by Kenny Moore
The land was perfect for Jon. He had been a Marine guard in the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, taken his degree from Oregon, and coached the US women’s ski team. But through it all what he really wanted was to cowboy. He had ridden in rodeos for years, and had broken his neck doing it. When he recovered, he was so happy to find himself alive and with a future that he wanted to spend it raising rodeo stock. In 1982, he married Candace Cookson, and on July 9, 1983, they had a daughter. Bill and Barbara’s fifth grandchild was named Elizabeth, after Bill’s mother. Hers would be an eventful infancy.
Two years before Elizabeth’s birth, followers of Indian spiritual master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, headed by his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, bought the 64,000-acre Big Muddy Ranch from Rube Evans for $5.75 million. Its bluffs and bottoms were just across the river from Jon Bowerman’s ranch. That summer, Sheela and an advance party of sannyasins (disciples) arrived, renamed the property Rancho Rajneesh, and promised Margaret Hill, the mayor of nearby Antelope (population forty-four), that no more than forty people would be employed on it.
It soon emerged, however, that the Rajneeshee had big ideas and substantial resources. They planned to construct a spiritual commune as the center of the Bhagwan’s worldwide, 200,000-member movement. In mid-September, Margaret Hill wrote to a land-use watchdog group called 1000 Friends of Oregon with the news that the Rajneeshee’s “stated goal was to build a self-contained city for 50,000.”
In a state that led the nation in protecting farmland and open range from urban sprawl, this goal was cause for serious concern. Oregon cities were required to maintain growth boundaries, zoning any new development within them. Any change in land use—such as plopping down a big new town on empty grazing land—had to be approved by the state Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC).
Henry Richmond, director of 1000 Friends, advised the commune leaders that Rancho Rajneesh was zoned as agricultural land and couldn’t be used for commercial or industrial purposes. The closest place with an urban boundary was Antelope, which was the only entity that could approve new buildings without LCDC review. Under the aggressive, well-educated, and relentless Rajneeshee leadership, the commune immediately commenced buying property in Antelope and moving sannyasins in.
“Thus began the battle of Antelope,” wrote Oregon law professor Garrett Epps in his 2001 book, To an Unknown God, “which set the pattern for the commune’s contentious dealings with county and state.” The Antelope City Council held a vote to disincorporate their town, but the new Rajneeshee residents outvoted the longtime townspeople fifty-five to forty-two.
Not long afterward, in November 1981, the Rajneeshee got permission from Wasco County (the county most of the ranch was in) to incorporate a brand new city, Rajneeshpuram, on the ranch proper. The Rajneeshee lawyers had found a loophole in the land-use laws. Unlike development outside an existing city boundary, incorporating an entirely new city required only county approval, not that of the LCDC.
In mid-1982, about a year after the Rajneeshee arrived in Oregon, Bowerman and Henry Richmond formed Citizens for Constitutional Cities, a nonprofit corporation to fund legal opposition to the ranch. Bill was its first president. “My ancestors,” he wrote in a press release, “have lived in Oregon since 1845. My son Jon is a rancher in Wheeler County. Bowermans past, present, and future are deeply committed to this state. Thousands like me have become concerned about the effect this group has had on its neighbors. As an educator and coach at the University of Oregon, I have always welcomed and encouraged new ideas and diverse people to come and live in this great state, irrespective of race, creed, national origin, or religion.”
But the battle of Antelope had shown there was cause for concern. “Citizens for Constitutional Cities,” Bowerman wrote, “is going to monitor the activities of the Rajneeshee and challenge them in court if necessary to avoid the creation of unlawful cities in this state and protect our citizens from harassment and intimidation in violation of the Oregon and United States Constitutions.”
The Rajneeshee response was to assert, in a letter to Henry Richmond, that they were the object of Eastern Oregon religious bigotry. Richmond replied with some heat. “If the early Christians had as much money and as many lawyers, planners, consultants, and public relations operators as you do, the Romans would have been hauled out of the grandstands and fed to the lions instead of the other way around. Who do you guys think you’re kidding?”
Bowerman’s main concerns were practical: the potential burden on taxpayers of a huge, tax-exempt city, the school and road costs, and its effect on the water rights of surrounding farmers. As it happened, Rancho Rajneesh did pay some taxes. It had a three-part financial structure. One was the Rajneesh Foundation International, a religious entity presided over by Ma Anand Sheela. One was the Rajneesh Investment Corporation, a subsidiary run by Sheela’s husband, Jayananda. And one was the Rajneesh Neo-Sannyas International Commune, which ran all the Rajneesh businesses, including a hotel in Portland. Only the foundation was tax-exempt as a church. But that distinction would soon blur.
In musing over the possible impact of the Rajneeshee, Bowerman realized that he knew virtually nothing about them or their master. He and Barbara began a crash course. The guru’s original name was Chandra Mohan Jain, and he’d been an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. In 1960 he began giving public lectures in which he criticized Gandhi for his worship of poverty. Jain preached that India needed capitalism, science, technology, and birth control. His audiences grew. In the early 1970s in Bombay, he founded his Neo-Sannyas International Movement and changed his name to Bhagwan (“The blessed one”) Shree Rajneesh. He liked and attracted Westerners; once they had become sannyasins, he sent many back to their homes to start Rajneeshee centers.
In 1974, Rajneesh and his first disciple, a woman named Ma Yoga Laxmi, moved to the city of Pune (formerly Poona), bought a villa, and began an ashram. By 1976, the Pune ashram, with 600 permanent residents, had become a major attraction for thousands of Westerners. Rajneesh let Westerners lead therapy groups in which hundreds of people screamed, sang, and threw themselves violently about. “I’m going to bring your insanity out,” he said. “Unless you become consciously insane you can never be sane.” By 1981, as mentally ill sannyasins ended up in Pune hospitals and others were caught smuggling dope, the good people of Pune had had enough. Rajneesh’s lectures went downhill, becoming dirty jokes and political attacks. Traditional Hindus were aghast. The Indian government refused permission for the ashram to move and make a fresh start.
In April 1981, Laxmi’s aide, Ma Anand Sheela, announced that the guru had gone into silence and would lecture no more. That May he flew to the United States with twenty disciples. His visa application said he was going for medical treatment, but he did not present himself to any US doctors. In Montclair, New Jersey, Sheela took over from Laxmi as the now-silent guru’s secretary. That summer she found the Big Muddy Ranch.
In Oregon, as Rajneesh himself continued to maintain his silence, Sheela called all the shots. But who was this woman? The Bowermans learned she’d been born in India and moved to the United States in her teens. In New Jersey she married an affluent American, Marc Silverman, and returned with him to India where they became disciples at the Pune ashram in 1973. In 1975, she’d started a Rajneesh meditation center in Montclair.
Sheela had bought the Oregon ranch on impulse. She believed in going with her feelings, changed her mind often, and was a great self-dramatizer. According to University of Oregon sociology professor Marion Goldman, who in 1999 published Passionate Journeys, her study of the women of Rajneeshpuram, “Sheela could change instantly from charming and flirtatious to abusive and vicious, because she inevitably sought adulation and approval, and became furious when she did not receive them.” During the four years she was in Oregon, Goldman would say, Sheela “grew increasingly irrational.”
In late 1982, Rube Evans, who’d sold the land to the Bhagwan, called J
on Bowerman to say he needed to sell the 800 acres he owned adjacent to Jon’s ranch and asked if Bill Bowerman would be interested. Jon said no, but Evans then called Bill directly, mentioning that Sheela wanted the land. “Dad paid almost a million for that,” Jon would say, “to keep the Rajneeshee out of Wheeler County, his boyhood stomping grounds.” The property had a comfortable, doublewide trailer, in which Bill and Barbara took up temporary residence. Next Bill bought the trailer camp in Antelope, giving them voting rights there.
Sheela’s combativeness seemed to permeate the Rajneeshee ranch. She instituted a police force and armed it to the teeth. The press and public were welcome to tour the ranch, escorted by attractive guides. But sannyasin guards along the riverbank would hold up their weapons as frightened rafters and fishermen floated by. The Rajneeshee set up video cameras and taped Antelope residents coming and going. Some older, retired town residents were so intimidated they left.
Because Jon Bowerman objected to such tactics in letters and articles in the local paper, he drew special surveillance. The ridge on the Rajneesh side of the river towers over the Bowerman ranch house. (Bill likened the butte’s topography to that of Riva Ridge in Italy.) “They had armed guards watching us here constantly,” Jon would recall, “with big spotting scopes by day, searchlights by night. It was like being watched by the East German border guard in Berlin. The lights were as bright as 747 landing lights, and periodically they would shine them at our house.”
In 1984, when daughter Elizabeth was six months old, Jon and Candy would wake up to her crying and find strobe lights playing across the walls of her room. When they moved her to the next room, the Rajneeshee shifted the lights downstream so they shone into that one. Jon called the police, but they refused to come at first, saying “it was just lights.” Jon said, “Well in that case I guess it’s okay if I put them out. With my .30-06 sniper rifle, two shots, guaranteed.” The police came and saw the harassment, and the Rajneeshee signed a consent order to desist. “But the next year, when Becky was due,” said Jon, “they came back with banks of lights and lit up the whole hillside.”
“No one’s distress over all this matched Bill’s,” Barbara Bowerman would say. “He was worried about Jon, Candy, and the two little girls. We could hear target shooting on the other side of the river, and looking down, they always knew when Jon was home and when he wasn’t.”
During this time the Bhagwan, accompanied by an armed guard in a Jeep, began to be chauffeured at two o’clock every afternoon in a new Rolls-Royce the fifty miles to Madras, the closest town of any size. There, a female devotee would get him a soda and the little convoy would turn around and go back to Rajneeshpuram. At the time, he had amassed twenty-one Rolls-Royces from donors, but the number kept rising (to ninety-three in all). Pulitzer Prizewinning author Frances FitzGerald, who visited Rajneeshpuram in May 1983, noted that these afternoon outings were the only times the Bhagwan’s disciples ever saw their guru. “For these pass-bys the sannyasins would line up along the roads and greet him with palms pressed together and beatific expressions.”
When they weren’t lining up to view their guru, the sannyasins were working very hard. In two years, the Rajneeshee completed a total of 250,000 square feet of new buildings. They cleared 3,000 acres of land and planted them in wheat, sunflowers, and fruit trees. The ranch produced ninety percent of their vegetables and all their eggs and milk. They dammed Mud Creek Canyon to make a forty-acre reservoir for irrigation and boasted that where Bowerman and the ranchers had worried that the Rajneeshee would lower the water table, they were actually raising it. They had a ten-megawatt power substation, a sewer system, and a phone system. They built a runway and had several aircraft. Their eighty-five school buses constituted the fourth-largest public transportation system in the state. Festivals drew as many as 15,000 outside sannyasins to the ranch.
At the time of FitzGerald’s first visit, the Rajneesh investment in Oregon was about $50 million. Her findings about the people who had joined the movement explained their power both to raise money and to spend it so effectively. Krishna Deva, by then the mayor of Rajneeshpuram, was the former David Knapp of Santa Monica, California. A clinical psychologist, he had done his PhD thesis on 300 American Rajneeshee in Pune. “There are various myths about us,” he told FitzGerald. “People think that a master-disciple relationship is like a master-slave relationship. They think we are dependent types, avoiding stress and decisions.” Quite the contrary, Deva asserted. “By and large, the people here on the ranch are people who have had success in worldly terms, and who see themselves as successes. When they came to Bhagwan, they were people in transition. There was some change involved—some openness happened. But they’re not dropouts. They’re what I call ‘dropups.’”
When Bill and Barbara talked to friends in Eugene about the Rajneeshee, ironies abounded. Bill, of course, was the one who had asked the Oregon team to presume all religious expression as genuinely felt. So he wasn’t antireligious. This wasn’t a matter of Christian vs. Hindu. It wasn’t even separation of church and state that much. But Bill objected to the fact that the Rajneeshee were not living by the Golden Rule; the Rajneeshee seemed not to care about non-Rajneeshee. They had these hotshot lawyers and they were litigious as hell—indeed, Sheela always seemed to be suing someone for slander.
Then Bill got word Sheela wanted to meet him. As Barbara would tell the story, a company in Eugene had been making good money selling the Rajneeshee industrial steel and plastic pipe. “One company executive kept telling Bill they were great people who paid on the barrelhead,” Barbara would remember. “He said, ‘Come see how nice they are,’ and invited us to lunch at the Town Club in Eugene. Sheela and her entourage flew over in their helicopter. They were all dressed in dark red clothes. Sheela was determined to convince Bill she was a nice person, and she kept talking about how nice she was, but her language was not nice. She said, ‘Barbara, do you know the men in Antelope are raping our women?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.’ Bill sat there like the Sphinx.”
As it happened, the Sphinx was corresponding with US Representative Robert Smith, in whose district Rajneeshpuram lay. “Having spent six months in Pakistan,” Bill wrote, “I have some feeling for the subcontinent. An Afridi tribesman in the northwest (India) territory told me that in India one does not ‘kick the basket when it may be full of cobras.’ I have frequently thought of that when the transplanted culture of Raj city comes up. That is an Indian city-state. Enjoying the rights and privileges that all of us are paying for—raising hell with five counties and influencing the lives of most Oregonians. Sitting and waiting is not going to help cure a bad thing that will only get worse if ignored.”
Oregon politicians were not indifferent to the problem, but they urged caution. Governor Vic Atiyeh met with Bill and Barbara. When Bill said, “All we ask is that you monitor the hell out of them,” Atiyeh said he had to be careful not to appear to be singling out a religion for harassment. “No doubt you sensed my frustration,” Atiyeh wrote to Barbara afterward. “The fact that a group suspected of having ill motives is able to hire topflight lawyers who can assist them in keeping within the law, and holds unpopular philosophies, does not put them outside the protection of the law.”
All true. But Bowerman and Henry Richmond felt the commune’s religious nature brought it over the line separating church and state. And Bowerman had, in one of the most satisfying (one might even say karmic) developments of his life, a friend in the perfect place to pursue that. In 1980, Otto Frohnmayer’s son David had been elected attorney general of Oregon.
“I talked with Jon and Bill about the abuses to local people in Antelope and elsewhere,” David Frohnmayer would recall, “and I had to be the voice of caution, saying, ‘If laws are broken, we’ll go right after them.’ I didn’t want to get the family in trouble by being too aggressive, because Sheela was saying everybody was prejudiced against them. I remember hearing Jon Bowerman mention how easy it’d be to take down
the power lines to the ranch, and I said that’d be the worst thing anybody could possibly do.”
Then, in September 1983, a legislator requested a legal opinion from Frohnmayer: Was the incorporation of Rajneeshpuram constitutional under the establishment clause of the First Amendment? (The establishment clause, of course, reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”)
“We researched that opinion exhaustively,” Frohnmayer would say. “And as we were doing it, the Rajneeshee made a tactical error. They stopped busing the Antelope-area farm kids to Madras and forced them to go to the Rajneeshpuram school.” Bill asked Frohnmayer to listen to a delegation of farmers about their concerns about harassment, and Frohnmayer suddenly realized how high the stakes were.
Frohnmayer asked his respected Boalt Hall constitutional law professor, Dean Jesse Choper, to review the draft opinion. Choper recalled that a recent Supreme Court ruling had language to the effect that it was unconstitutional to “enmesh churches in exercise of substantial government powers.” Frohnmayer also got Gerald Gunther at Stanford and Lawrence Tribe at Harvard (“names that would turn the head of any federal judge”) to consult and sign on to the opinion. Frohnmayer’s research showed that Rajneeshpuram was entirely private land, owned by the nonprofit Neo-Sannyas Foundation, a religious entity. All the construction in the city was for the benefit of the religious group. All administrative offices were filled by sannyasins. The question of whether this church was “enmeshed” in government was indisputable.
Frohnmayer issued his opinion on October 6, 1983. He wrote that the city “is the functional equivalent of a religious commune.” Not only should it not be allowed to receive state funding, but so long as it was a religious body, the city itself was unconstitutional and must cease to exist.