The Ragged Edge A Range Of Opinion Two Boundary County Ranchers Life Off Adjoining Land, But Have Cultivated Divergent Political Views
Profile: Bob Vickaryous and Julien Bucher
At first glance, a lonely creek and 14 years are all that separate Bob Vickaryous and Julien Bucher.
They live side-by-side two miles from the 49th Parallel - closer to Canada than to the nearest pay phone. The weathered ranchers, both Boundary County natives, graze cattle on nearby forest allotments.
Similarity ends there.
Bucher, 62, stumped for a recent $14.7 million bond to expand Bonners Ferry High School. He believes public land grazing fees are low and thinks outcry over gates blocking forest roads is “irrational overreaction.” The Democrat worries his community is “coming unzipped.”
Vickaryous, 48, spearheaded a tax rebellion that helped defeat the high school bond. He’s fighting to unravel new development laws and started a recall petition against the county prosecutor for refusing to put a new zoning code on the ballot. The John Birch Society member frets about one-world government and a loss of liberty.
In this isolated county, political paths - even among lifelong neighbors - often fork like logging roads.
On a rainy October evening, Vickaryous sits in his mobile home eating a steak from one of his own cattle. He scans a recent “New American.” The John Birch Society magazine cover shows an American soldier who refuses to wear U.N. blue.
The country is abandoning its sovereignty, Vickaryous says. Americans could lose “complete control over our government.”
Huddled in a fox hole in Korea’s demilitarized zone for 13 months in 1966 and 1967, Vickaryous had plenty of time to wonder: “Why did Korea lose half its country to the communists?”
These days he points to the U.N. declaring Yellowstone National Park a “World Heritage Site” or leading American soldiers into battle.
“When you control the power to enforce the laws, you control the power,” he says. “It’s really scary to me.”
Vickaryous grew up in this valley that splits the Selkirk and Purcell mountains 20 miles north of Bonners Ferry. He finished public high school and began logging and tending cows on the family’s 160-acre hay ranch.
In the mid-1970s, his brother passed along John Birch Society literature picked up from some loggers.
Vickaryous read about the Council on Foreign Relations, international bankers and politicians not upholding the Constitution.
In 1983, an airline crash killed Georgia Congressman and John Birch Society leader Larry McDonald. It hit hard.
Soviets shot down the plane as part of a plan to kill the articulate leader, Vickaryous believes. “It demoralized a lot of people.”
Then, during the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush gave his “new world order” speech. Boundary County adopted rules about how many pupils a music teacher can instruct at home. The number of gates blocking forest access to protect grizzly bears and caribou climbed to 118.
Vickaryous could take no more. People clearly had forgotten their heritage, he says.
He founded a local property rights group to rein in local, state and federal government. He led a letters-to-the-editor war on school funding.
“Do we need public schools anymore, and if we do, how do we pay for it?” he asks. “I don’t think we need them.”
Public schools could be replaced by market-driven private schools and home schooling, Vickaryous says.
He battles the federal Endangered Species Act, the county’s 104-page zoning plan, and the $2.80 in grazing fees he pays monthly for each of his 92 cow-calf pairs.
“If more people paid attention, it’d stir them into action, too,” he says.
Across Smith Creek, Julien Bucher crouches in dusty coveralls over a smouldering stump. He has his own theory about why people here are bitter about government: Shame.
Cash-poor farmers, ranchers and loggers were raised to hoard independence like pennies, Bucher says. Instead they directly benefit from government farm subsidies and below-cost timber sales.
“We feel guilty about handouts,” he says. “When you accept their power, their roads, their dams, you give up freedom. Deep in our hearts we feel we’ve gone too far.”
So, he says, “we’re casting about for enemies.”
Bucher learned 40 years ago how anxiety and fear evolve into conspiracy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy “made a big dent here,” he says, adding “it sounded like the entire government was infiltrated.”
But, he says, 20 years in the Air Force, including seven years in Asia, opened his eyes and convinced him that “McCarthy was a loser and a skunk and utterly unscrupulous.”
He learned about the dangers of polarization and hate outside an Arkansas movie theater in 1954.
He asked a black man for a match to light his cigarette. The man obliged and Bucher responded, “Thank you, sir.” A group of white men turned and threatened Bucher for showing respect.
“That was a turning point for me.”
Bucher returned home in the mid-1970s, and now tends to 80 head of cattle on his 120-acre ranch. He watches Boundary County “double-clutching” into a new economy and struggling with social changes.
Rocky Mountain Academy, a school for troubled youth with a tuition of more than $3,500 a month, drew “tree-huggers and educated folks who make us uncomfortable,” Bucher says. He’s seen conservative retirees come to Boundary County only to be dubbed “screaming pinkos” by more conservative natives.
Instead, he says, county residents need to come together. They have before.
When the late Robert Miles, a Michigan racist, planned to move here a decade ago, Bucher and 30 others formed a human rights group and wrote dozens of letters telling him he wasn’t welcome. Miles didn’t move.
“We have a deep, ingrained sense of fair play,” Bucher says. “There’s a live-and-let live feeling here that makes us vulnerable.”
When Militia of Montana patriarch John Trochmann tried to join the county’s human rights group, the group refused to make a motion to include him.
Agitators shouldn’t be encouraged, Bucher says, or politics will fracture further.
“I just won’t believe this county - or this country - will go that route.”
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