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May/June 2007
Volume I; Issue 2
Special Report:
Conservation Easements

Katherine Lehman
A Rebel With a Cause

by Mary McElhaney

Katherine Lehman describes herself as a tomboy who much prefers outdoor life to domestic chores. Katherine lives in southern Oregon near Ashland, where she and her husband (the love of her life) have a commercial egg operation. They raise a few beef cattle on the side and have a good-sized fruit orchard, consisting of apple, European and Asian pears, apricots, cherries, and plums. Miss Tomboy should get plenty of outdoor time taking care of all that stuff.

In her previous life she said she held down a variety of jobs including a seven-year stint with the U. S. Forest Service, where she helped put out forest fires and served as a road construction inspector for timber sales, among other duties. Once, she even worked as a machinist to craft firing pins for missiles.

She says her involvement in the property rights movement came about in an unusual manner. When she was working in Southern California, she became friends with a woman who would change forever how she viewed her world.

“Wanda Benton,” Katherine said, “always had a very vocal opinion about just about everything. Even when we disagreed, politically, we had some great discussions. She and her husband were quite liberal in their thinking.”

But attitudes have a way of changing.

“When Buddy (Wanda’s husband) retired from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, they moved to Missouri to run the cattle ranch they had always dreamed of,” Katherine said, “and found themselves smack dab in the middle of a proposed Biosphere Reserve.”

“I tell you, there’s nothing like making your living off the land to snap your head around if you had some wrong notions. Their attitudes snapped around so hard they should have both suffered whiplash.”

When Wanda learned the Biosphere Designation would prevent her family from pursuing their dreams, she went to work to stop it. She got her neighbors involved in the campaign and through diligent efforts, the transplanted Show-Me woman showed the Reserve promoters how the cow ate the cabbage.

Wanda didn’t stop there. She had learned through her fight that property rights and civil liberties were in jeopardy all over America and convinced Katherine, “hounded,” was the term, to get involved in the property rights movement.

“I finally agreed in the spring of 2000 and bought my first computer,” Katherine said. “The first e-mail Wanda sent me was about the Darby Farmland Rally. The idea of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service drawing a line around 50,000 acres of prime farmland to grow tall prairie grass for ducks outraged me to no end. Then I found out many of the farmers were Mennonite. That’s when I learned the government’s tactics were to divide and conquer. Pick on people isolated from general society so no one would care enough to intervene. I couldn’t believe this was happening in America.”

So began the journey.

“I rescheduled my vacation that fall and headed for Illinois instead of Australia. In Elko, Nevada, I met with a convoy of others who were on the same mission. In the ways that God has that always confounds mere mortals, I and another woman, whom I had just met, were asked to take that convoy of people we didn’t know to a place we’d never been. We were each alone in our cars, driving while juggling a road atlas and talking by cell phone to media who wanted to know why the heck we were traveling to this place to help a bunch of strangers.”

The intrepid travelers did make it to their destination, even though their fearless leader took the scenic route a few times.

“No matter which way I led them, even the wrong direction, my little parade of vehicles followed me like a gaggle of baby ducks. When we turned south, outside Chicago, I took my loyal followers across the Mississippi River five times before I got straightened out. That earned me the nickname ‘Pathfinder.’

“The Darby Rally was amazing,” Katherine said. “People came from all 48 contiguous states, 2,000 in all. It was there I first met Wayne Hage and Helen Chenoweth-Hage; Jay Walley of the Paragon Foundation and Dr. Floy Lilley; firebrands for freedom all.

“The Darby experience changed my life completely. When I returned home I began to search for an organization of people who shared my concerns and settled on the Pacific Region of People for the USA (PFUSA). Our organization teetered along while we tried to affiliate ourselves with another organization that could provide basic infrastructure such as a 501(c) (3) and liability insurance. In 2002, we joined the California Grange and are now known as PFUSA Grange.

“As I learned more about land use issues; western water law and split estate lands, I tried to find a conference where our local agriculture people could learn how to deal with environmental regulations that impacted their livelihoods. I finally realized that if I wanted a land use conference in southern Oregon, I was going to have to put it on myself.

“The Western Land Use Conference was held in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 2003. About 70 people attended and we heard from experts on western water law, split-estate lands, how to analyze federal projects for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) compliance and county empowerment. It was a smash hit; we barely broke even.”

“The second conference, My Land, My Home, My Business, was held in April 2006 in Phoenix, Oregon. We had a great lineup of speakers including Tim Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation, and Fred Kelly Grant of Stewards of the Range. This time the focus was on eminent domain, conservation easement, and political solutions to over reaching government. The attendees loved it. We barely broke even again.

“This past February, we joined Stewards of the Range in Yreka, California, to host the County Coordinate Plans conference. It was a huge success. “We educated and fired up a bunch of folks with this one. Stewards has a winner in this program.”

There have been some notable successes in the seven years of PFUSA Grange’s existence. Katherine relates the satisfaction she and her group felt when they derailed some of Bill Clinton’s legacy building.

In the waning hours of his presidency, Bill Clinton put on his Teddy Roosevelt hat and went on a monument-designating rampage. Three of them were in Oregon.

Katherine says she and her group were able to mount enough opposition to stop two of them. One was the Siskiyou Wild River Monument, or as the greens refer to it, “The Ark of the Covenant.”

“We took the Ark of the Covenant away from them,” Katherine chuckled. The second one to bite the dust was the Medicine Mountain National Monument.

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is all that remains (the loading ramp to the Ark of the Covenant, in green parlance) and there are plans to challenge its legality in that the Bureau of Land Management’s own management plans violate NEPA as well as other federal land management statutes.

Pathfinder has recently added another monumental job to her busy freedom fighting life, editing the American Policy Centers “Sledgehammer” and “APC Newswire,” run by Tom DeWeese.

She recognizes the helplessness people feel when they are confronted by loss of their property, their livelihoods, their rights. But never give up, she counsels. “Try to find organizations that are fighting your fight, she advises. They might have already done some of the legwork.”

“I came back from that Darby Rally so ignorant of what was happening all around me, but so on fire for this struggle. I firmly believe that I finally found my mission in life.”

While she downplays her role in the movement, Katherine does believe that by telling her story, others will learn there are people who are fighting and winning the same kinds of battles.

“Bug people and bug people and bug people until you get some answers because nobody is going to fight these battles for you,” she laughs.

“It can serve to expand our network which is ultimately the only way we can stop these things. The only way we can get anything done is by helping each other.”

Frustration creeps into her voice when she speaks of the freedoms that are already lost. “Most people in this country don’t realize who they have already come for. It would be so much better if we could wake up a few more thousand people.”