Hank Vogler’s Stand In Eastern Nevada

In September of 1985, Hank Vogler moved into an old shack down in the bottom of an outfit in Nevada after a series of unexpected twists. He had originally planned to lease a sheep ranch from a friend in eastern Oregon, but the friend suddenly fell ill with a brain tumor and passed away. After scrambling to adjust his plans and bouncing around Idaho trying to trade cattle, Vogler ran into the man who held the lease on the Nevada place, took a look at it with his banker, and remained there from that point forward.

​The conflict with the Southern Nevada Water Authority began because the agency essentially bought out every single ranch between that region and Las Vegas to secure water rights. They purchased the property of Vogler's down-valley neighbor, a water company with which he had previously partnered. Vogler owned the sheep permits on that ranch in an area known as Tippett Pass, or the 12 Mile, which features incredibly steep terrain covered in black sage. While cattle normally avoid black sage, it is ideal country for sheep. The previous owner had historically run a few cattle there but never completed the paper transfer with the Bureau of Land Management, meaning the area always remained a sheep permit on the official records.

​The water company signed an agreement to conduct a three-year monitoring study with the BLM to properly divide the range, an initiative scheduled to end in November of 2004. Vogler purchased the sheep permits in June of that year and explicitly asked the BLM if any further data was required from him to finish the study. The agency never completed it. Over twenty years passed for a study that was supposed to take three, primarily because the official in charge was simply watching the career clock on his desk and refused to act. Had they finished the study on time, a formal white paper would have been available by 2006 to fine-tune the boundaries and allow for necessary adjustments through proper appeal channels. ​Instead of a fair process, the Southern Nevada Water Authority utilized immense political capital, backed heavily by powerful Washington D.C. figures like Harry Reid, to force their demands through the BLM. Vogler observed it as a complete abuse of power, crooked as a dog's hind leg, but the entity was too formidable to fight. Around 2007, after the water authority purchased the nearby Robinson Ranch, the intimidation tactics turned physical. While Vogler was serving in Carson City on the State Tax Commission, he received a phone call reporting that an individual working for the water authority had attacked his sheep camp. The individual kicked over a propane tank in the dead of October, leaving raw propane blowing into the air and driving Vogler's terrified herders out into the brush for the night. ​ The water authority operated like a bully because it possessed a massive annual budget and lacked accountability to the local populace. Their designated ranch expert wore a cowboy hat and held a beautiful academic resume, yet he knew absolutely nothing about the actual life of ranching in Eastern Nevada. Because they drove around in tax-exempt pickups and held unlimited funds, they looked down on local ranchers and alienated the entire community. They bought up ranches at highly inflated prices just to pump a finite supply of underground water continuously to Las Vegas, causing the water table to drop across every single valley where they drilled. ​This short-sighted pumping created major long-term resource issues, compounded by the massive overgrowth of pinion and pine trees on the mountains. These overgrown forests put the aquifers into a negative recharge state for nearly eighty years, drawing up precious water that used to fill the mountain reservoirs even in the driest seasons. Despite these factors, the local BLM office completely refused to sit down and resolve the Tippett Pass situation, as dealing with the largest political force in the state was viewed by officials as a career-ending injury.

​This fight over local resources tied directly back into the broader history of the Sagebrush Rebellion. Years prior, during a meeting in Boise, Vogler managed to secure entry into a high-society cocktail party at J.R. Simplot’s house where major political players and corporate executives gathered. When Simplot asked what he did for a living, Vogler told him straight out that he was a sheep herder. Simplot took a liking to him and brought him downstairs into a room filled with congressmen, senators, and Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, Jim Watt.

​During that era, the Reagan administration actually offered to turn all federal BLM land in Nevada over to the state itself, which would have established a major constitutional precedent under the equal footing doctrine, similar to how Texas controls its own territory. Remarkably, the Nevada delegation turned the offer down. Decades later, the consequences of leaving that control in federal hands remain apparent as municipal entities attempt to dry up rural valleys. To Vogler, building massive towns in the middle of a desert with a strictly limited water supply was completely short-sighted, and the local ranchers who understood the actual balance of the land were the ones forced to bear the brunt of it.