A barbed wire fence cuts through dead sagebrush on a stretch of U.S. 395 outside of Burns, Ore., on Dec. 18, 2025. “I think there was an attempt to come in here and start what I like to say was a second ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’,” said Tim Callahan, the former Harney County district attorney during the occupation. “That didn't happen here. And I think a lot of that was because of the work that had been done in this community before then,”
Eli Imadali / OPB
On Jan. 2, 2016, a dozen armed anti-government militants led by Ammon Bundy and his brother, Ryan, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters outside of Burns in Harney County. The 41-day siege at the bird sanctuary in rural Eastern Oregon attracted national and international media attention. On Jan. 26, one of the militants, Arizona rancher Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, died during an armed confrontation with the FBI and Oregon State Police. Law enforcement also arrested the Bundys and several of their supporters that day, although prosecutors failed to secure convictions of the Bundys and five other defendants during a trial in the fall.
OPB legal affairs reporter Conrad Wilson and OPB visual journalist Eli Imadali recently traveled to Harney County to see how the Malheur occupation reverberates within the community 10 years later. Wilson joins us to share what he learned and the perspectives of former officials and community members he spoke with about the occupation and the challenges the county grapples with today.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. On January 2nd, 2016, a dozen armed anti-government militants led by Ammon Bundy and his brother, Ryan, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters outside of Burns in Harney County. It was the start of a 41-day siege that attracted international attention. OPB legal affairs reporter Conrad Wilson was one of many OPB journalists, including members of the Think Out Loud team, who went to Harney County to cover the occupation. He recently went back to see how the occupation reverberates today, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Conrad Wilson: Hey Dave.
Miller: What were you hoping to learn by going back to Harney County 10 years later?
Wilson: Well, as you pointed out, this was a story that I covered, along with many reporters here at OPB and Think Out Loud. I had the opportunity to go to Harney County during the occupation and just got to know a lot of people in the community, spent actually a lot of time there. Since then, I’ve kept in touch. Harney County is just a beautiful, and for me, it’s a really special place, and I was just curious how this big event, both in my life and in this community, is really resonating 10 years later.
Miller: You went to, among other places, the Harney County Historical Museum in Burns, which has a ton of information about the area, all kinds of objects and displays, including information about the wildlife refuge, but you found that there’s zero mention of the occupation. And in fact, one of the bigger takeaways I got from your reporting, and folks can see beautiful video and photos online, it’s that no one really wanted to talk about it. Why not?
Wilson: Yeah, that’s right. In interview after interview, that kind of sentiment came up and I don’t think it was so much that folks didn’t really want to talk about the occupation at the refuge, because even those who said that would then talk for a long time about the occupation.
Miller: It’s different than sometimes, people say I don’t want to talk about it, and they won’t talk about it. In this case they would say that, but then they would?
Wilson: Yeah, we got there, right, and there was actually a lot to say for some folks who didn’t want to talk about it. But I think it was also just the sense that it wasn’t relevant or all that impactful in terms of where Harney County is at, today.
It was a huge deal, super divisive, certainly the community got caught up in it, but one thing I heard over and over from folks was just that the Bundy’s – Ammon Bundy, who led the occupation, and his brother – their supporters, so many of them were from outside the community, and so once they left, a lot of the drama left with them.
The occupation was something people said, Harney County was hijacked or it was like a stage for this thing that happened in Harney County, but it wasn’t really a local fight. It didn’t resonate and it doesn’t really resonate all this time later.
Miller: You talked to a number of current residents, current and former leaders, including folks who held elected office during the occupation. One of them was a former district attorney, Tim Colahan. What did he tell you?
Wilson: Tim Calllahan is now retired. He was one of those who said the county had really moved on. He’s lived there almost his entire life, and at the same time, he was also reflecting during our interview about how Harney County did that.
Tim Callahan: I’m very proud of our community. What we endured and what happened here was a huge blow to this community, and in many ways the community pulled together and not only did we survive as a community, I think that we, in some ways, may have even gotten stronger. I think as a community we didn’t allow to happen what was being attempted.
Miller: So what’s the former DA there talking about? What does he think that the Bundy’s attempted to do and didn’t do?
Wilson: He’s referencing another sagebrush rebellion, right? And so historically that was this big fight across the American West between the federal government and states that have huge tracts of public land and how the federal government implements conservation and environmental policies in Western states, impacting things such as economic development, mining, lumber, ranching.
Basically, this idea that faraway bureaucrats are telling locals what they can and cannot do in their communities with land that’s right outside their door, and really that tension historically is explosive and so when he’s kind of saying it didn’t happen here, when Harney County is something like 75% federal land, and so what didn’t happen was this effort to really set things off again.
Miller: Why do you think, why does he think that the Bundy’s failed?
Wilson: Most folks credited a nonprofit in Harney County called the High Desert Partnership. Since 2005, it’s facilitated some challenging conversations really around public lands. And that’s between like land managers, so the governments, state and federal governments, environmental and conservation groups, and then ranchers or other folks who use the land for public land for cattle grazing.
It actually started out as a need at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge itself. There wasn’t great communication between ranchers, and the refuge when they would kind of try to do some of these conservation activities, and so that led to lawsuits. Brenda Smith is the executive director of the High Desert Partnership, and I started actually by asking her how folks talk about the occupation now.
Brenda Smith: I would say usually when, at least when I talk about the occupation, it’s when people from outside of the county come and talk to us and want to know about the occupation, but we don’t talk about it. I think we were moving on even when it was happening, it was like there was work that was going on around collaborating and having better relationships between public and private land managers that had been going on before, during, and has continued to go on after the occupation and I think that’s just the space we’ve always been in as being part of High Desert Partnership.
Miller: One of the most defining characteristics of Harney County is its isolation and it’s just giganticness, its size. How much did that come up in your conversations?
Wilson: I found this part of the reporting just so revealing, because if you’ve been to Harney County or southeastern Oregon at all, I mean, it is just so out there, right? It is vast and you really feel small and you kind of feel the isolation. And that’s something, that theme I guess, came up in a lot of the conversations that Harney County is this remote community way out in the desert.
At the same time, it’s small, something like 7,000 people live in the county, and the area, like the land size, is about the same size as the entire state of Massachusetts. So it’s just a massive space with not that many people living in it. That creates some interesting tensions or working through kind of things in the community. I spoke with Jeff Rose, who works at the Bureau of Land Management. He worked there during the occupation and then later ran the office in Burns.
Jeff Rose: You hate each other and love each other at the same time. And one of the things I used to hear all the time was, is, we hate the government, but we like you. And I go, well, I mean, it took me a while to kind of figure that out. I represent the government, but I’m local and there’s somebody they can have access. And one of the things here is people here expect a certain level of access to leaders, and they want to know that they can go talk to somebody.
And I use the term when folks would move here, I said, you have to understand sometimes here it’s full contact citizenship. People can get to you, they know where you live, they know who you are, and they want to talk to you. And if you want to come here to be anonymous, it’s not really the place to be.
Wilson: That is just an irony that both Rose and I kind of talked about, and Jeff was so reflective and so open with his thoughts about the occupation and just how it fits into the now. And we talked about how the isolation makes people reliant on one another. You talked about how just you have to work through these disagreements and problems because in Harney County, your neighbor or the ranch down the road or your relatives in town, they’re the closest people if you need help, if you wanna be social, have dinner with somebody, if you wanna go to a high school basketball game, like it’s a place where you can have deep disagreements, but you still have to work together. And folks would talk about just how nationally and to some extent across Oregon, that’s something that maybe has been lost to some extent.
Miller: If ranchers and other folks did not want to talk about the occupation anniversary, what did they want to talk about?
Wilson: Yeah, there’s some really big issues, particularly groundwater that Oregon officials say in Harney County has been overpumped, and they have drafted rules to roll back the amount of water that can be taken out of the aquifer in Harney County. I visited Scott Franklin while he was feeding his cattle, and we spoke on his tractor.
Scott Franklin: You just kind of try and forget about it because when you think about it, was just really stupid, with just stupidity at its best. And so yeah, we have much bigger issues here now, very big issues, with our water, our groundwater and the way that’s being handled and the impact that’s gonna make on this community. I don’t think people have really soaked that up yet as far as how big an impact that is, but I think it’s going to affect everybody, one way or another. But for what those guys did here 10 years ago was a waste of time and it was stupid and got a lot of people fired up, but it was just stupid.
Miller: That is, if you count, it’s a groundwater sandwich made of stupidity bread there. He says stupid or stupidity four times in something like 40 seconds. I want to change gears. Over the last week, there have been two momentous anniversaries. It’s been 10 years since the Malheur occupation, as we’ve been talking about, and five years since the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Do you see any connections between these two events?
Wilson: These are both massive events, one that both fueled political divisions nationally, and in some ways, I think, we’re still working through the significance of even what they mean today, but they’re both uprisings from the far right, and while different, both intended to disrupt and really upend the federal government.
Miller: Only one person was killed during the occupation. LaVoy Finicum was shot by an FBI agent at a roadblock after reaching into his pocket for what turned out to be a loaded gun. He became a kind of hero for some people after he was killed. Do you still see LaVoy Finicum memorials or bumper stickers or imagery as you drive around?
Wilson: Finicum was actually killed by state police, but it was an FBI roadblock.
Miller: I appreciate that correction.
Wilson: And definitely, there is like a memorial down the road from where he was actually killed on this kind of remote stretch of highway between Burns, it was in Grant County. The occupation leaders were driving from Burns, from the refuge to John Day for a meeting there, and they never got there because there was this FBI roadblock that state police were also involved with.
Along that highway on some private land there is a little memorial and it has kind of the LV, LaVoy Finicum, there’s a flag. We went there and it’s surrounded by sagebrush, and it’s definitely like there’s some signs that say it’s under surveillance and it’s maybe seen better days. It’s a little kind of weathered, but it is there.
Miller: Finally, what was it like for you personally to go back to the refuge, to Burns, to Harney County where you’d spent a lot of time 10 years ago?
Wilson: I was reminded of just how absolutely beautiful that place is. It was a pretty clear day when we were there and at sunset and we heard coyotes howling, and birds and it was so cold, less snow, but just the beauty of that part of the country and it was a privilege to go back there and just sort of see how great it looked. It just was really fixed up, and it looked just beautiful.
Miller: Conrad, thanks very much.
Wilson: You’re welcome, Dave.
Miller: Conrad Wilson is OPB’s legal affairs reporter. He joined us to talk about the 10-year anniversary of the Malheur occupation.
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