Leisl Carr Childers: Understanding Cliven Bundy & Utah Public Lands (Utah Historical Quarterly) (Season 2, Ep. 2 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome, this is Brad Westwood, and you're listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is the second show in our second season, and we've been interviewing Dr. Leisl Carr Childers, and we've been talking about public lands, and we've been focusing on her article in the Utah Historical Quarterly, and the title of that is Understanding Cliven Bundy, Using Narrative, Geographic, and Visual Empathy in Public Land History. Welcome back, Leisel.
So you were talking as we left off in our first half about Cliven Bundy. I want to stop for a moment and talk a little bit about some of these other people whom you talk about in this article. Gration, tell us about him and his life and his story as a rancher.

**Leisl Carr Childers** (1:06)
So Gracie Newhaldy and I, unlike the Dancesters and Cliven Bundy, actually spent some time together. He was the one rancher of these three that I actually met in person. This is not uncommon for historians, even those of us who call ourselves oral historians. We like to talk to live people, those of us who practice oral history, but sometimes that's just not possible. So then we go to documentary records and try to puzzle out the story from there. I met Gracie in 2006 as part of the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, and that was also part of my dissertation work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I found him to be just the most interesting, charming person I'd met in a long time. I actually got to go out there to his ranch in Central Nevada and interview him because nobody else wanted to. My mentor, Mary Kolewski, Dr. Mary Kolewski, who was the Director of the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, she had wanted to talk to ranchers specifically about the impact of nuclear testing on their lives throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. But none of the grad students that she'd worked with to that point really had much of an interest in doing that.
I can't tell you why I was interested. I just think I liked the idea of taking my Ford Explorer out to the middle of nowhere and whomping it around on some dirt roads. That was very appealing.
But it took me a few tries to get ahold of Grayson because he's very busy and, you know, he raises sheep and cattle and sometimes livestock doesn't cooperate with your time schedule. So we had a few missed opportunities, but when I finally was able to interview him, it was a beautiful interview. And I think that he helped pitch some ideas together that fundamentally undergirded my research in The Size of the Risk, my first book, that couldn't have happened any other way. He spoke very frankly and honestly about the impact that nuclear testing had on his life, but he also spoke about the problem with the controversy with wild horses in Nevada. He spoke about outdoor recreation and some of the difficulties that he had with the BLM over time.
But Yuhalde's position isn't antagonistic in the same way that Cliven Bundy has been towards the BLM. He's actually been more involved in pushing for better decisions. He tries to work with the agency as much as possible.
And he's tried to work with several government agencies. It's actually shocking how many different government agencies are present in the Great Basin. It's more than you and I have to deal with on a regular basis.

**Brad Westwood** (4:03)
Well, his story is a long generational story on this landscape.

**Leisl Carr Childers** (4:09)
Yes. And interestingly, that was the common thread that all three families had, the Hollies, the Danes and the Bundys. All three have multiple generations present on the land.
But it kind of depends on how you see those generations.
Gracian's family had homesteaded in the area, but not exactly where I met him. Where I met him at Cherry Creek, I'm sorry, where I met him at his ranch in Garden Valley or just outside of Garden Valley, was not the original ranch at Cherry Creek. It was an expansion. We can kind of think of Bundy's ranch that way in Bunkerville too. The Bundy family had emerged on the Arizona Strip and the branch of the family that ended up in Bunkerville is sort of like an extension of that. And the Dancesters, their property is their indigenous homeland, but that specific piece of property was not necessarily theirs in terms of multiple generations in the same way. It's basically two. So it depends on how you look at it, right?

**Brad Westwood** (5:20)
There was at the Paiute Indian Native American. Western Shoshone. Western Shoshone. Sorry, thank you for that correction.