-walled offices of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Harney County, Oregon. Created by President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, to protect egrets and other birds from hunters who sold their plumes to clothing manufacturers, the refuge is centered on wetlands in a region that is mainly high desert. At more than ten thousand square miles, Harney County is bigger than eight states, including New Jersey, and about the size of Rwanda or Haiti. About seventy-seven hundred people live there; more than ninety per cent of them are white and the rest are nearly all Native American or Latino. Three-quarters of the county consists of federal land, which is owned and directly administered by the United States government.

Ammon Bundy, leader of the occupying group, and his father, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, belong to a long-simmering Western populist movement that has never accepted limits on the private exploitation of public lands. Cliven Bundy, the patriarch of the family, first drew attention by refusing to pay fees to graze his cattle on public land. Bundy and his fellow occupiers have said that they came to Harney County to support local ranchers named Dwight and Steven Hammond, who have been in disputes with federal-land managers over grazing for decades, and who, on Monday, went to prison for setting illegal fires on federal land. (The Hammonds have distanced themselves from Bundy’s occupation in public comments.)

Ammon Bundy has explained the occupation this way: “The people cannot survive without their land and resources. All comfort, all wealth, everything that we have as a people, to live, to eat, comes from the earth. We cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point where it puts us in poverty.” Asked how long the occupiers would stay, Bundy replied that they would be satisfied “when the people of Harney County can use these lands without fear: once they can use these lands as free men.”

Bundy’s call for “the people” to reclaim their livelihood from the capital echoes a long tradition of populist claims on land, from the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War, who cultivated unused ground, to squatters movements in modern Brazil and, of course, the encampments of 2011, which “occupied” public spaces from Manhattan and London to Tel Aviv.

But Bundy’s movement makes sense—a strange and parochial kind, but still sense—only in a more specifically American and Western context. In American politics, there are two traditions of laying claims by occupying a place. The more familiar kind, which belongs to the left and the civil-rights movement, makes private spaces more public and political. Strikes asserted workers’ role in their employers’ factories and mines. Sit-ins at lunch counters asserted a principle of equality against business owners’ traditional legal right to decide whom to admit to their places. The Occupy movement made the privately owned but publicly accessible Zuccotti Park into a pageant of participatory, consensual democracy and anarchist self-organization, at least for two months in 2011.

The other tradition turns public land into private property by occupying it. Historically, it has been anything but a protest technique. From Independence until the late nineteenth century, the major function of federal law was to convert public land, which had recently been indigenous land, into private property for white settlers. The usual trade was ownership for occupation. In the nineteenth century, it was possible to acquire land by clearing forest, planting trees on grassland, draining wetlands, irrigating dry land, mining precious minerals, and gathering stone. Until 1934, much of Harney County could be homesteaded in ranching tracts that were as large as six hundred and forty acres. Although President Franklin Roosevelt ended active homesteading in response to the Dust Bowl, he did so by executive action, and the laws permitting homesteading remained on the books, poised for possible revival, until Congress repealed them, in 1976.

The Bundys’ side of these fights is rooted in the radical idea that the federal government was never supposed to hold Western lands permanently, but instead should have ceded them to the states or granted them directly to private owners. It is possible to piece together this argument from the text of the Constitution, but courts have never accepted it. It is not really a legal theory but a political wish that history ended in 1891, when the federal government began to create national forests, or even back in 1872, when Congress made Yellowstone the country's first national park.

County governments throughout the West have passed (unenforceable) ordinances asserting their jurisdiction over federal lands, and some Utah counties have sent road crews onto federal land to bulldoze trails, disqualifying the land from federal-wilderness status. Utah senator Mike Lee has said that he believes federal lands belong to the states, and Utah’s state legislature agreed in 2012. Montana’s house of representatives has voted to nullify the Endangered Species Act within the state.

Sometimes called the County Sovereignty movement, this wave of Western localism largely continues what is known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was mounted against federal environmental management in the nineteen-seventies. (Ronald Reagan called himself a “sagebrush rebel” while campaigning in Salt Lake City, in 1980, when six Western states had asserted sovereignty over federal land.). Although it has ebbed and flowed, this strand of Western politics has never really disappeared since 1878, when settlers resisted the first limits on timbering public lands, and their congressional representatives rose to compare federal regulators to King George and to accuse Washington of “robbing the poor” and “depopulating” Western lands. Ammon Bundy would have been at home in that floor debate.

Under inspection, the Oregon occupiers’ call to defend calloused workers against callous bureaucrats dissolves into a quarrel over who should benefit from federal largesse. Vast tracts of national forests remain, in effect, public timber farms for private logging contractors—and Ammon Bundy wants more of these in Oregon. The grazing fees that Cliven Bundy refuses to pay are so much cheaper than the market rate that they have been estimated as amounting to a ninety-three per cent subsidy. An 1872 law, a keystone of the nineteenth-century privatization program, still allows mining companies to remove roughly a billion dollars a year of minerals from public lands without paying royalties or meaningful fees. The federal Bureau of Reclamation and allied state agencies maintain irrigation systems across the West that bring arid land into cultivation, often at highly subsidized rates. But all of these federal supports for logging, mining, ranching, and farming press against, and sometimes lose out to, environmental regulation and recreational uses of public lands. Federal acreage in the rural West has been split by a long-running culture war between these two agendas, and each side tends to see the government as captured by the other. When Democrats are in power, Western populists feel especially mistrustful and beleaguered.

Quite understandably, the sight of armed white men laying claim to public land when black children are shot for brandishing toy guns has drawn the discussion of the Malheur occupation to race, but much of what has been said is too simple. The deaths of Western separatists in standoffs with federal agents in the nineteen-nineties at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, show that there is no clear-cut white immunity. But the occupiers’ sense of dispossession is fraught with racial and other ironies. Harney County was largely Paiute land until the Civil War, and later settler pressure and violence eroded the tribe’s claim to lands that were nominally reserved to it. The age of settlement lasted a few generations in eastern Oregon, beginning with the bloody dispossession of indigenous peoples and ending with the rather gentle conclusion of federal privatization.

American vigilantism is never racially innocent. Its two parents are self-mobilization on the frontier, usually against Native Americans at a time when homesteading was reserved to whites, and the racial terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during and after Reconstruction. It is too much to call the occupiers “domestic terrorists,” as the Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh or the Klan were, but it is also obtuse to ignore the special comfort that certain white men have using guns as props in their acts of not-quite-civil disobedience. After all, guns were how they acquired their special sense of entitlement to public lands in the first place.