PORTLAND, Ore. — It has been a difficult few months for the Bundys.

Ten months after two brothers from this country’s most notorious ranching family staged an audacious, armed occupation of a wildlife sanctuary in eastern Oregon, their call to shift federal land to local control has softened to a whisper. Some of their allies have abandoned them, and almost a dozen fellow occupiers have pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Outside the downtown courthouse where the brothers, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, and five others are on trial for conspiracy, their supporters have dwindled to a handful of self-described patriots carrying pocket Constitutions and lamenting their shrunken ranks.

“I had hoped there would be hundreds of people here, but there’s not,” said Jason Patrick, 44, tugging on a cigarette not far from a Black Lives Matter rally that had more than 100 participants. “Why wouldn’t you come to the most pressing court case of your time?”

It is a long way down the mountain from the weeks in January when the Bundys drove around the snow-covered refuge in cowboy hats, leading daily news conferences for an international audience, ripping out government fences and propagating a vision of a West in which the federal authorities owned little of the land.