In deciding to call in the SWAT team, Sheriff Fairbanks was, of course, conscious of the murders that had taken place when law-enforcement officials tried to arrest Gordon Kahl in North Dakota. A couple of months after the North Dakota shootings, Fairbanks had helped organize a Nebraska Sheriffs Association briefing in Grand Island on the Posse Comitatus and other fringe groups—a briefing at which the sheriffs were told that a number of Nebraska farmers and ranchers had been engaging in combat maneuvers.
Late in the afternoon, the SWAT team was officially called in. Negotiators were named. An operational headquarters was set up in Cairo, and a command post was established at Troop C. Arrangements were made for an ambulance to be on hand in Cairo. “At approximately 8:00 pm, the command post was advised that the SWAT team was deployed in the vicinity of the Kirk farm,” the county attorney, Stephen Von Riesen, said in his report. “The negotiators interviewed Mr. Titsworth, and it was agreed that he should be the first person to call the Kirk residence.”
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Among Nebraska farmers, one response to the news of Arthur Kirk’s death was outrage. From some initial news reports that didn’t go into what Kirk believed politically, or precisely why the SWAT team had surrounded his house, Art Kirk seemed to be a harassed farmer trying to defend his family’s land against foreclosure—a tragic real-life version of the plucky farm folks that people like Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard and Sally Field had been playing in Hollywood movies. When Kirk, a man who hadn’t done much socializing, was buried, several hundred people turned up for the funeral service. One local business took an advertisement in the Independent announcing that it would be closed for two hours so employees could attend “the funeral of Arthur Kirk, who was shot to death by State Police while trying to defend his family farm.” Farmers held protest meetings. The headquarters of the Norwest Bank, in Minneapolis, sent a security team to the Grand Island branch. Kirk’s pastor wanted to know why a churchman hadn’t been called in. Kirk’s wife wanted to know why she hadn’t been allowed to go to her husband. A lot of people wanted to know why it was imperative for Arthur Kirk, a man who held no hostages and didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat to the community, to be confronted with such force of arms. At least two state senators called for an inquiry into the circumstances of Kirk’s death, and the governor eventually asked a retired district judge, Samuel Van Pelt, to conduct an investigation. The Independent got a lot of letters to the editor, most of them expressing sympathy with Art Kirk and condemnation of the law-enforcement authorities. “A large Chicago bank goes on the rocks,” one letter began. “What happens? Several banks from around the world donate and the federal government comes with I forget how many billion dollars….A farmer goes broke, they can’t get to him to sell him out, so they kill him.”
The Hall County authorities and the state police defended themselves vigorously. They pointed out that a number of widely held assumptions about the incident were not true. The SWAT team was there to arrest Kirk on a felony charge, for instance, not to foreclose on his farm. The bank had made no claim to Kirk’s land. The superintendent of the state patrol said that SWAT teams were a device for controlling violence rather than raising the level of violence; the SWAT teams were organized in 1975, he said, and until Art Kirk started shooting his automatic rifle that night, they had never been involved in an exchange of gunfire. The burden of the case made by the authorities was that Art Kirk had been a dangerous man, more like Gordon Kahl than like Sam Shepard. The morning after the Independent carried the story of Kirk’s death, its lead headline was LINK BETWEEN KIRK AND VIGILANTE GROUP PROBED. The state patrol released transcripts of Kirk’s telephone conversations on the night of the shooting—transcripts full of vituperation and threats and obscenity and bigotry. At a news conference, police displayed twenty-seven weapons that had been seized from Kirk’s farmhouse after his death. Stephen Von Riesen, the county attorney, revealed that papers seized from the house at the same time included Posse Comitatus propaganda. They also included material from organizations such as the Committee to Restore the Constitution and the National Commodity and Barter Association and the Anti-Lawyer Party and the Christian Nationalist Crusade, whose booklet Jews and Their Lies, by Martin Luther, carried an epigraph of singular ecumenism: “Attention Reader: This book is not published for sectarian purposes. The publishers, as indicated above, are also publishing the edicts of more than 20 popes who dealt with the Jewish problem. Their edicts are as strong as anything contained in this work by Dr. Martin Luther.”
Stephen Von Riesen maintained that those who wanted to assign blame for Art Kirk’s death should have been looking not toward law-enforcement officials but toward the organizations that sell desperate farmers pipe dreams about how to escape their problems. “It’s always easier to blame some amorphous conspiracy,” Von Riesen said not long after Kirk’s death. “Farmers have reached the point where the normal ways of handling problems aren’t working. They’re faced with losing their farms, and they’re susceptible to radical, spurious approaches to the problem. Arthur Kirk was a victim of these groups that told him that there is a free lunch. There isn’t any free lunch. If you borrow money, you have to pay it back.”
Deloris Kirk continued to blame the police and to support NAPA. In fact, she seemed to draw closer and closer to the organization after her husband’s death. Requests for interviews were referred to Robert Mettenbrink. When Mrs. Kirk held a press conference in Grand Island just after her husband’s death, Mettenbrink introduced her, and Rick Elliott was also on hand. Mrs. Kirk was asked at the press conference how people could help, and she suggested that everybody read five works “that they’re trying to destroy”—the U.S. Constitution, the Nebraska Constitution, the Bible, and two booklets associated with the fringe right. She appeared at NAPA rallies to say that her husband had been a happy man from the moment he heard Rick Elliott speak. It was a testimonial that lost some of its impact a few weeks after the shooting, when the Independent ran its first large story on Elliott’s run-ins with the law. He had just been charged by the attorney general’s office in Colorado with nineteen felony-theft counts having to do with NAPA and the Primrose & Cattlemen’s Gazette.
When Deloris Kirk was asked at her press conference if she considered her husband a martyr, she said, “No, I think he was a victim.” It was easy to see Art Kirk as a victim, although there was a lot of disagreement about whose victim he was. Some people agreed with Stephen Von Riesen that Kirk was the victim of those who led him to believe he could get his loan declared null with a do-it-yourself lawsuit and could keep the sheriff off his land with a legally worthless piece of paper. A lot of people saw Kirk as the victim of the pressures that farmers have had to face—a desperate man driven so far from rationality that he could believe that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was pulling the strings in Hall County, Nebraska. Some people thought that there was plenty of blame to go around. The Independent’s editorial on the shooting said, “There are people who are profiting from the plight of farmers, some indirectly and even innocently because they are themselves deluded, and some more maliciously defrauding them,” but it also said that the fact that Kirk owed the bank far more than he could ever hope to repay from the income on his land “says something to lenders and borrowers alike.” Some Nebraskans who despised the message that groups like NAPA and the Posse Comitatus bring to farmers also thought that what Arthur Kirk chose to read in his own house was nobody’s business and no justification for the state’s show of force at the Kirk farmhouse that night.
In his report to the governor, Judge Van Pelt said that someone analyzing the circumstances of Arthur Kirk’s death could identify several junctures at which a different decision might have avoided catastrophe. If the bank hadn’t pressed its legal case or if the sheriff’s department had sent out one unarmed deputy instead of three armed ones or if Deloris Kirk and some friends who went to counsel with Art Kirk after the incident with the deputies had stayed around or if Jan Stee
ple had gone to the Kirk farm to talk things over or if an arrest had been attempted while Kirk was cutting beans instead of while he was barricaded inside his house or if the SWAT team deployment had been delayed until Kirk had a chance to cool off, the judge said, Art Kirk might have survived. Still, Van Pelt found that at each juncture the decision reached had been understandable, given the knowledge and resources available at the time. In other words, a lot of people had acted as they might have been expected to act, and in the end Art Kirk lay bleeding to death in his farmyard. It was not an analysis that offered much comfort to the Nebraska farmers who had been so upset by the shooting in the first place. A lot of them have a lot of Art Kirk’s problems.
Right-of-Way
* * *
Washington, Virginia
MAY 1985
“The ironic thing is that both of these people came here to find peace,” the man said. When he said it, he swept his arm out to indicate a scene of palpable peacefulness—a narrow street with almost no traffic on it, a line of buildings that looked as if they might have originated in the early nineteenth century, some lovely mountains in the distance. He was standing not far from the courthouse in the seat of Rappahannock County, Virginia—a town that is named Washington and is sometimes called Little Washington, to distinguish it from the larger, much less peaceful seat of government in the District of Columbia, an hour and a quarter to the east. The residents of Rappahannock County aren’t fond of having their county seat called Little Washington, but the town does have the feeling of a place built on the smaller scale of more settled times. The old brick courthouse is flanked by two diminutive brick buildings that look like toy courthouses themselves. The brochure available to visitors says, “Today the population of Washington, Virginia, barely exceeds that at its 18th Century beginning.” In recent years, Washington has acquired a community theater and a restaurant widely known for elegant turns on American cuisine, but there is still not enough bustle to require a public telephone booth.
The theater and the restaurant are, of course, the sorts of institutions brought to rural Virginia by newcomers—along with craft shops and careful restorations and elaborate zoning ordinances. It is only in recent years that Rappahannock County has been thought of as the sort of place that might offer shiitake mushrooms on vermicelli or a remarkable level of peacefulness. In the thirties, when Shenandoah National Park and the Skyline Drive were established in the Blue Ridge Mountains, along the western border of Rappahannock County, a lot of people were resettled from the mountain hollows into what was then a farm county known mainly for apples and cattle. Some of those who were resettled did not immediately abandon their customary ways of resolving disputes or celebrating good fortune or displaying their resentment at having been forcibly removed from their land. Even before the resettlement, there were parts of the county where sheriff’s deputies went with trepidation. Rappahannock County, which had always had some large farmland holdings, didn’t carry the reputation for random violence that was associated with a couple of the mountain counties nearby, but on a Saturday night in an area like Jenkins Hollow, the peace was breached rather regularly.
“There probably aren’t more than one or two Jenkinses left in Jenkins Hollow,” a Rappahannock lawyer who sounded as if he rather missed the old sort of Saturday night has said. “I suppose it’s mostly retired people from D.C. The houses are very well kept.” Of the six thousand or so residents of Rappahannock County, a couple of thousand are people who have moved in within the past fifteen or twenty years. As it happened, Rappahannock County represented a haven to a lot of different sorts of people. For a time, there was an influx of hippies, many of whom drifted on and some of whom evolved into respectable shopkeepers or building contractors or schoolteachers. A lot of people who worked for the government in Washington, D.C.—civil servants or military people at their final posting—bought houses in Rappahannock that began as weekend retreats and became retirement homes. Some people who were trying to escape the steady suburbanization of the northern Virginia counties—people who were more comfortable in small towns, people who wanted a place where it was possible to hunt rabbits or raise a few crops—moved from Fairfax County to Prince William County to Rappahannock County. For some rather prominent people in Washington, D.C., Rappahannock County seemed to have the beauty of the Virginia foxhunting country just to the east of it—in fact, it has always had a hunt—but not the social pressure associated with places where the horsey types have collected in great numbers. A lot of people who settled in Rappahannock County found it to be what they sometimes call “a good mix.” It’s a place where some families have presided over large holdings long enough to hear themselves discussed as feudal and where some families continue to live in the government-built bungalows still known as resettlement houses. It’s a place that has tasteful antique shops as well as, on the road to Shenandoah National Park, a line of stands selling apples and cider and Hong Kong statuary. It’s a place where life seems simple but where the guest columnist in the county weekly is Eugene McCarthy.
Although the man standing near the courthouse in Washington, Virginia, might have found it ironic that two of the people who had come to Rappahannock County to find peace had found turmoil instead, he would have seen no irony in the fact that the cause of the turmoil was—at the beginning, at least—an argument over property. The newcomers to Rappahannock County brought with them an urban precision about property—about precisely where the boundary was and precisely who had the right to cross it. They talked a lot about property values. Partly because of their presence, of course, there was more property value to talk about. People in Rappahannock County had always had the occasional title disagreement or boundary dispute, but the new people seemed to bring a new relentlessness to such disagreements. When the disagreement between Patricia Saltonstall and Diane Kidwell began, they were arguing, relentlessly, about a right-of-way.
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“I fell in love with it when I saw the hills open up,” Patricia Saltonstall says of her first impression of Rappahannock County. That was in 1970, and, like a lot of people who had found the sixties almost too eventful, she was in the market for a peaceful place. She had the sort of credentials that presumably could have been useful in keeping a certain amount of turmoil at bay. Her parents’ marriage was a union of two prominent New England families, the Saltonstalls and the Laphams. She had gone to Smith and then married a Yale man whose family owned a factory in Pittsburgh. But by 1970, when she was in her early forties, she had also seen her share of contention. Her first marriage had ended in divorce, and so had her second. Reclaiming her formidable maiden name, she had moved with her three sons to Washington, D.C., and established herself as a society writer for The Washington Star. In the mid-sixties, she became caught up in the civil rights struggle; she worked for a while for the federal Community Relations Service and then began to devote just about full time to the District of Columbia school-desegregation case. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, she and a number of companions—most of them convention delegates who had impressive credentials of their own—were arrested for disorderly conduct, and she responded to the experience by threatening to sue the city to stop the practice of strip-searching female prisoners. In 1970, she was working in Washington for Senator Harold Hughes, of Iowa, mostly on matters concerning the problem of alcoholism, and looking for some land to escape to on weekends and summer holidays. She had the sort of taste and accent that might have been expected from a former society writer with a formidable name, but she also seemed like someone who had been affected by her connection with the civil rights movement and the struggles entailed in raising a family on her own—a direct, rather intense woman with a no-nonsense manner and a lot of pride in her own independence.
The land she found in Rappahannock County was a two-hundred-and-seventy-acre farm not far from the village of Flint Hill, in an area along State Route 729 which includes some relatively simple houses on ten or fifteen acres of
land and some imposing places displaying signs such as CLIFTON, ESTABLISHED 1675. The farm was what she has sometimes called landlocked—it could be connected to the state road only by a private road slicing through neighboring properties—but that brought the price down and added to the privacy. It was lovely, rolling land, leading back to include an overgrown mountain—Hickerson Mountain—that could be seen from miles away. She bought the place and named it Points of View. There was an abandoned tenant’s house, which she began to renovate—rather gradually, since she had not yet come into her inheritance. She wanted a barn—a barn that, like the house, was tucked into the curves of the fields in a way that made it blend with the landscape rather than something that seemed to have been dropped naked on the top of a hill. An architect from Georgetown built her an ingenious, multiuse version of a faded wood barn, which eventually won an architectural award and was pictured in The Washington Post. In 1973, a two-hundred-acre farm a few miles down 729 was divided into eight lots that became known as the Lindgren-Whaley tract, and she acquired three lots that joined her land on the other side of Hickerson Mountain. Although her holdings on that side of the mountain were also blocked from 729, they could be reached without hacking up and down Hickerson: the Lindgren-Whaley deed provided that the owners of all lots had the use for all purposes of a fifty-foot right-of-way that ran back from 729 through a ten-acre parcel known as Lot A.
For several years, Patricia Saltonstall thought that in Rappahannock County she had found the peace she had sought. Then she started having problems with her neighbors. It may be that the problems started when she changed from a weekender into a permanent resident who was intent on making Points of View an effective agricultural operation—in the late seventies, when, after having come into her inheritance, she decided to make a serious commitment to the farm. In her view, that caused some irritation among the nearby farmers, because it deprived one of them of some grazing land he had been renting cheap and it challenged some of their old Virginia notions about the place of a woman. Whatever notions Pat Saltonstall’s neighbors might have had about women, they had different notions from hers about how to approach farming. What they tended to think of as the occasional and inevitable straying of cattle, for instance, she considered “systematic stealing of grazing land”—stealing that was made all the more irritating by the accused neighbor’s expressing amiable surprise (“My land! What am I going to do with them critters?”) and vowing to get at that broken fence just as soon as he could. Some of the neighbors thought that Pat Saltonstall, in her businesslike approach to farming, was inflexible and maybe even self-righteous. “Pat was her own worst enemy,” a friend of hers has said. “With her money, she should have just fixed the fence instead of worrying so much about what was right or wrong.”
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