On the morning of July 4, 1994, Nye County resident Joni Eastley received a call from County Commissioner Dick Carver, asking her to come out to Jefferson Canyon Road in the Big Smoky Valley, north of Tonopah. Carver wanted a crowd of supporters to witness what he later called an act of civil disobedience.
About 200 people showed up for Carver’s event, but Eastley wasn’t one of them. “I drove around, and I just couldn’t find it,” she recalls. As a result, Eastley missed out on a confrontation between Carver and two U.S. Forest Service employees that kindled a national movement and earned a Time magazine cover story.
Thirty years ago, making Time’s cover was a big deal. The weekly newsmagazine’s trademark red-framed cover generally was reserved for presidents, dictators, and business tycoons. Wars and famines. Occasionally, musicians, actors, and athletes at the top of their game.
So, imagine how remarkable it was when Time’s issue of October 23, 1995, featured a portrait of a small-time cattle rancher from rural Nye County.
What were the magazine’s editors thinking? Was the air too thin in their Manhattan ivory tower to competently select that week’s cover story? Surely it must have been a very slow news week.
And yet, with three decades of hindsight, it appears that those editors recognized something bigger was afoot. They detected a new political movement bubbling below the surface of mainstream American politics that would have vast ramifications for the country.
Carver was angry that Forest Service officials would not reopen Jefferson Canyon Road, a flood-damaged thoroughfare crossing national forest land. They insisted an archeological survey had to be completed first.
Brandishing a pocket-sized Constitution, Carver climbed aboard a county-owned bulldozer and began illegally moving dirt in the right of way. While his supporters cheered, two frustrated forest officials tried, but could do little, to stop him. Fortunately, the confrontation did not become violent.
Carver’s ballyhoo went viral, to borrow a phrase from the following century, even though pictures of the event are hard to come by. (The Time cover image was staged later.) If something like this were to happen today, a hundred cell phones would record it from every angle. As Time correspondent Erik Larson put it, Carver’s “frontier Boston Tea Party” immediately “propelled him to leadership of a rebellion now sweeping the West.”
What was behind the rising antagonism toward federal agencies?
First, consider the timing of Carver’s stunt. The Ruby Ridge shootout occurred in 1992 in Idaho, and the Waco siege happened in 1993. These tragedies were both widely seen as cases of power-crazed feds gone wild. Larson noted, “These days it seems no conversation in Nye County can conclude without some reference to Waco and Ruby Ridge.”
Also, as anyone who has lived in Nevada for more than a minute knows, more than 80 percent of the state is federal land. The percentage is even higher in Nye County. This fact really bothers some people, especially in rural communities, where the federal government tends to be less popular than Hillary Clinton and Bud Light combined.
The hostility toward federal control of lands in several Western states gave rise to the County Supremacy Movement. Its advocates contend that state governments, not the feds, rightfully own those lands. This argument is based on the Equal Footing Doctrine, which holds that new states admitted to the Union should have the same rights as the original 13. The federal government’s control of so much land, per this line of thinking, violates that doctrine.
There’s a fundamental problem with this argument, at least in Nevada. As a condition of Nevada becoming a state in 1864, it adopted a clause declaring that it would “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.”
Those words are surprisingly clear for 19th century legal language, though they didn’t deter Carver and his fellow anti-federalists.
Not everybody in Nye County was enamored of Carver’s earth-moving escapade. Fellow County Commissioner Cameron McRae laments today that it cost the county tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend lawsuits brought by the Justice Department.
“Dick Carver took an action unilaterally, without the consent of the majority of the board,” McRae says. “We as a county got drug into it based on that action. Once the horse was out of the barn, all we could do as a county was try to get that horse back in the barn with the least damage to the county and the taxpayers possible.”
McRae acknowledges that Nye County’s legal battle with the Forest Service resulted in improved relations between federal and local governments. “There hasn’t been a huge issue that has come up and created a conflict that I’m aware of,” he says.
Still, there’s no question Carver’s road-clearing fracas contributed to a movement that has grown in size and influence, and is cradled significantly in Nevada. The dots can be connected to the rise of the Tea Party, which held one of its earliest rallies in Searchlight, in 2010. They also can be linked to the defiance of the Bundy ranching family, which held an armed standoff with federal agents near Bunkerville in 2014, and then occupied a federal wildlife refuge building in Oregon in 2016.
In 2025, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah tried to include language in a budget bill to sell off 250 million acres of federal lands in the West. The measure was withdrawn, but the movement to privatize Western public lands is far from dead.
While the political threads spreading from Carver’s Caterpillar caper remain intriguing, what really interests me is how this sparsely populated, 18,000-square-mile county, where I grew up and still have family ties, ended up on Time’s cover. That just doesn’t happen, right?
I’m reminded, however, that Nye County has long had a knack for drawing the media spotlight. After 5-foot-2 grandmother Joni Wines was elected Nye County’s first female sheriff in 1978, she graced the cover of Us magazine holding a Thompson submachine gun. In the 1980s, nuclear protesters, including celebrities such as Martin Sheen and Kris Kristofferson, were routinely arrested by Nye County sheriff’s deputies and processed through local jails. The popular late-night radio host Art Bell, broadcasting from his home studio in Pahrump, routinely described himself as hailing from the “Kingdom of Nye.” After making headlines as a notorious Hollywood madam and serving a prison term, Heidi Fleiss relocated to Pahrump to rescue parrots. And lest we forget, in 2018, Nye County voters chose brothel kingpin Dennis Hof to serve in the Nevada Legislature even though he had died a month before the election.
There’s rarely a dull moment in Nye County.
Joni Eastley, who got lost on the way to Carver’s bulldozer episode, later served 12 years on the Nye County Commission, including a few years alongside Carver before he died of a brain tumor in 2003. Her interactions with federal agencies were generally cordial.
“They tried to work with me, and I appreciated that,” Eastley recalls. “I think it’s a more successful approach to dealing with federal agencies than trying to beat down the door with a battering ram.”
