“Clive,” she said, pressing a pocket Constitution into his hands, “do you have a second to sign this for me?”

On another track are environmentalists, government workers and many others who worry that Mr. Bundy’s freedom will embolden people who oppose a federal land policy — the designation of a new national monument, for example, or a ban on mining by a national park — to mount an armed protest.

“The legacy of this is going to persist,” said Mark Fiege, a professor of Western history at Montana State University, who said that much of his anger fell on the federal prosecutors who appear to have bungled the case.

“It seemed cut and dry to many of us,” he said. “How did they blow it?”

The Bundy family has lived in southern Nevada for generations, grazing cattle on a portion of the hundreds of millions of acres throughout the West that are owned by the federal government.

In 1993, Mr. Bundy declined to renew his grazing permit, saying that he did not recognize Washington’s claim to those acres. By 2014, when the authorities began to confiscate his livestock over more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees, hundreds of armed supporters rallied to his side. The federal agents, outnumbered, released the cattle and went home.

The standoff called into question the government’s ability to enforce the law on public land, a question that only deepened when Mr. Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan began an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon two years later.