Norbeck Society pushing back on Neiman influence in LawCo

After a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades. The collapse of the Black Hills hydrologic region was forecast in 2002 even as the mountain pine beetle raced to save Paha Sapa water supplies. Nevertheless, Hulett, Wyoming-based Neiman Enterprises bought the former Homestake mill in Spearditch in 2008 after logging most of the Black Hills National Forest into the dirt. 

In 2018 after the Trump Organization gutted the National Environmental Policy Act then was thrown from the White House Neiman closed its Hill City, South Dakota sawmill and is threatening to shutter another in Spearditch announcing layoffs and production cutbacks while blaming the US Forest Service. Earth hating US Senators John Thune and John Barrasso introduced the Save Jim Neiman's Ass Black Hills Forest Protection and Jobs Preservation Act of 2022 but it died in committee. The downsizing came despite Neiman's successful operations in blue states while enjoying the fruits of socialism as Republicans found a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to the Black Hills timber mogul under a partnership between the US Forest Service and the National Wild Turkey Federation. 

 

In June, 2023 an interested party asked former acting Black Hills National Forest Supervisor Jim Zornes to comment on an article appearing in South Dakota Searchlight about the heinous state of affairs on the Forest then the publication followed up on that piece with another describing the unheard of turnover of supervisors so an interested party asked Dave Mertz to comment on it. Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's lone US Representative Dusty Johnson when he sicced two fellow Earth haters on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. 

Historian Paul Horsted, the Norbeck Society, People for Sustainable Logging in the Black Hills and the Black Hills Environmental Coalition joined the condemnation of Rep. Johnson's attack on the Forest Service.

The subtext: 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺.

Until recently the Lawrence County “Natural Resources Committee” was called the “timber committee”. To the best of our knowledge, since the name change a few years ago, they have not addressed any resource except timber.

Since 2011, science has repeatedly shown that logging on the Black Hills National Forest is unsustainable.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙇𝙖𝙬𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙮 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙞𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙚 𝙝𝙖𝙨 𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙪𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙨 𝙗𝙮 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖 "𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙩". In addition to the widely available information about the depletion trend of saw logs, the committee has disregarded the resulting consequences to aesthetics, habitat, wildfire risk, and how the pressure they exert on the Forest Service to cut down big trees will run the timber industry out of business for lack of suitable trees for logging.

By our calculations, within 6 years at the current pace of logging, the Lawrence County Natural Resources Committee will likely have no more “expertise” to offer to the Forest Service. Maybe at that time they will move on to other resources.

Concerned residents might consider a visit with Lawrence County Commissioners and/or Committee members about the influence the County is exerting on the Forest Service and management of the national forest lands within the county. [Norbeck Society]

Lumber prices are depressed as wildfire salvage floods mills.

In a request for comment on the status of the cooperative agency status and what it means for the Forest Service and the private timber industry, Cochran’s office said they felt the issue had been resolved and refused further comment. [Lawrence Co. regains cooperative agency status with Forest Service]

White pastors preach spiritual genocide on Wind River Reservation

In the US where sovereignty rights are leading culture and language resurgence, growing capital resources from cannabis and casinos are building alternatives to historical trauma, hopelessness, suicide, and repression in Indian Country. 

So, in 2018, the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project began to address more broadly the food insecurity and high rates of diet-related disease in the community. With help from the Nature Conservancy, Wind Cave National Park in occupied South Dakota contributed to the reintroduction of bison to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation sending fifty to Wyoming in 2021. Today the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative is part of a program that teaches members traditional methods of drying meat and even modern canning techniques. 

Jason and Sarah Lucas say they felt their god leading them to start a ministry on the Wind River Reservation so they moved their family to Wyoming to birth what they call "Foundations For Nations."

On Sunday, as the Northern Arapaho Sundance ceremony was in its final day, Foundations For Nations Pastor Sarah Lucas stood before her congregation on the Wind River Reservation and suggested Native people should turn away from their traditional ways, calling them a false “idol.” As the video began circulating on social media on Wednesday, several hundred Native community members moved swiftly to protest, to demand that Foundations For Nations leave the reservation. The Lucas family fled, citing death threats. The church’s related food shelf closed its doors. But the backlash has continued, with calls for the tribes to invoke the “bad man” clause in their treaty with the U.S. government, which empowers the tribes to ban people from reservation land. [Sermon faces backlash] 

The Bad Man Clause has been applied in other actions.

The "bad man" legal argument was successfully used by Lavetta Elk, another Oglala Sioux, in a lawsuit alleging that a U.S. Army recruiter had violated the "bad man" clause when he sexually molested her while transporting her to a military recruiting appointment. Elk recently won a $650,000 settlement that left intact a federal judge's ruling that said the treaty language requires the government to reimburse Sioux tribe members who are injured by "any wrong" done by "bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States."

Tribal nations are recognized by the federal government as political sovereigns, not a racial group. Ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit and as part of the Cobell settlement the Interior Department's Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, some three million acres in fifteen states are being returned to Tribal trust ownership. So, a plan by the US Bureau of Reclamation to remand some 60,000 acres on the Wind River Reservation to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes is long overdue.

Guest post: keep US85 historic

Editor's note: After Missoula I returned to Deadwood in 1981 and was hired as a foodservice delivery truck driver by Paul Miller, a mad genius, who ran the transportation for Twin City Fruit. Paul's dad Dave told stories about beating checks back to Deadwood driving rickety old trucks on gravel roads and US85 since the 1940s from Deadwood to Denver's Denargo Market peddling produce from Scottsbluff, Nebraska back to the Gulch. They owned the Scottsbluff market back-hauling beet sugar and Rockyford melons from the area. 

Paul's brother David, Jr., now a local historian, ran the staff and warehouse until selling his share to Paul while their father, Dave, Sr. ran purchasing. David, Jr. also owned Pop's Grabit N Growl on Deadwood's Main Street until gambling came to the Gulch. Paul bought the Fish and Hunter warehouse then built a freezer that featured an impressive 40-foot roof-mounted ammonia refrigeration system to sustain the large-scale walk-ins that sustained Paul's $22 million market share. The property footprint sat directly along the US 85/Highway 14A and Whitewood Creek boundary, which serves as the primary gateway into Deadwood. 

Let me just say that you haven't lived until you've driven a refrigerated truck from Deadwood to Newcastle, Wyoming and back again twice a week for a year and a half on US85 sometimes over ice and snow covered roads.

Denver-based competitor Nobel also distributed in the Black Hills market then it was absorbed by Houston-based Sysco but was the division that ultimately bought Paul's client list. Following corporate transitions later in its history, local lore and historical employee forums note that operations abruptly ceased, with remaining inventory packed up overnight. Paul died in 2014 but not before giving the Fish and Hunter property back to the City.

Today, I can see US85 from my house in New Mexico, drive it nearly every day and my dreams still feature deadlines to meet.

From my inbox.

Hello Larry, 

My name is Mike Miller. I worked with you at TCF in Deadwood. I left in 1987 to work for American Airlines in Tulsa, retired in 2021, and moved to Olympia, WA. I’m sending you this in case you would be able to help my Dad out. He’s 85 and still fighting for the Black Hills at every opportunity. What we are trying to do is get as many people as we can to submit comments to Mark Malone of the SDDOT. Their plan is to widen and straighten highway 85 from Cheyenne Crossing to the Wyoming border. We know what that means. We recently got an extension on the comment period to September 4th. If you, or anyone you know could send a message to Mark, it would help a lot. A comment from you would carry a lot of weight. 

Thank you Larry. 

Sincerely, Mike Miller

Hardly new, environmental racism part of lithium, rare earth mining

In 1951 after uranium was discovered in South Dakota's southern Black Hills more than 150 mines were ripped into the Earth where the Oglala Lakota once made their winter camp. Since then, radioactive tailings from those scars have been detected in Angostura Reservoir after a dam on the Cheyenne River broke in 1962. Beginning in 1958 Homestake Mining Company gouged uranium from New Mexico leaving piles of waste rock laden with selenium causing cancers and thyroid disease in its wake. 

In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine in the Wyoming Black Hills just upstream of the South Dakota border on ancestral Apsáalooke and Lakota lands at the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. 

In 2019 because the Trump Organization despises Native Americans uranium mining was fast-tracked in and around Indian Country where tribes already suffer from diseases and birth defects wrought by radioactive contamination and in northwestern South Dakota cleanup in the Cave Hills area went for decades without remediation. 

In South Dakota, British Columbia-based United Lithium staked some 500 claims on treaty lands, some on Bureau of Land Management ground near Pringle, where lithium bearing pegmatites are already being quarried for potassium feldspars and micas. Canada-based Clean Nuclear Energy Corporation wants to drill through the water-bearing Inyan Kara Group on School and Public Lands property in Fall River County. The project is less than a mile from Craven Canyon where pictographs and rock art of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Mandan, Hidatsa, Ponca, eastern Dakota, and other Native American cultures are protected on the Black Hills National Forest.

Exploiting the General Mining Law of 1872 Australia-based South32 Ltd. is ripping into Sobaipuri O’odham and Hohokam ancestral lands at Harshaw, Arizona with plans to extract zinc, manganese and nickel. In 2023 Trump appointees rejected a lawsuit that would have blocked mineral exploration in Arizona's Patagonia Mountains despite the resultant acid mine drainage that puts wildlife at risk where half of all migratory birds in North America move through the nearby avian sanctuaries at Sonoita Creek State Natural Area and Patagonia Lake. 

Australian miners like Jervois Global want to gouge ore containing cobalt from the homelands of the Nimíipuu or Nez Perce at a Superfund site near the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho.

Trina Lone Hill wasn’t surprised that mining companies had found lithium in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Gold and uranium had drawn drillers to the Lakota Sioux tribe’s hallowed ground in these western highlands years ago. Now, with this new mineral powering the global green-energy transition, the tribe’s historic preservation officer had one thought: “Here we go again.” 

Indigenous communities are hard hit: Roughly one in 10 proposed mines sits within 10 miles of a tribal reservation, even though reservations comprise 2 percent of U.S. land overall. “All those minerals … are right in our sacred sites,” Lone Hill said. The pattern of sidelining tribal voices and dispossession, she added, “has always been oppressive.” In Nevada, ground zero for America’s lithium rush, Western Shoshone members, much like their Sioux counterparts, have maintained that they never ceded their ancestral land. [How the Rush to Mine the Metal of the Future Echoes America’s Colonial Past]

Learn more from the South Dakota Democratic Party.

Landback gains momentum

Project 2025 and the extreme white wing of the Republican Party want a not so civil war over critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI because oligarchs fear an admission of guilt implies liability and they will be compelled to pay reparations to Indigenous and to the descendants of enslaved people.

"Landback isn’t a slogan; it's the solution to some of the biggest challenges we face as a society, from climate to racial justice to food sovereignty. Landback means reclaiming our power collectively to build the future that our great-grandchildren can thrive in."

There are Indigenous Nations who can afford to buy much of the land in the public domain if it indeed goes up for sale and after a 23-year effort and $56 million about 47,000 acres in the Klamath Basin have been returned to the Yurok Tribe after studies showed how conservation goals are more effectively met when Indigenous peoples manage their own territories. There is at least a $billion in the fund for the Black Hills Claim just for instance so some day tribes will buy some of their own land from the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in occupied South Dakota and Wyoming. 

Ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit and as part of the Cobell settlement the Interior Department's Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, some three million acres in fifteen states were returned to tribal trust ownership including in New Mexico.

While the program operated nationwide across more than 50 tribal locations, specific outcomes for 

Kewa Pueblo

 (Santo Domingo) in New Mexico include: 

• Land Consolidation: The program aimed to address "checkerboarding" and fractionated land ownership—where a single tract might have hundreds of individual owners—by purchasing interests from willing sellers at fair market value and transferring them to tribal governments.
• National Context: Across New Mexico and other states, the program paid out approximately $1.69 billion to over 123,000 individuals over its 10-year lifespan.
• Related Land Efforts: In addition to the Buy-Back Program, other recent land transfers in New Mexico include bipartisan legislation to transfer land from a former boarding school to the state's 19 Pueblos (including Kewa) for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

AI on the Black Hills

The historical landscape of He Sapa (the Black Hills) was significantly different from its present-day appearance, with quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) playing a much more dominant role in the ecosystem, particularly in mesic (moist) areas, prior to European settlement. 

• Pre-Settlement Landscape: The area was characterized by a mosaic of diverse habitats, including open ponderosa pine parks, grass prairies, and dense stands of hardwoods, of which aspen was a significant component in moister, sheltered areas and lower valleys.
• Role of Fire: Quaking aspen is a pioneer species that thrives following disturbances like fire. Historically, natural and indigenous-led fires maintained a diverse landscape that favored the regeneration of aspen.
• Settlement and Environmental Change: Following settlement, fire suppression and changes in land management allowed conifers, particularly ponderosa pine, to encroach upon areas previously dominated by aspen and other hardwoods.
• Ecological Significance: Before these landscape shifts, these mesic aspen habitats served as crucial biodiversity hotspots. 

Today, the prevalence of aspen has been heavily influenced by logging and fire suppression, which have, in many parts of the region, increased the overall acreage of aspen but altered its historical distribution and competitive relationship with other tree species.

Wyoming Earth haters ignoring cheatgrass fix

Cheatgrass can produce more than 10,000 plants per square yard and is a major fire risk because it dries out more quickly than native vegetation. In 2021, the Forest Service, the US Department of Agriculture and the Wyoming Game & Fish Department sprayed the herbicide Rejuvra® with a helicopter on cheatgrass in a 9,200 acre area within the Mullen fire perimeter with the hopes of reducing, maybe even eradicating its presence. People recreating on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest were warned to avoid the kill zone and the compound is persistent in soil posing long-term risks to aquatic habitats through rain-induced runoff particularly on sloped or compacted earth.

In 2025 the Red Canyon Fire scorched 195 square miles of land plagued by a cheatgrass infestation so county weed and pest people argue that "without costly chemical intervention in the near future, the fire scar could convert to an unproductive monoculture of invasive grasses." But, those in the extreme white wing of Wyoming's party of Earth haters are pushing back on the cost of spraying Rejuvra®, at about $1,150 a gallon, on at least 340,000 acres in just one county.

Buffalo eat young, green cheatgrass in the spring and dormant plants but they mostly avoid it during the mid-summer seed stage when the awns are sharp and unpalatable. Wapiti or elk, mule deer and pronghorn travel from Grand Teton National Park to winter ranges throughout the region and into the Wind River Reservation eating cheatgrass along the way. But disease, urban sprawl and oil and gas development have altered historic migration routes in wonderful Wyoming.

So, irony is just another casualty of Wyoming's wildfires which have also cleared millions of acres of fences, power lines, dry grasses, sagebrush, ponderosa pine and juniper in Republican ranch country even as the Biden administration reached out to those serial ecoterrorists who rely on moral hazard to survive. But, if grazing cattle is the key to preventing wildfires why do red states suffer from near daily high even extreme grassland fire danger indices even in February? Because they're in denial about how manifest destiny is destroying the West.

ip image.

The Black Hills National Forest is broken

Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the Black Hills National Forest who attended a 2024 roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's Earth hating US Representative Dusty Johnson when Johnson sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. 

Mertz' comment below appears at a Colorado Springs forest policy blog.

Regarding [mountain pine beetle] treatments, if you get ahead of the beetles and thin to 40 BA (basal area), I believe it was affective here in the Black Hills. In some areas, very effective. Once the beetles are already in an area, it is a lot tougher to deal with them. It doesn’t work to go chasing after beetles. We also did a lot of “cut and chunk” where infested trees are cut into 2-foot lengths soon after infestation and left to dry. This is obviously very labor intensive and costly. There was some minor success with this, but I don’t think it was worth the effort or money. 

Regarding the benefits of thinning, there are pluses and minuses, but I think the pluses win the day. It is true that thinning, particularly heavy thinning, can increase the 20-foot windspeeds (this is why it works on MPB and disrupts their pheromones) and the reduction of shade increases the ground level temperatures. Trees also suck up a lot of water so if there are fewer of them, soil moistures should be higher. Regarding thinning and wildfires, it should reduce the likelihood of crown fire, but a big factor is what is left on the forest floor? Is it covered with activity fuels? Did the opening of the canopy facilitate a flush of growth (seedlings/saplings, grass, shrubs)? Was the stand rx burned after thinning? So, in my opinion, the answer is complex. Generally, I believe that thinning down to 60 BA or so, combined with rx burning is a good thing.

I agree that with high winds, low RH, high temps, and low fuel moistures, no fuel treatments will be effective. 

I did want to respond to your post on “Different Forests”. I agree that the Black Hills NF is probably different from a lot of the other Forests, but the truth is, I don’t really know if there are other Forests in the situation of having to cut more than what their best available science tells them is sustainable. The Chief and others have said that many (if not most) Forests are not cutting to their [allowable sale quantity], in some cases nowhere near their ASQ level. I don’t really know if that is a good metric to use. For instance, here on the Black Hills, our ASQ was developed in 1997 and the Forest was overstocked at that point. The Forest that exists today is not even remotely similar to the Forest that existed back then. I am going to guess that there are a lot of Forests out there with ASQ’s that are not viable with the conditions today. If your Forest has had large fires and/or bug kill, was the ASQ ever updated?

I can look up what Forests are selling in the cut and sold report and see who the big producers are, but how do I know if the levels they are selling are sustainable? ASQ is not always a good metric. The Chief wants an increase of 25% to the volume sold by FY 28. How did they come up with that number? Was there any analysis or was it as we used to say, a rectal extraction? [Dave Mertz]

Image: People for Sustainable Logging in the Black Hills.

Norbeck Society, Mertz concerned about lack of timber competition

There aren't enough litigators to sue the Forest Service allowing Republicans to infiltrate management of the Black Hills National Forest and there is no evidence to support the claim that logging is effective insect control. Some imaginary war with the bark beetle on the BHNF is really more a fight for clean water because after all dead trees don't suck aquifers dry. Until forest managers and South Dakota's Earth hating congressional delegation get that they are being preyed upon by the Neimans to take legacy trees and leave the doghair for someone else to deal with because they aren't focused on hardwood release, prescribed fire and restoring the Hills bioregion to what it was 150 years ago.

The above images and the following copy appear at the Norbeck Society's Faceberg page.

Unit 5 of the Stinger Timber sale on the Northern Hills Ranger District. This timber sale was part of the infamous Black Hills Resilient Landscape Project (BHRL). The Black Hills National Forest has largely moved on from BHRL (which involved tens of thousands of acres of overstory removal) so hopefully this is one of the last timber sales covered by that terrible project.

Unit 5 was cut with an overstory removal prescription. This involves cutting most or all of the large trees on a stand and leaving the remaining understory of smaller trees. As you can see, what remains is a doghair thicket. This is some of the worst doghair we have seen on the Forest. How does a situation like this develop? It's hard to say exactly but it was probably a result of a really good pine cone crop years ago followed by really good spring moisture. In other words, perfect conditions for establishing Ponderosa Pine seedlings.

What remains now is a mess. These doghair thickets are really are not good for anything. Under the right conditions, they are a substantial fire risk. Virtually nothing grows underneath them, and they really don't serve any purpose for wildlife.

The Northern Hills Ranger District does have a fairly good track record of pre-commercially thinning young tree stands, as funding allows. Thinning allows them to grow substantially faster and healthier. The sticker is that there is never enough funding to thin all of these dense young stands. We want to be clear, these doghair thickets are a much bigger threat to the sustainability of the Forest than what remains of the sawtimber across the Forest.

We hope that the Northern Hills Ranger District will commit to thinning this doghair thicket.

Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a 2024 roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's Earth hating US Representative Dusty Johnson when Johnson sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. His comment below appears at the Norbeck Society's FB page.

Money paid for a regular timber sale can still be used in part to fund the KV Fund. KV stands for the Knutsen-Vandenburg Act. It was passed in 1930 and allows the Forest Service to use some of the proceeds of a timber sale to put back into the sale area for things such as pre-commercial thinning. I believe this is what you are talking about. The Forest used to have a K[V]  fund worth many millions of dollars. The problem is that it has been tapped so much to make up for other budget shortfalls that there is not that much left. Also, timber stumpage values have been relatively low, compared to times in the past, and that results in not much money going into the KV fund. Little competition also results in low bid rates. [Mertz]

Wildfires are still popping up on the Forest but the Bureau of Land Management conducted a prescribed burn north and east of Newcastle, Wyoming to control doghair and reduce fuels.

SD Earth haters escalate not so civil war

Editor's note: Minnehaha County Earth haters are ready to come to blows and it's great fun! It would be a breath of fresh air if the SDGOP would decide host a circular firing squad of its top officeholders and finish the job of wasting money and beating the shit out the party’s candidates.

Statement from the Chairman

"An Executive Board meeting of the South Dakota Republican Party was held the evening of November 10th, 2025, with 11 of 12 members attending, to address the recent vote in Minnehaha County to remove their Chairman.

It was the majority voice of the Executive Board that our bylaws do not allow for the removal of duly elected officers by going to Roberts Rules of Order for guidance in the matter.

If the South Dakota Republican Party is to have a process for removing officers, it will require a bylaws amendment to be passed by a properly convened body of the State Central Committee.

The South Dakota Republican Party wishes the best for Minnehaha County, and they must find ways to move forward and be productive, so we don’t allow Minnehaha County to turn blue. There are too many votes there and Republican ideals and principles must lead the way."

Jim Eschenbaum

SD GOP Chairman

Doeden confidence exceeds his writing skills

Editor's note: Toby Doeden is one of three announced Earth haters running for governor in the horrible red state of South Dakota but like Pat Powers Doeden is certainly the least comfortable with the English language. Interim Governor Larry Rhoden doesn't have the fire in the belly and will likely bow out. Republican Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon is showing the weariness, too.

The career politicians are fighting with each other, and things are about to get VERY, VERY nasty.

Dusty Johnson has been the political class choice for Governor since DAY ONE. The special interest donors, the D.C. elites, and the lobbyists are hellbent on making him Governor. The problem for them is, the vast majority of regular people cannot stand Dusty. His approval rating is terrible, and the conservative voters in South Dakota are entirely unwilling to support him.

Here is an even bigger problem for the political establishment. INTERIM Governor, Larry Rhoden, is refusing to drop out of the race. While Larry is nowhere near the top of the polls, he still has a small base of support, and Dusty Johnson is panicking that those voters may end up costing him the race.

So what are Dusty and his friends going to do about it?

This is the disgusting part…….they are likely going to try and pay him off. Dusty Johnson and his clan of D.C. insiders are actively looking for ways to force Larry Rhoden out of the race. They are even allegedly offering him enormous amounts of cash to get him out. (Is that even legal?) They simply cannot risk him getting in Dusty’s way.

Now listen, I don’t agree with Larry Rhoden on every issue; in fact, there is more than a handful of ways in which we differ, but I will say this, he is a good and honorable man. From what I am hearing, Larry isn’t having it. He is a west river cowboy who cut his teeth ranching; my guess is there is no chance he is going to be pushed around by a bunch of dudes in suits from Washington D.C. BUT that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

At the end of the day, we are in great shape! Our message is spreading, and we are winning! The political establishment is terrified, and we are well on our way to delivering a resounding win for conservatives across our state next June.

I appreciate the love, words of support, prayers, and well wishes from all of you. We are going to keep digging, keep fighting, and let the politicians do what they will.

-Toby

More bad news for rural economy: Goss

Creighton University's Ernie Goss follows the economies of several breadbasket states. He says Mexico remains the top destination for agricultural exports although Colorado is less dependent on that nation according to August numbers but South Dakota sends 77.3% of its ag product exports to America's southern neighbor. Canada is the top destination for Wyoming's exported agricultural goods and livestock. 

Rural Mainstreet Economy Falls in Negative Territory
One-Fifth of Grain Farmers to Experience Negative Cash Flow
 

August 2025 Survey Results at-a-Glance:

• For the sixth time in 2025, the overall regional economic index sank below growth neutral. 
• For the 15th time in the past 16 months, farmland prices sank below growth neutral.
• Approximately six of ten bank CEOs support a Federal Reserve rate cut at their September meeting. Only 3.7% support a rate cut of more than 25 basis points (¼%).   
• On average, bank CEOs expect one in five grain farmers to experience negative cash flow for 2025.
• Farm equipment sales dropped below growth neutral for the 24th straight month.   

Overall: The region’s overall reading for August fell to 48.1 after rising above growth neutral to 50.6 in July and 51.9 in June. The index ranges between 0 and 100, with a reading of 50.0 representing growth neutral.

Confidence: Rural bankers remain pessimistic about economic growth for their area over the next six months. The August confidence index weakened to 27.8 from 36.0 in July. “Weak grain prices and negative farm cash flows, combined with tariff retaliation concerns, pushed banker confidence lower,” said Goss.

Learn more about red state failure at South Dakota Searchlight.

Cross-state pollution in reverse?

Wyoming dumps tons of mercury and other heavy metal oxides every year on South Dakota from coal burning power plants and researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines know most of the toxins in the state's lakes have precipitated from emissions released by plants in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. And, if South Dakota had a Democratic attorney general she'd sue those states for the poisoned legacy created by Colstrip, Basin Electric and Black Hills Energy. One of the most polluted reaches of the Belle Fourche River goes right through current Republican Attorney General Marty Jackley's boyhood ranch. 

So pick your poison, Republicans.

Horse slaughter sealed

In Wyoming the Trump Organization plans to remove then auction off all of the nearly three thousand free roaming horses from public and private land and most will be shipped to Mexico for slaughter. These moves are happening as land managers have lost control of the invasive grasses that drive mega-fires. 

Surprise! Earth haters turn against law enforcement in Maude case

In South Dakota members of the law enforcement industry enjoy qualified immunity from prosecution for the often lethal offenses they commit in the line of duty so the violence they visit on suspects is simply dismissed as justified. 

But, on January 6, 2021 the attack on the US Capitol was a climax of an anti-law enforcement movement emboldened by the 2014 Bundy standoff. So, it's hardly surprising that Earth haters like Cliven Bundy and Harriet Hageman are defending Charles and Heather Maude because they hate what they call the administrative state even as it benefits them. 

US Forest Service Supervisor Jack Isaacs (now retired), Special Agent Travis Lunders and District Ranger Julie Wheeler are receiving death threats just for doing their jobs then thrown under the bus by the Trump Organization's agriculture secretary. Extremists are screaming that Agent Lunders came unannounced to the Maude ranch in 2024 in full tactical gear to serve the summons to appear in district court because the Maudes blew off civil remedies after breaking federal law. The Forest Service denies the agent was outfitted with "any tactical uniform, gear or assault weapons" even though it is widely known property owners in that part of South Dakota are militantly opposed to gubmint especially those of Democratic administrations but love all that subsidized crop and livestock insurance anyway. 

Jon Haber spent a career in the Forest Service and is now a Missoula, Montana attorney who specializes in environmental litigation.

I was watching this case develop, and then stopped when it got quashed – thanks, Dave [Mertz] for digging into it. I think you quite likely nailed it with: “I would imagine that any similar event in the future would certainly make a Forest Service Line Officer wonder whether the Secretary of Agriculture would have their back.” You have the more traditional “don’t mess with anyone politically connected to the administration, with the addition of an administration that likes to make examples of people as a tool for intimidation. And they especially seem to like to promote stories that make government agencies look bad. Dave’s words, but maybe more to the point in this case as “not interested in the facts.” [comment, Haber, Theft of Government Property or an Innocent Mistake?]

Heather Maude is a Wyoming native and her parents are Trump supporting Earth haters, too.

The case in South Dakota takes place against a backdrop of federal agencies frequently struggling with the way they’re perceived among rural people. [Federal Fence Line Fight With Ranchers Is ‘Odd,’ Wyoming Attorney Says]

But public servants who arrest people of color for trespass in Madison are qualified immune because selective enforcement is nothing new in South Dakota.

Movement to stop strip mine near sacred site making waves

Racist nutbag and financially broke Shad Olson is hopping mad over the pact between NDN Collective and Black Hills Clean Water Alliance as they use billboards to raise awareness in and around Rapid City and urge action to stop Republican donor, Pete Lien & Sons' proposed strip mine near Pe'Sla. Olson also cites the Bear Lodge rare earth mining site as a calamitous Green New Deal project apparently not knowing the pilot plant in Upton that would process ore is funded by Earth hater, General Atomics and is delayed because of design flaws even as it seeks permits from the US Forest Service to expand the Bull Mountain mine in the Wyoming Black Hills.

Threatened species, Forest Service, Wyoming, warring ranchers, sheriff, politics colliding in northern Black Hills

Forty five years ago this interested party logged in the Buckhorn and Moskee, Wyoming areas of the Black Hills when it was home to some of the last old-growth ponderosa pine stands in the region. We operated a belt-driven portable sawmill powered by a John Deere tractor on private ground where I cut and skidded some huge bug-killed trees. 

In 2020 the State of Wyoming completed the purchase of some 4349 acres of private land surrounded by the Black Hills National Forest near the border with South Dakota in the Grand Canyon area near Moskee in Crook County about seven miles east of Sundance. 

It's home for 38 varieties of native plants, 63 species of birds, 30 mammals, 8 reptiles and 4 amphibians some identified as critters of greatest conservation need and include the northern goshawk, northern pygmy-owl, least weasel, smooth green snake, the threatened northern long-eared bat and black-backed woodpecker. Wyoming is a fence-out state so the parcel is at risk to cattle encroaching from neighboring allotments and private property but Crook County Sheriff Jeff Hodge has refused to ticket the livestock owners who complain the cost of fencing is prohibitive. 

Grazing on federal lands is a privilege not a right and the Forest Service issues tickets for noncompliance but can also allow permits for trespass.

No legal fix has yet been found for the state land lease issue in the Moskee area that left two ranchers at loggerheads over grazing rights [sic]. However, Bearlodge District Ranger Patrick Champa visited the Crook County Commissioners last week to explain how the U.S. Forest Service has been working with the Office of State Lands and Investments to tackle the problem once cattle are turned out for the year. USFS does not require fencing on its leases. [Mediation ongoing for Moskee grazing issue]

Now, extended drought in the region is causing a bump in the number of pine beetles like Dendroctonus ponderosae and Ips pini so Neiman Enterprises has compelled the BHNF to request comment on proposals for commercial logging on 8,000 acres of National Forest System land four miles south of Beulah, WY and on 6,372 acres and fuel treatments on a total of 15,170 acres of NFS land on the South Dakota side of the border. 

Spearditch Republican Randy Deibert, a monetary recipient of Neiman largesse, is all for the projects even as the Norbeck Society and the group, People for Sustainable Logging in the Black Hills are sounding the alarm on over-logging on an already-stressed BHNF. 

Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a 2024 roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's lone US Representative Dusty Johnson who sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. Cochrane was the sixth different leader in 2023 alone and 11th in the past seven years. Mertz just told an interested party that the Allowable Sale Quantity or ASQ on the BHNF should be about 40,000 hundred cubic feet (CCF) and that despite increased timber sales the closure of Neiman's mill in Spearditch is only a matter of time.

Polluting pork industry GOP Nebraska governor calls for nitrate study

Republicans in red states are howling because the federal government is buying land to protect it from desertification so groundwater depletion and the absence of public land is draining the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer six and a half times faster than its recharge rate and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates from industrial agriculture. 

In 2008 after Nebraska's 1978 median nitrate level doubled lab tests showed a few municipal wells were exceeding the US Environmental Protection Agency limit for uranium when samples jumped as high as 57 parts per billion. In 2011 one irrigation well just four miles from a municipal water source tested 322 parts per billion of uranium or more than 10 times the legal limit for drinking water set by EPA. 

In a 2015 study researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported that 78 percent of groundwater samples from the Ogallala Formation found with unsafe concentrations of uranium were also contaminated with nitrates from farming. Researchers learned that nitrates at levels near the 10-parts-per-million legal limit release uranium into the state’s groundwater, which provides drinking water for 85 percent of Nebraskans.

Towns in Nebraska are stepping up sampling municipal supplies where nitrate levels are still rising but the owners of private wells are not. Jim Pillen, the state's Republican governor is a major contributor to nitrate impairment but he wants a study that will pin the blame on farmers. Suggesting that irony is not completely dead, wells in the Republican River basin are the most severely threatened by nitrate poisoning. 

Bacteria in human bodies can turn nitrate, a colorless, tasteless and odorless chemical, into nitrite and then convert it to nitrosamine, a known probable carcinogen. Out of nearly 29,000 private well owners the state reached out to, only 3,478 samples were sent back. The state study happened because it’s a step toward Pillen’s goal of reducing overapplication of nitrogen fertilizers, said Laura Strimple, the governor’s spokesperson, in an email statement. [Many Nebraskans still under threat of high nitrate in drinking water, report finds]

After public outcry scuttled its eminent domain scam federally subsidized Sioux Falls, South Dakota chemical company POET, that enables nitrate pollution to grow corn for ethanol, has entered an agreement to transport waste carbon dioxide through Nebraska in an existing natural gas pipeline to a sequestration site in Wyoming according to a press release.

Learn how Flatwater Free Press reporter Yanqi Xu uncovered extensive nitrate pollution in Nebraska, including from the governor’s hog farms. healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/01...

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— Association of Health Care Journalists (@healthjournalism.org) January 30, 2024 at 8:37 AM

Wyoming Republicans will likely doom another Indigenous historic site

Exploiting the gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode Clovis people came down the Little Missouri River and were likely the first humans to see the Missouri Buttes and Devils Tower. The divide between the Little Missouri and the Belle Fourche drainages is not very wide: less than a mile just west of the Missouri Buttes. At that location it's not difficult to visualize how the people migrating into the region at least 12,000 years ago seeking shelter and food sources found their way into lands free of glaciation. 

There are at least 23 prehistoric sites near Devils Tower National Monument, some of which are archaeological treasures eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. So in 2023 during a review of its resource management plan (RMP) the Newcastle, Wyoming office of the US Bureau of Land Management identified the Little Missouri Antelope Trap as an area of critical concern or ACEC. 

Ogden Driskill is an Earth hating Wyoming legislator running cattle near Mahto Tipila in the Belle Fourche River watershed. But even Driskill isn't white enough for some Trumpers and faced a solid write-in campaign from a former chair of the Crook County Republican Party. Crook County is home to the Little Missouri Antelope Trap. 

Since at least 2021 Wyoming's two Earth hating US Senators have introduced legislation that would cancel Indigenous culture at America's first national monument so the preservation of another ACEC is likely doomed especially now that a US president who hates Native Americans is slashing history.

"In the interior, there are a series of wooden juniper drive-line structures and there is a physical antelope trap where Native American Indian tribes came to hunt for significant periods of time across the land-scape," says Chad Krause, Field Manager for the BLM's Newcastle Field Office. There's only one existing ACEC in the management area overseen by the Newcastle Field Office. The cur-rent plan, which was approved in 1999, includes Whoopup Canyon east of Newcastle. "It has petroglyphs that are around 11,000 years old," Krause says. The proposed area has public access via the Little Missouri Road and is a popular hunting area for – unsurprisingly – antelope. What made this site stand out, he says, was partly the information gathered from the tribes and partly the manageability of the location. [BLM proposes new protected area]

Learn more at Salon.

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