2005Poem

Hey Chris--

Picked up your website from the Gazette-Journal this morning, and your eMail from your website.
I'm somewhat of a writer of cowboy and western poems, and wrote this right after the raid in 2001.
I figured you might like to have this in your files.

Hal

Tortoises, Mustangs, and Cows
by Hal Swift

July, in the summer of two-thousand-one,
it's Saturday out on the range.
The ranchers are all in a meetin' in town,
and something sure seems mighty strange.

The ranchers are meetin' to set up some plans
to protest the government's hold
on land that the rancher's have used many years,
but there's somethin' that they ain't been told.

Cowboys from Utah are out on the range,
and takin' a rancher's whole herd.
The BLM says that the land is all theirs,
and that's the straight government word.

They ride to another ranch, take cattle there,
the ranchers are still paintin' signs.
An auction is set up to sell all the cows,
to pay off some trespassin' fines.

One-hundred-forty-one years this has brewed.
The government says it allows
there just ain't no grazin' room left on the range
for tortoises, mustangs, and cows.

Now, grazin' room ain't what this fight is about,
and both sides have taken a stand.
And what they've been fightin' about in the courts,
is who is it owns all this land?

The government says, "Why, it's our land, of course!"
The ranchers, they all disagree.
But takin' folks' cattle without they've been judged
seems mighty suspicious to me.

I'm hopin' that someday they'll figure it out,
that cattle with no place to roam
is food that the public won't see at the store,
and steak that they'll never take home.

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