Honey, Let's Take Over the Country!

So many ways to use a Subaru

In his recent piece Tom McCall and The Subarurals, Joel Barker considers the nature and behavior of progressively minded people who either move to the country, or already live there, but with values more oriented towards urban lives. In this piece, I consider migration a bit further.

Since around 2011, politically exteme real estate agents have caused a property boom across remote corners of the Northern Rockies by marketing the region to wealthy survivalists as the American Redoubt¹. The notoriously media-shy leaders of the “Redoubter” movement largely focus their public writings on three things: secession, guns, and Christian Nationalism. In fairness, some of their followers take a cafeteria-line approach to these issues.

Redoubters tend to be wealthy enough to buy homes, land, and survivalist supplies. Typical of those who believe they know some secret truth about the world, they tend to see themselves as victims and expect the USA to collapse. Some even hope for this. If a collapse happens, one way or another, the leaders of this loose-knit but heavily armed and networked movement plan to form a Christian Nationalist theocracy to govern at least the Northern Rockies. Which is not a new idea.

Deep in the heart of the American Redoubt sits Hayden Lake, Idaho. This is where a White Christian Nationalist organization that called itself The Aryan Nations, and channeled tax-free donations through their Church of Jesus Christ Christian, built a paramilitary training compound in 1973, focused on these same goals: secession, guns, and Christian Nationalism. This explicitly white racist organization lasted until 1998, when its property was legally seized to repay for their armed, violent assault on local Native Americans². For the record, the spiritual godfather of the Redoubter movement, James Wesley Rawles, denies his movement is racially motivated³.

Real estate prices in this low-density region have soared over the past decade. Several real estate agencies aggressively market the American Redoubt to politically motivated "patriots.”⁴ A friend of mine who worked as a church deacon in far Northwest Montana once warned me to stay on the main roads when driving near Yaak, or risk being shot.

I have never tested this warning. But, I would love visit these lands beyond Glacier National Park. Pictures of it paint a gorgeous landscape of steep, snow-capped mountains, cold rushing streams, and endless trees. The type of rural landscape you could really tear into in a Subaru freshly outfitted with a tent-topper and a couple of mountain bikes. Imagine pulling up to your rental cabin nestled in the trees, firing up your sat-link to load a movie or take a meeting, lighting a campfire, roasting a marshmallow, grilling a steak, patrolling your perimeter, and doing some target shooting off in the back 40. At some point, settled-in before the fire with a beer in your fist, you might murmur “Honey, let’s move to the country.”

The Northern Rockies are a nice place to start a little kingdom for yourself, if you’ve got the guns and money for it.

Religiously motivated racial tension is nothing new to the Northern Rockies. Active colonization of these ancient American Indian lands -- above and beyond the 1804 Lewis & Clark Expedition and ensuing depredations by fur-trapping mountain men -- began around 1840. The Salish tribe of the Flathead Lake region learned from traveling Iroquois that Jesuit “Black Robes” would come teach medicine and other useful skills, if asked. Repeated Salish requests for a Jesuit mission were finally met in 1841, when Pierre-Jean DeSmet, a Jesuit Catholic priest, opened Saint Mary's Mission in the Bitteroot Valley.

You should always be careful what you ask for. This Catholic mission anchored the first permanent white settlement in Montana, seeding a town later to be named Stevensville. Just a few years later, in 1847, a busy fur-trading post opened on a Missouri riverbend 240 miles northeast of Saint Mary’s. This U.S. Army-guarded trading post became a town still named Fort Benton. As a river port, Fort Benton quickly become the epicenter of white settlement in Montana. Further fuel hit this fire in 1858, when gold was discovered in a creek near the town now called Drummond. Miners started streaming in by boat through Fort Benton, and by land from played-out gold fields further south.

To properly exploit this gold rush, in 1864 the U.S. Congress declared the notoriously violent town of Bannack to be the capitol of a newly defined "Montana Territory.” Vigilantism, mass buffalo slaughter, and the widespread theft of American Indian land ensued and burned the mountain states throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Congress passed a variety of "Homestead Acts" to divide and give Native American land away to immigrant settlers, virtually all them European. In 1877, Chief Joseph tried to lead what remained of his Nez Perce tribe to safety up in Canada, but was chased by the U.S. Army and caught 40 miles from the border. He and those of his tribe who survived this last battle were promised they could return to their lands in southern Idaho. So, he surrendered, famously declaring “I will fight no more forever.”

The Army had lied, though, and drove the Nez Perce to Colville, Washington, instead. Now, in 2024, only 6% of Montanans are Native. The other 94% of us immigrated here from somewhere else since Saint Mary’s Catholic Mission was founded to “help” the Indians. Stevensville, Montana, the site of Saint Mary’s Mission church, is now an epicenter of the Redoubter movement.

Humans have been fighting over good real estate for a long time. According to mitochondrial genetics, our species began migrating out of Africa between 130,000 and 170,000 years ago⁵. In light of this hard evidence of continual human migration, it is interesting to wonder how long humans must be settled in one place before we feel we belong there. At what point do we feel a sense of ownership over some piece of land we occupy? Does it matter whether this piece is just big enough for a house, or if it spreads between mountains and rivers like a big ranch or state or reservation? Who do we expect to respect our land claims, and why? Who will enforce them, and how? Will this be by law and tradition? Perhaps by mutual respect and shared need? Or, by guns and subjugation?

Prevailing anthropological and legal theories assert that “ownership” is defined by the direct or indirect power to destroy something or prevent its destruction. The definition and enforcement of property rights is arguably the central function of any government. So, to secede from a government is to reject its definition of every piece of property under its control, while also claiming the right to define and enforce a different set of property claims instead. All of which is a fancy way to say theft. If theft happens at a large enough scale, backed by enough guns and money, does it become something else entirely?

My grandfather was a late-arriving Homestead Act land grant settler who immigrated from Luxemburg in 1907. Had he stayed in Europe he would have effectively been a serf, due to an ancient inheritance practice known as primogeniture. So he went to where a government was giving away free land. He later sold the farm, but my family still owns land in Billings, Montana, where we grew up. A few rental houses, to be precise. Dad bought them back in the early 1970s, and we still keep them as well-maintained low-income housing. Taxes, maintenance, and insurance on them are steep, and getting steeper. But, these costs keep the buildings safe, and the surrounding community intact, with roads, sewers, services, and citizens hopefully literate enough to cast a well-informed vote. These costs are a trade off, the fairness of which is endlessly arguable all around, by everyone, including our tenants.

If the 1851 Fort Laramie (Horse Creek) Treaty were ever honored as written, the entire City of Billings and a whole lot more, from just east of Livingston to Miles City, and from Ryegate south to Lander, Wyoming (look all this up, it is a lot of land), would all be owned by the Crow tribe⁶.

Some people get good deals on land. Others have theirs taken. Many Americans these days complain loudly about taxes and immigration. I will always wonder why, and where their own land and family came from and when. Because, unless we are Native American, none of us have been here long at all.

1. The "American Redoubt" is a Christian Nationalist real estate marketing program first proposed in 2011 by survivalist bloggers. It recruits self-styled “patriots” to buy real estate in the Northern Rockies, move there, and prepare to secede from the USA.

https://montanafreepress.org/2021/11/24/selling-the-american-redoubt-in-montana/

2. The Aryan Nations organization lost their land in 1998, after their guards chased, shot at, and severely assaulted and battered an American Indian mother and her child driving on the road outside the Aryan Nations compound.

https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/706

3. The Times of London provides one of the most in-depth new reports available on the American Redoubt and its leaders, including an interview with John Wesley Rawles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6RQJQ6J5w

4. The sale of “defensible” real estate may not be an ethically defensible practice.

https://maxread.substack.com/p/bug-out-real-estate-in-the-american

5. Map visualizing the spread of humanity out of Africa, according to mitochondrial data.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_prehistoric_human_migrations.jpg

6. Treaty of Fort Laramie (Horse Creek) 1851

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Laramie_(1851)