American history is rich with stories of local communities pushing back against distant authority. For example, the history of cattle ranching in Idaho and the broader intermountain west reflects tensions between local and federal oversight as much as it does the emergence of a unique cowboy culture. Cattle ranching in Idaho became prominent after the 1860s, following mining booms and the displacement of the area’s tribal nations from their original homelands. And yet, this region and this industry were not the only ones that experienced such tensions. Our nation’s earliest history mirrors similar grievances. To understand the motivations that connect the dusty rangeland of Idaho’s cattle country to the musket-lined battlefields of New England is to trace a common thread of resistance, adaptation, and profound transformation through time.  

In the spring of 1775, colonial Americans stood upon the threshold of revolution. Years of mounting grievances against British rule, especially forged through the concept of “taxation without representation,” and the perceived trampling of colonial legislatures, fueled a coalition of patriots to coalesce across the thirteen colonies. Tensions, long simmering, burst into open conflict at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, where colonists and British troops exchanged shots, bringing the conflict into sharper focus. The escalation continued a few weeks later at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where colonial troops demonstrated their resolve under fire. 

Facing such insurrection, King George III issued his Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775, from St. James’s Palace. The crown could no longer see the trouble in the colonies as a distant protest. Through this proclamation, the crown publicly denounced the colonists’ actions as an “open and avowed rebellion.” The King specifically named John Hancock and Samuel Adams among the leaders of this dangerous movement, ordering all British civil and military officers to use their “utmost endeavors to suppress such rebellion and bring the traitors to justice.” Despite the Second Continental Congress’s efforts to negotiate a resolution via the Olive Branch Petition, drafted in July 1775, and which aimed to express loyalty to the crown while outlining specific grievances, the crown remained opposed to any reconciliation. 

Word of the royal decree swept the Atlantic, giving radical colonists, from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a more common cause under which to unite. By the fall of 1775, Virginia’s embattled Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, issued his own proclamation, offering freedom to enslaved persons who joined British forces, further stoking the social and political fires of the day. The British government’s open commitment to using military force catalyzed a divided populace toward unity, and, in July of 1776, toward independence. 

Fast forward more than a century to the cattle country of Idaho and the broader Intermountain West. Though distant in both geography and time from the colonial struggle and the Revolutionary War, this era pulsed with similarly charged questions of authority, autonomy, and identity. Cattle ranching ascended in Idaho after the 1860s, a consequence of mining booms and busts, the forced removal of tribal people from their indigenous homelands, and the blending of indigenous, Spanish Mexican, British Isles, and Midwestern ranching cultures. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this vast territory had developed a unique social fabric, which historians characterize as one of “rugged individualism.” 

Yet, beneath this identity lay tensions that shaped both agricultural practice and political outlook. Economic hardship forced large and small ranching operations to balance values of self-reliance, neighborliness, and wariness toward outsiders. The advent of the national forests in the early 20th century brought cattlemen under increasing scrutiny and control by federal agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The imposition of grazing fees, range permits, and scientific management (“sustained yield” concepts) generated persistent friction. Ranchers relied on public lands but resented what they saw as distant, bureaucratic interference threatening their way of life and local autonomy. 

By the 1970s, these historical currents converged in a new crucible, coined the Sagebrush Rebellion. The passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976, signed by President Gerald Ford, was a significant turning point in this conflict. The law vested the BLM with consolidated authority over an immense expanse of Western lands, nearly 450 million acres, representing roughly half the territory of 11 Western states, including Idaho, and declared that these lands would remain federal property. The movement’s name itself, the Sagebrush Rebellion, evoked the language of insurrections past. At its core, ranchers claimed that local communities should control the public lands upon which their way of life depended. The “right of the people of the state…to own and control their public lands,” asserted by Nevada’s legislature in April 1979, mirrored in tone if not in context the defiant calls of colonial leaders for local rights nearly 200 years prior. 

Prominent Western figures stepped into the fray. Nevada governors Mike O’Callaghan and Robert List lent the movement executive muscle, while Idaho’s State Senator Bill Belknap and groups like the Idaho Cattle Association mobilized ranchers and rural voters. Boise, Twin Falls, and Pocatello became temporary stages for rallies and legislative debates. And then-presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan lent national voice in the summer of 1980, pledging, “Count me in as a rebel.” 

But, unlike the Revolutionary War, combatants in the Sagebrush Rebellion waged war via lawsuits, legislation, and rhetoric rather than with musket and cannon fire. Though the Sagebrush Rebellion failed to deliver a mass transfer of federal lands to the states, it decisively reshaped the region’s political landscape, kindling a lasting tradition of local activism against perceived federal overreach. Its logic and language reverberated into the 21st century, in such instances as the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, in periodic debates over grazing rights, and in the cultural memory of Idaho’s ranching communities. 

The parallels between the American colonies’ confrontation with King George III in the 1770s and the Western range wars of the 1970s are striking. Both moments brought grievances to a boil and forced national conversations over who should make decisions for whom, and where authority should truly reside. Just as King George’s proclamation publicly staked the Crown’s authority and painted colonial leaders as dangerous conspirators, Sagebrush Rebels issued their own legislative pronouncements and manifestos, defiantly asserting a moral (and at times legal) right to local control. And whereas the Proclamation of Rebellion welded disparate colonies into a united front, the Sagebrush Rebellion drew its strength from a distinctly Western identity, casting the federal government as an “absentee landlord,” much as patriots once attacked the British Crown.  

What emerged from both eras is a sense that American identity is often forged not only in the fires of open rebellion but in the quieter persistence of people determined to steer their own fates. For Idaho’s ranchers, the battle lines drawn by the Sagebrush Rebellion were about more than property or profit. They were about the preservation of a “way of life” where work and meaning are inseparable, and where outside control is felt not just economically, but existentially. Folklore, ethnic heritage, and adaptation to both climate and law have made Idaho’s story, like America’s, one of ongoing negotiation. 

Written by State Historian HannaLore Hein

Bibliography

“King’s Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives.” Accessed August 7, 2025. https://history.house.gov/Records-and-Research/Listing/c_109/. 

Louie W. Atteberry. “Celts and Other Folk in the Regional Livestock Industry.” Idaho Yesterdays, Home on the Rangeland, vol. 28, no. 2 (1984): 20–29. Idaho State Archives. 

Neil Rimbey. “Comparisons: The Economics of Range Livestock.” Idaho Yesterdays, Home on the Rangeland, vol. 28, no. 2 (1984): 14–17. Idaho State Archives. 

Peter K. Simpson. “Studying the Cattleman: Cultural History and the Livestock Industry in Southeastern Oregon.” Idaho Yesterdays, Home on the Rangeland, vol. 28, no. 2 (1984): 2–13. Idaho State Archives. 

William D. Rowley. “Bureaucracy and Science: The Role of Sustained Yield in Managing Range Resources in the National Forests.” Idaho Yesterdays, Home on the Rangeland, vol. 28, no. 2 (1984): 30–36. Idaho State Archives.