The Ragged Edge Defending A Way Of Life Residents Cling To Traditional Values In A Growing, Changing Stevens County

An eight-foot, stuffed bear hulking inside the doorway of Wayne Sell’s mobile home reminds him of happy autumn days hunting with his grandfather.

It was Gramps Sell who taught him to track game through Stevens County backwoods as a schoolboy.

“Since I was 8 years old, I was carrying a rifle,” says Sell, 39, a softspoken logger.

Early in his marriage, the venison he toted home was sometimes the only meat in the freezer.

Things have changed in the dozen years since Sell and his wife, Roxanne, settled on an 8-acre plot east of Colville. His neighbors are new to country life, and they’re startled by gunfire at midday.

Now Roxanne calls ahead when her husband walks out by the shed to sight his rifle. “Wayne’s going to be shooting,” she warns, “so don’t get worried.”

The Sells and other Stevens County residents are reeling from a fading timber industry and exploding growth that’s recasting this rugged homeland of loggers, miners and farmers into a refuge for people fleeing cities.

Some come to retire in the country; some move for a life of simplicity and community in the hills; others move because they’re white and they want to live in a mostly white area.

The mix of values - and a county that’s trying to oversee all the change - fuels a frustration with government that has eclipsed the usual rhetoric. In Stevens County, the sentiment has moved into local politics.

A state representative wants to wrest power from the federal government. A new county commissioner applauds the militia movement. Some angry citizens are trying to elect more constitutionalists like him to public office.

Another commissioner believes anger at government has reached an unprecedented fervor during his six years in office.

“Now they’re just flat mad,” Allan Mack says. “I don’t know what it’ll take to stop it.”

Howls of intrusion

Some say the voices railing about the corruption of today’s government officials are a loud, radical minority.

Often, though, it’s people like Wayne Sell - people simply afraid the government is infringing on their property rights, guns or livelihood.

Every time Sell opens a firearms magazine, the National Rifle Association is warning of some new bill that threatens his gun collection. For years, Sell just paid his NRA dues and sent an occasional letter to lawmakers.

Two years ago, he’d had enough. He picked up the telephone and joined a fledgling group called Citizens for the Second Amendment.

His first dabble in activism was a thrilling success. About 100 angry, enthusiastic gun owners piled in a City Hall meeting room and hashed out plans to safeguard their firearms. They quizzed sheriff’s candidates about gun rights. They pelted politicians with pro-gun letters. They dressed as patriots and carried muskets in a parade.

Sell’s companions were primed for such a grass-roots movement.

They’d just won an exemption from a state law that would have limited where they could drive with a gun in the gun rack.

And many people were still seething over an April morning in 1992 when 20 federal agents and sheriff’s deputies looking for machine guns leaped from a rental truck and surrounded a house on Peterson Swamp Road north of Colville.

The story ricocheted across Stevens County. Agents had handcuffed Melissa Knudson before she could go get her baby from the bathtub! And they found no illegal weapons whatsoever.

Law enforcement’s side of the story rests in a federal file in Spokane: A neighbor had warned agents that the Knudsons and friends who wanted to replace the U.S. government with an Aryan one were shooting automatic weapons.

The case was closed when agents found only legal guns and M-16 parts. An agent quickly lifted the baby from the tub, stresses Bob Harper of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or BATF.

Howls of government intrusion kept Stevens County commissioners from passing a noise ordinance in May.

Logging truck drivers feared they couldn’t use loud brakes in the early morning hours. Farmers complained they couldn’t shoot porcupines in their hayfields after dark. Dog kennel owners worried it would shut down their businesses.

One after another, proposed laws and ordinances have rattled Stevens County residents. The earthquake already came, in the legendary siege at Ruby Ridge, where federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin after he dodged a court hearing.

“Randy Weaver was the big catalyst here; in fact, it was the fuse,” says Stravo Lukos, who publishes Radiant, a new community newspaper. “More and more people started turning against the BATF. I’m still kind of shocked about the resentment of people to the police.”

Commissioner Mack thrusts a finger at nine volumes of state law when explaining why he takes so much flack as a government employee.

State and federal lawmakers pass too many one-size-fits-all laws that work fine in heavily populated places such as King County, he says. But in Stevens County, nearly 6 in 7 people live in the country.

A changing county

After six years in Stevens County, Joyce Tasker still sounds slightly astonished. “It’s like living on the frontier out here… They pack guns. They shoot deer all the time to eat. I’m getting ready to pack a gun and I’m embarrassed to say so.”

For others, the Wild West image is fading with every U-Haul that pulls in. It’s replaced by new schools, more traffic, a bigger hospital, supermarkets.

In the past 35 years, the county’s population doubled to beyond 35,000, with most of the growth outside Colville.

This city and county are changing fast. Places like Branding Iron Burgers, Logger Tavern and Kohlstedt Pharmacy flank Colville’s Main Street. But on the north edge of town is a new Wal-Mart. On the south side, McDonald’s sits a half-block from a cattle pasture.

The transformation is reflected in an ever-changing school population, says superintendent Rick Cole. About 2,550 children attend Colville schools, 500 more than seven years ago. “We’ve got a lot of kids coming from a variety of family structures - there aren’t many two-parent homes.”

Some people welcome the growth.

“I think it’s been a happy development, and it is bringing a few more jobs,” says Pauline Battien, of the town’s historical society. “We still need a lot more.”

“We’ve had big companies come in,” says Realtor Don Lenhard. “Many people are kind of scared about it, but it’s brought more people to Colville than ever before. It’s the best thing that ever happened to Colville.”

Still, the timber industry is lagging and unemployment hovers at 2 or 3 percent above the state average.

Per capita income is among the lowest in the state. At $15,147, Stevens County ranked 37th among 39 counties in 1993.

“I think it makes them more susceptible to groups like the militia,” says social worker Nancy Foll. “They are pretty disenchanted with whatever is happening in their lives and here comes some guru who tells them things can be better or different.”

In many ways, Colville is a typical small town, with flourishing 4-H clubs and Boy Scout troops, fraternal organizations and church socials. Rodeos and fiddling contests are popular.

Yet for years, Stevens County has also attracted a jumble of people seeking nontraditional lifestyles, from hippies to John Birch Society members to disenchanted Vietnam vets.

The county, about 92 percent white, has a human rights coalition that fights discrimination against minorities and celebrates other cultures.

People pursuing a simple life in the hills buy hand-dipped candles, bulk herbs, and hot lunches of rice and tofu at the North Country Co-op in Colville. And each fall, the scent of marijuana mingles with campfire smoke at “barter faires” attracting aging hippies, many with their own gripes against government.

Swaneagle, 45, says she’s a victim of governmental “hippie hatred.” The peace activist believes surveillance helicopters have spied on her. She says cops harass her long-haired friends, stopping their cars for no reason.

Says Susan Fuhrman, wife of state Rep. Steve Fuhrman: “Even when we’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, we just move in unison when it comes to government in your face.”

Taking action

When the varying political voices rise in Stevens County, conservatives shout loudest.

George Bush won the presidential bid over Bill Clinton. Democrat Tom Foley lost to Republican John Sonneland in the 1992 congressional race, one of the few counties he lost. Sixty percent of Stevens County voters last month favored Referendum 48, which would have made government pay for regulations devaluing private property.

Some of those leading the move to revamp government don’t think voting Republican is enough.

J.D. Anderson, a county commissioner since January, is an outspoken constitutionalist who believes militias are critical to America’s future and that federal officials have no jurisdiction inside any state.

Anderson refused to discuss his views on the record, but made them clear in a letter to local human rights leader Jim Perkins: “We have been asleep and the socialists have taken over. We now plan to take back our country and use the Constitution to do it.”

He also writes, “this is NOT A DEMOCRACY!! Our fore fathers hated that word and only the socialist New World Order gang and the ADL push it.”

Anderson, a retired Air Force sergeant, has risen to hero status among some Stevens County residents.

He’s a much-needed shot of adrenaline, says Cathy McMorris, a bright-eyed, 26-year-old state representative. “It’s easy to become apathetic as citizens. Sometimes you need people like him to wake you up.”

Another supporter is 25-year-old Tim Hoecher, who proudly recalls the day a John Birch Society leader called his beliefs radical.

From his dad’s 600-acre farm south of Colville, Hoecher works hard to circulate what he considers evidence of government abuse.

After plowing fields and repairing farm equipment, Hoecher settles into the family’s dining room-turned-computer center. This is where he scans the Internet for articles on how the government set up the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s where he gleans tales of corruption from “Conspiracy Nation.”

Hoecher never went to high school but believes he learned from the best - the Constitution, the Bible and his parents.

“It’s simply a fact that outlaws have taken over the government,” says Don Hoecher, 66, who lays tile for a living.

Want evidence? Sit in a courtroom and watch how much money government rakes in for petty traffic fines, says his wife, June, who has done it.

She backs up the family’s religious beliefs by quoting scripture from her Giant Print Reference Bible - proof that mixing races is evil, that Northern European descendants are God’s elite, that adulterers should be put to death.

Don Hoecher hasn’t given up entirely on government. He prodded Tim, his youngest son, to become the family activist. Now Tim says he won’t rule out running for county commissioner himself someday.

With the right people in office, says his father, a county could do away with most government bureaucracy. Downsize schools, eliminate most taxes, send federal agencies packing. It could be the seeds of a brand new America.

“You have to start at the local level. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 11 Color Photos Graphic: Stevens County

MEMO: 2 Sidebars appeared with story:

1. Another time, another minority disparaged Flashback: Fill in the blanks: “It is a notorious fact that (blank) are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive is tainted with the infectious venom of (blank).” The blanks are “Catholics” and “Catholicism,” and the year is 1855. This editorial comes from the Texas State Times.

2. Militia member battles extremist stereotype A member of the Cascade Brigade militia in Western Washington says militias aren’t “the neo-nazi racist gun-toting, anti-establishment crackpots they’ve been stereotyped as, but law-abiding, extremely concerned citizens.” To prove it, he posted on the Internet this list of issues important to militia members: “1. Most are mainly concerned with getting the federal government down to a manageable and constitutionally relative size… “2. I see a usurping of local authority (state, county and city) by the federal government. Local government is more responsive to the needs of the people in their region… “3. Cascade Brigade’s main goal is answering the need for factual information… “4. Yes, there are racists in some of these groups (but they are fast becoming insignificant minorities)…”