This episode contains audio and descriptions depicting violence, as well as some harsh language.

Please take care when listening.

In the American West, land is life.

Back in the 1800s, as the country expanded west, land was cheap.

The federal government gave away hundreds of millions of acres of western land to anyone

who wanted to homestead. But after over a century of giving the land away,

there were still stretches of it out here that no one wanted to live on.

Huge swaths of desert, sage-dotted badlands where farming was impossible.

In 1976, a government agency called the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM,

took over most of this unwanted land and held it in the public trust.

They would lease the land out for a fee, mostly to cattle ranchers and minors.

And in Nevada, where more than half of state territory is managed by the BLM,

a war over this land that no one wanted has raged ever since.

In the American West, it's in a hall-out brawl called the Sagebrush Rebellion,

and the battle is threatening to turn very ugly.

When the BLM took control of these lands in 1976, a collection of ranchers

minors and loggers, along with state and local officials, began to object to the new rules

the federal government laid out about how that land should be used.

And as those objections got louder and angrier, they became a movement that would be known

as the Sagebrush Rebellion.

In the land of wide open spaces, there's a new land war.

The federal government owns almost half the property in the West,

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