by Jess Walter
Finally, on September 1, 1983, after being on the road more than a week, the Weavers’ moving truck happened to roll up Idaho State Highway 95, past rangeland and thick forest, into the town of Bonners Ferry. They found a motel and began asking about land and the possibility of jobs. That first day, the Weavers met a nice family—three kids and a couple who seemed to share their apocalyptic beliefs. The children all played together, and the parents politely asked the family to dinner. Vicki wondered if perhaps God had delivered them after all.
“There are a lot of people here who say they’re Christians and that the Lord sent them here,” Vicki wrote home. “They just smile and don’t think we’re crazy at all! They say they don’t really understand what the Lord is doing up here.” A local saw mill was adding a shift around the first of October and so Randy applied, and he and Vicki set about looking for somewhere to live. They visited real estate agents and looked at land, but it was all too expensive.
“As for me, I got really rested up the 2 weeks plus it took for the Lord to guide us here,” Vicki wrote home. “My Lord Jesus Christ knew how hard I worked before we left and knew how badly my body and mind needed rest. I was so tired and I was forced to rest on the way out here.”
Finally, on September 6, the day before God had insisted they have a place to live, Vicki and Randy found it. Their friends drove them south of Bonners Ferry, about seven miles, to a dirt road called County Road Number 12, which jogged off the old highway and etched its way up a steep hillside. A couple of miles up the road, at a mountain meadow, they turned off the road onto a primitive logging path that ended in a stand of trees. For several hundred yards they walked up the wooded hillside until they found the spot their friends wanted to show them. It was the view that hit them first, profound and familiar, as if they’d known it all their lives.
“When we drove up to it, Weaver couldn’t believe it,” Vicki wrote. “It’s just what the Lord showed him it would look like. The only way buildings will fit is the way the Lord showed him last August.”
The Indian summer sun beat down through gaps in the washboard clouds, and Randy and Vicki Weaver stood on the rocky bluff, looking out thirty miles to the south, to Sandpoint, and twenty miles to the north, toward the wooded Canadian border. In between was a glacial valley, laid out before them with green pastureland and stands of ponderosa pine, white birch, and buckskin tamarack. It was a view worthy of the Bible, Ayn Rand, and H. G. Wells. All around the bluff there were boulders every few feet, excellent places to defend the hilltop, should that become necessary. There was a spring on the property, with fresh cold water, and Randy and Vicki talked about tapping it to bring running water into the cabin. There were 15 acres for sale, at $500 an acre—$7,500 total—a great price considering Californians were already running up land prices all over the Northwest. God really had delivered them, and Vicki and Randy felt better than they had in months.
On the way down the hill, the Weavers and their friends stopped at the meadow about a mile from the land they’d just seen and met another family trying to scratch together a home. Wayne and Ruth Rau were working on their roof when the Weavers pulled in. The Raus were from California and, like a great number of people who were coming to North Idaho then, lived in a trailer while they finished their log cabin.
Everyone who met the Weavers insisted they had to meet another couple who lived up on that ridge, Arthur Briggs and his wife. They lived in a trailer between the Raus’ place and the land the Weavers were buying. Like the Weavers, Arthur Briggs was a legalist, a follower of Old Testament law. But the Briggses were out of town when the Weavers arrived and they made plans to meet them the following week.
Wayne and Ruth Rau didn’t think much of the Weavers’ religious beliefs. But the new family was planning to home school, which the Raus did, and right away they liked the Weaver children. Vicki seemed nice, but the Raus didn’t think much of Randy, who talked melodramatically about the trouble that would come and the need to be prepared. Vicki agreed with her husband, and they made eye contact as Randy let forth with his view of the world. But she also tried to quiet him when he got too animated by saying gently, “Aw, Weaver.” He called her “Mama.”
At dinner with the Raus that week, Randy was adamant about the Great Tribulation, how the government would turn on its people, and bloodshed would be visited upon white Christians. Then he talked about the beautiful piece of land he was buying and said, “Armageddon’s gonna end on that hill.”
RUBY RIDGE JUTS OUT over the town of Naples, Idaho, eight miles southwest of Bonners Ferry, like a proud, tree-covered chin. Some locals insist the knob is really part of Caribou Ridge and produce old maps to confirm it, but the Forest Service lists Caribou as another rocky knob that rises just across the creek.
Either way, it was Ruby Ridge that stuck, the peak misnamed after Ruby Creek, which was misnamed when a prospector found a strange red gem and decided there must be several tons more where that came from. These creeks, which feed from the mountains into one another like the veins of a leaf, were the scene of some mad panning around the end of the last century, before locals figured out logs were the most substantial treasure this far north in Idaho. But the good names were gone by that time, and so Gold Creek runs parallel and just a few miles north of Ruby Creek. For such grizzled, hard-luck men, the prospectors were certainly optimists.
The woods around Naples are so rugged, and the roads and streams so crooked, loggers who named one strip of water Twenty-Two Mile Creek had to change the name to Twenty Mile after they’d straightened the road enough to actually measure it.
The land, of course, is older than any names, billion-year-old metamorphic rock giving way to rising granite masses that 70 million years ago formed a valley framed by the Selkirk and Cabinet mountain ranges.
There were already trenches between the mountains when 7,000-foot-thick slabs of ice—Pliocene glaciers—oozed in between the granite peaks and carved some of the deepest freshwater lakes in the world, like 1,300-foot-deep Lake Pend Oreille, which still cuts away pieces of mountain as if to remind where the real power lies.
The first white settlers here found a band of northern Kootenai Indians, a tribe with a very musical language and a rich diet. They lived in mat-covered houses and made occasional war with their Flathead cousins to the east, but they spent most of their time fishing the lakes and streams for salmon, trout, suckers, and sturgeon and hunting the ridges for sheep, goats, grizzly, deer, elk, and moose.
And caribou. The last American caribou once roamed here in Boundary County, until, like everything else, the endless flow of people and logging and modern life—more steady and eroding than any ice age glaciers—pushed almost all of them out, except in a few remote places too hardscrabble for most people to settle. Places like Caribou Ridge, or, as it became known as the memory of caribou began to fade, Ruby Ridge.
RANDY AND VICKI WEAVER hunched over the table of a motel room in Bonners Ferry on September 8, 1983, mapping out the house they were going to build. It was going to be big—Randy figured forty feet wide by fifty-five feet long, a one-story log home with lots of storage space for everything they would need during the end time. Three bedrooms, a bathroom, a workshop, a sewing room, and a pantry. The kitchen and living room would be one open area. It seemed extravagant to Vicki, especially if they only needed it for two or three years at the most. But Randy explained that they would be building on free rocks on the mountaintop and that the logs on their land would be free. Like every other house around there, the roof would be metal sheeting, so the snow would slide off it.
The only real cost will be floorboards and roof boards, Randy said.
Luckily, God had shown Vicki an empty cabin, and so she had brought everything she could think of to Idaho. Still, there was so much to buy, and everything out here was expensive and in short supply. Sometimes, the pressure of preparing for the end was almost too much for her. She was still exhausted from preparing for their trip out here, and now, it became c
lear, the hard work was only beginning.
By October, Arthur Briggs let them move into an eight-foot-by-fifty-foot mobile home about a mile from their new land, and they prepared for their first mountain winter. Sam’s broken leg had healed, and as soon as he got his cast off, he and Sara played with the Rau kids and with a nanny goat named Amanda who followed them everywhere.
After some wrangling over the land, the Weavers ended up with twenty acres and the owner agreed to part with the land for $5,000 and the moving truck they’d brought from Iowa.
That fall, the Weavers got up every morning, packed a lunch, and drove or hiked up the steep logging road and then through the wooded field that led to their land. They built a slash pile of old timber and brush, set it on fire, and worked at clearing off the rocky point where the cabin would go, taking some chunks for firewood, others for the slash piles and a few that they saved for the building itself. The guy selling the land had a Caterpillar bulldozer and he agreed to scratch out a sort of driveway from the logging road up to the bluff.
“Sara and Sam are in school,” Vicki wrote. “My school: Readin, Writin, Arithmetic and the Bible.” The kids pored over the old textbooks Vicki had brought with her, and the precocious Sara, especially, seemed to thrive, quickly reading books well past her seven-year-old reading level.
One night that fall, an earthquake jostled much of northern Idaho. The Weavers were far from the epicenter, and they slept through it. But the next night, Vicki went to town and called her mother in Iowa, who told her they’d heard about an earthquake on the news. It was a sign: “That’s just one more of the birth pangs of Matthew 24,” Vicki wrote in a letter to Carolee. Matthew 24 promised “famines and pestilences and earthquakes in diverse places,” before the Great Tribulation. Matthew 24 also promised wars, and Vicki said the invasion of Grenada was another clear sign the end was coming. Vicki urged her parents and friends back in Iowa to keep a notepad handy and write down all the news events, so she could apply them to biblical prophecy and her visions from the Lord.
It was becoming clear to her how the end would come about. “I still think the Russians are going to invade the United States from Canada,” she wrote.
Probably all the way across our border. We’ve heard they built a highway down from Alaska that’s 10 lanes wide. (To carry an army, perchance?) They’re building a brand new 4-lane bridge in Bonners Ferry which connects Canada traffic to the U.S. through Idaho. The old bridge was O.K., but probably not big enough for an army (only two lanes).
On November 6, Randy and Vicki celebrated their twelfth wedding anniversary, and although she was always tired now, for the first time in years Vicki was beginning to feel safe. But she missed her family, missed friends like Carolee. A few days after their anniversary, Vicki sat down and wrote Carolee a twelve-page letter, telling her not to worry about her insecurities over her faith and to keep up in her battles trying to follow the path without Vicki.
“You are fighting the whole world,” Vicki wrote.
The whole world lies in wickedness and we fight spiritual battles like the one I just explained…. I spent my whole adult life in that house next to you—but the house isn’t my God. “Jesus Christ the Lamb” is and whithersoever He goeth and sends me I will follow Him. Even though sometimes it hurts. We’re all gold that has to be tried and refined through fire. The Lord is really perfecting (or trying to perfect) patience in Randy and I right now—because we’re anxious to get busy and can’t really yet.
Please take care—We are fine and healthy and happy. May the Lord watch over you both.
Love from all of us.
Vicki
FEAR THRIVES in Boundary County. It takes form in tall mountain grass, peers down from granite crags, and waits in shaded creek beds. It jostles and pops along dirt roads and stares unflinchingly through stands of pine. Fear is the last cash crop left in North Idaho, the last big predator, the last roadside attraction.
From all over the country, fear dragged people away from cities and into the mountains of North Idaho. In the early 1980s, when the reasonable folk of North Idaho noticed all these strange newcomers, they quickly saw the hatred: of racial minorities, of the government, of the decadent society. But what many failed to notice was the fear, the choking paranoia that made young, reasonable families seek out a place where they felt in control of their lives again.
There were no zoning codes in Boundary County. No sewer. No fast-food chains. No building codes. Not even a stoplight. No one flinched when a man walked into a store wearing a pistol on his hip. The state itself held just more than a million people—only 3,000 of them black—in an area as big as New England. Such places have always attracted recluses, but until the early 1980s, those people were coming from the other end of the political spectrum: hippies, draft dodgers, an entire back-to-the-land movement.
But Boundary County doesn’t discriminate. Anyone can hide there. In fact, the county—like much of North Idaho, like much of the West—always attracted people whose only common trait was the overwhelming desire to just get away. Sometimes it was more than a desire. The convicted spy Christopher Boyce found support and a place to hide in Boundary County, and there were always others trying on new names and identities. Boundary County defies stereotyping. It is the home of survivalists, but also of pacifist Mennonites. Democrats usually win the elections, but most residents would probably tell you they’re conservative. Left and right swing out as far as they’ll go, and then connect in Boundary, where people take the opposite political tracks to the same conclusion—that they want to be left alone.
In the early 1980s, it was Randy and Vicki and people like them who were looking for Boundary County and places like it, looking for a ridge top on which to hide out and build a life. A blurring continuum of home schoolers, Christian survivalists, apocalyptics, John Birchers, Posse Comitatus members, constitutionalists, tax protesters, Identity Christians, and neo-Nazis found one another at the army/navy surplus store in Sandpoint or the barter fair in Northport or the bookstore at the Aryan Nations church at nearby Hayden Lake, Idaho. From California, Florida, Indiana, and Iowa, they talked of reading the same things, coming to the same understandings, and they picked up beliefs and ideas from each other. For many, it was confirmation of everything they had been thinking in the wilderness of civilization. “If they believe it, too, it must be true.”
The Weavers had a close group of friends, including the Tanners, whom they’d met their first week in Bonners Ferry; Terry Kinnison, an Indiana transplant who, with his wife, shared similar beliefs to the Weavers; and the Kumnicks, Frank, a janitor and handyman from Florida, and his wife, Mary Lou.
There aren’t a lot of rules in Boundary County, but there is this one: No house is ever finished. The Weavers watched people who spent three, four, five years on the prototypical log homes, and they realized they didn’t have time for that. No one did anymore.
Happily, it was a mild winter, and the Weavers made good progress on their cabin, although it changed quickly from their original plans. Instead of being forty feet by fifty-five feet, it was twenty-five by thirty-two, with a sleeping loft above the main floor. Inside, the house was beamed with logs as knotty and bent as arthritic knees. The entire house was built up on top of vertical timbers, as if the family were awaiting a great tide to wash right up underneath the house. Randy didn’t work during that time, except on his cabin, and the money from their house in Iowa was quickly running out. But it didn’t matter much to the Weavers. Their land was paid for, their cabin was coming together, and the only money they needed was for kerosene for their lamps. Soon, they said as they worked on their cabin, money would be useless anyway. They nailed the two-by-four frame together and, instead of using logs for the walls, put up a rack of uninsulated plywood, set the windows in, and hammered the metal sheet on top for a roof. It was not a house built to last more than a few years. But Randy and Vicki didn’t figure they needed much more time than that.
The snow melted earlie
r than usual, and by early February the ridge was clear. It was a beautiful spring, and by the middle of March 1984, they were ready to move in. It was a common sight in those days to see a line of trucks negotiating some muddy mountain road, delivering the necessities of life to a family that would live without phone and running water. With coaching and help from Terry Kinnison, Randy bought a horse to help with the logging, and then he built a corral. Vicki unpacked and got the house ready, setting her dishes out on the L-shaped kitchen counter that she and Randy and their friends had built. Finally, they were in their mountain retreat. Sammy and Sara loved it. They fished and played in the woods and said they never wanted to go back to Iowa. But two-year-old Rachel had a tougher time and refused to call the primitive cabin home.
Finishing the cabin was rewarding, but Randy and Vicki were worn down trying to get ready. It was worse knowing approximately when and how the world would end. “The past six months have really been a trial,” Vicki Weaver wrote.
None of it has been easy. But in every little area, I see the Lord gently pushing and opening paths to enable us to do what we must do.
I can’t help but think things are shortly going to come to pass. I feel like we were utterly put in a situation where we had to get this house built quickly—otherwise we would have taken our time. (But there may not be time.)
The Weavers resumed their Bible studies, this time on Friday nights with their new friends, who believed, as they did, that Jesus was the savior of Israel—whose people were, of course, really American Christians—and that they should obey the Old Testament, especially the Ten Commandments.
If the Weavers were uncertain about the role of racism in their beliefs in Iowa, they had no misgivings about it in Idaho. They believed God was telling them that Jews and gentiles, blacks and whites, Asians and Indians should all be separate, and that mixing was forbidden by God—as represented in a description of the Hittites in Deuteronomy, Chapter 7, verses 2–3: “Thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. Neither shall thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shall take unto thy son.”