June 6, 2006
The Associated Press
Reno, Nevada - Wayne Hage, who battled the federal government for decades over public lands and private property rights, has died.
Hage, who came to epitomize Nevada's Sagebrush Rebellion, had been ill and died Monday at his Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah, friends said. He was in his 60s.
"He actually successfully beat cancer a number of years ago," said Bob St. Louis, and longtime friend and fellow rancher. "In the past couple weeks, it came back in really aggressive form."
A memorial service is planned Saturday at the Hage ranch in Monitor Valley.
Hage, who married former Republican U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho in 1999, had battled the government since the Forest Service started scaling back the number of cattle allowed to graze on national forest land in the early 1980s.
In 2002, U.S. Claims Court Judge Loren Smith ruled in Washington D.C., that Hage had a right to let his cattle use the water and forage on at least some of the federal land where he formerly held a federal grazing permit north of Tonopah, in central Nevada.
A longtime state's rights activist and author of "Storm Over Rangelands," Hage filed a claim seeking $28 million in damages in 1991 after Forest Service officials suspended his grazing permits on parts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, saying overgrazing was causing ecological damage on the high-desert range.
Hage said the water rights came with the Pine Creek ranch when he bought it for about $2 million in 1978 and those rights carry with them the right to the associated forage.
"If you don't have the water rights, you don't have a ranch," he said during a 2004 court hearing.
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Source: http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2006/jun/06/060610029.html