On September 26, nine ranchers left Bodega Bay, California, on horseback for a 3,000-mile journey to Washington, D.C. They carried a petition with two demands: Restore full grazing rights on the northern Nevada rangeland, and fire the Bureau of Land Management's district manager for the region, Douglas Furtado. The riders called their trip east a Grass March—the cowboy version of Gandhi's 1930 Salt March, challenging British control of an essential resource.

Unfortunately, the ranchers face an even more tyrannical force than did Gandhi in Britannia: the weather. The drought gripping the western United States has reduced vegetation on some parts of the Argenta allotment, a checkerboard of public and private land near the Lander County town of Battle Mountain, to unsustainable stubble. 

But that's not how the ranchers see it. They claim that late-spring rains replenished the range enough for their cows to graze. "We have bought and paid for our grazing and water rights," says Pete Tomera, a rancher whose family has run cattle on the Argenta allotment for four generations. "We see no good reason not to use them." 

The ranchers grew defiant when Furtado closed or limited grazing on roughly one-third of Argenta's 331,000 acres. BLM communications chief Erica Haspiel-Szlosek argues that Furtado was obligated to act: "The drought triggers were met, they were exceeded, and the cows were not removed." The closures, she points out, will protect habitat not only for the greater sage grouse, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to keep off the endangered list, but also for future generations of ranchers. "The bottom line," Haspiel-Szlosek says, "is that the rangeland can only support so many cows." In a drought, that number inevitably goes down.

Katie Fite, biodiversity director with the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit based in Boise, Idaho, believes the BLM has actually been far too lax. Even in wet years, the cows trample and pollute the delicate streams and steeps that feed the flat, sagebrush steppes. With the added stress of the drought, "the BLM is finally standing firm on some protections for public land." 

The ranchers, who took turns riding horses and driving trailers on their three-week journey, arrived in the nation's capital on October 16. They paraded down Constitution Avenue and later met with legislators who are sympathetic to their plight but powerless to change the weather: Three years without substantial rain have taken their toll on the Nevada rangeland. Neither protest nor petition nor BLM personnel change can do much to alter that.