VICKI WEAVER WAS WORRIED. Here it was, the first of September, and they seemed no closer to their mountain sanctuary. Soon winter would come, choking off the mountain roads and making it too late to begin building anything at all. Jesus kept telling her to be patient, but it was trying. There was just so little time. God had made it known to Randy that they would find a place by the Feast of Trumpets, which fell on September 7. That didn’t seem likely now. All through Montana, Randy and Vicki had looked for undeveloped land, but it was $1,000 an acre and more, a price that didn’t even take into account that you’d have to drill for water on most of the property. They continued west across the Idaho border—checking the rearview mirrors to make sure they weren’t being followed—and found North Idaho more affordable. Land was promising around Wallace, an old mining town in the middle of the Panhandle. But every hillside in Idaho that looked like a good place to wait out the Great Tribulation was owned by the government and marked with National Forest Service signs. All this remote wilderness and none of it for the people. It was a chilling sign of what Vicki and Randy already believed. They rumbled farther west in the old moving truck, staying at motels with kitchenettes, where Vicki cooked soup and turkey dogs for the kids.
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 clear, 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 earlier 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.”
Other justifications of racism came from biblical apocrypha, the so-called lost books of the Bible. The number of books accepted as canon varies from church to church, but the Weavers began believing in Christian Identity, a racist religion that accepts obscure, ancient writings that few churches recognize as legitimate, like the book of Enoch, in which dark angels descended to earth, took human wives and “the women became pregnant and gave birth to great giants whose heights were three hundred cubits [about fifty feet]. These giants … turned against the people in order to eat them. And they began to sin against birds, wild beasts, reptiles and fish …” Many Identity Christians say that was the beginning of the African race, which they called “mud people.”
Quickly, the Weavers fanned through the views of the radical people they met, accepted the ones that fit their ever-changing philosophy, discarded the ones that didn’t, and worked to become the most studied, serious, and spiritual racists in all of Idaho.
VICKI WAS GETTING WORKED UP again by current affairs and the conversations she was having with other people in northern Idaho, many of whom were further along in the track of radical right-wing belief. The election was coming up, and Vicki wrote her friends in Iowa for more information about “this Gary Hart person,” who she believed might have been foretold by one of the prophets. She found herself drawn to Daniel, Chapter 5, wherein the original Babylon is destroyed. The Hebrew phrase “Mene, Mene, Tekel” appears in Daniel, and it began popping into Vicki’s mind “when I least expect it. I think Jesus is telling me the U.S.A. is going to fall soon.”
The first sign, the Weavers and their friends agreed, would be the devaluing and changing of money right after the November 1984 election.
“I prayed in Iowa that He would let me know so I could finish getting supplies before our money was useless,” Vicki wrote. “We’ve heard they’ll give you a new dollar for every ten of the old. It’ll hit people with savings and the retired the hardest. The factory workers with debts will be fine. They’ll just make their new phony money every week.”
Toward the end of every summer, Vicki’s parents drove 1,500 miles west to visit the Weavers in the mountains. That first trip, David turned off the highway, crossed Ruby Creek and started along the dirt road, up the mountainside, until they reached a clearing, and he figured, this must be it. But according to the directions Vicki had sent, they were still a mile away. That last mile was nearly impassable, an old logging road that David thought couldn’t get any worse until it would jog around a tight switchback and be even more rutted, even more overgrown. Finally, they came to the rocky point where Vicki and Randy had settled, and one thought crept into David’s mind.
“Why in the world,” he asked, “would anyone build a cabin up here?” The view was incredible, but it was no place to live. Why not build the cabin down below and walk up here to look at the view, he asked Randy. The house was built on logs leaning out over the bank, and the logs weren’t even tied down. With all the nice, accessible land below, his daughter and son-in-law had chosen an awful, rocky point and built a house that looked like it was going to slide right down the cliff.
They unloaded the supplies and books they’d brought and helped work on the house. David even tied down the logs on which the house was built. While they still disapproved of Randy and Vicki’s lifestyle and their ever-hardening beliefs, they reached a sort of truce and enjoyed their visits, watching the kids chase each other through the woods and fish for palm-size trout in the mountain streams. Sara and Sammy would wait hungrily for their grandparents and then run off with whatever books they’d brought, often finishing them before David and Jeane had even left the mountain. On those warm summer nights, Vicki and her mom stayed up until 2:00 a.m., canning and sewing and just talking about things. Vicki was clearly the one who kept things going up there, Jeane thought. On those summer trips, she began seeing those same qualities in Sara, who was growing up like a piece cut from her mother.
Randy got jobs on a road crew, splitting wood and running errands. His longest stint was at Paradise Dairy in Bonners Ferry, where he spent a year driving farm equipment and doing chores. He was a good worker and didn’t talk much about his beliefs, but there was so much to do on his own cabin, he barely had time for a job.
IN 1984, RANDY BROUGHT home another stray. Kevin Harris’s father had died when he was two years old. His mother was only twenty-two and expecting her fourth baby, and it was difficult for her to raise children when she was growing up herself. Kevin had trouble in school in Spokane, was placed in foster homes, and began running away from home at nine. He lived with some mutual friends in Idaho for a while, and that’s where he met Randy and Vicki—when he was fifteen. Kevin told them he needed help getting off the streets and away from drugs. They said he could stay with the family whenever he wanted. On Ruby Ridge, he found a family as warm and structured as he’d always wanted, along with horses, dogs, chickens, and guns. As Randy began to share the family’s beliefs with him, they made sense to Kevin and explained the world in a way he’d never thought of before. Even though he’d known black and Jewish kids in Spokane, Kevin began to agree with the Weavers that the races ought to be separate. He was as quiet and loyal as a German shepherd, an impressionable young guy looking for a father figure like Randy and for someone who saw him as a big brother, as Sara, Sammy, and Rachel did.
His mother, Barb, a manicurist in Spokane, and his stepfather, Brian, a paralegal for the county prosecutor’s office, were glad Kevin was staying somewhere and was off the streets, but they couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that ridiculous religion. The Pierces visited the cabin once and were impressed by how close the family was and glad to see Kevin gardening and baking. But they were sickened by Randy’s beliefs, as he explained that black people were created as a slave race and that Jews controlled all the money in the world. Brian had to keep from laughing when Randy told him the Jewish hook nose was “the mark of Cain.”
Over the next nine years, Kevin Harris would drift around the western states, working as a logger and a laborer. He’d come and go from Ruby Ridge, often walking eighty miles from Spokane on blistering feet. He’d be gone for a couple months and then he’d show up again, always seeming to know when the family was feeling persecuted and needed his strong, quiet friendship.
BACK IN CEDAR FALLS, IOWA, Carolee Flynn read the letters from Vicki and worried the family wasn’t getting enough to eat. Across town, Vaughn Trueman read his own letters from the Weavers explaining how they’d come to believe that only white Christians were chosen and how Jews were the spawn of Satan. He still thought the Weavers were the kindest, hardest-working people he knew, but he wished they would find the peace of mind that he’d found in the love of Jesus. Mike Roethler got a phone call from Randy, and even though his own spirituality seemed static since the end of the Bible study sessions, he felt bad that his old friends had become mired in hatred and fear. He wondered how he could have been on the same track at one time.
In Fort Dodge, David and Jeane reported to the others that Randy and Vicki really were living on a mountaintop. But it seemed they were doing okay and sometimes the apocalyptic talk subsided, although it was being replaced by more fervent racism and survivalism. Jeane hoped they would just settle down and eventually move down the mountain and into town. David hoped they didn’t freeze to death once winter came.
Julie and Keith tried to comprehend that the Weavers’ racial beliefs had gotten even more radical, but they couldn’t. They cringed at the descriptions of Sara and Sammy learning to shoot guns. Julie just couldn’t believe that Vicki would let her babies fire guns! They had seen Randy and Vicki obsessed and overwrought about everything that caught their attention, but it was hard to imagine that they’d become the thing that liberals like Julie and Keith simply had no use for: outright racists.
Julie remembered how Vicki had come out of the bad times, and she just hoped that—once she and her husband realized the government wasn’t coming after them—she would come to her senses, drive down the mountain, and come home to Iowa. Maybe, she hoped, the peace of country living would bring her sister back from the edge.
CITY PEOPLE LIKE TO BELIEVE that once you get out to a place like Boundary County, where you might be a half-mile from your nearest neighbor, everyone gets along in a sort of Mayberry bliss. Most rural sheriffs will tell you that’s not the case. There are always disagreements, land disputes, misunderstandings, and grudges. Oftentimes, the sheriff can’t even figure out who started it or what the fight is about.
Almost from the time they arrived, the Weavers were at the center of those kinds of feuds. Seemed every six months or so, the sheriff was called up to Ruby Ridge to talk to the Weavers or one of their neighbors. Someone was shooting guns at night. Someone else ran pipe over that person’s land. Those people dumped garbage on the road. That guy cut firewood off this guy’s property. This guy shot that guy’s goat.
Sam Wohali was a judge for the Kootenai Indian tribe who moved his wife and seven children onto land near the Weaver cabin in the summer of 1984. A big guy with waist-length braids, he was always being told he didn’t look Indian. That summer, Randy helped Sam build a fence around his place, but their friendship lasted only a couple of weeks. Wohali—who said he was half Indian, half German Jew—didn’t appreciate hearing about Randy’s racist beliefs, and he got tired of all the gunfire coming from the Weaver cabin. Once, when a border patrol agent was visiting Wohali, the judge heard automatic weapon fire come from a stand of trees where Weaver and another man had just driven.
By August, Sam Wohali had had enough gunfire and racist talk. He saw Randy standing in the Naples general store with a bunch of Randy’s friends, who also wore fatigues and sidearms.
“Can I talk to you in private?”
Randy said no.
Wohali told him to stop shooting at his house.
“What’ll you do if I don’t?” Randy asked.
“I’ll kick your ass,” Wohali said. He was furious. “Am I correct in understanding that you believe the end of the world will come sometime in the next two months, that this will start to take place—something between the blacks and the Hell’s Angels—and that it will end up at your house, on your front door, and that it will be the start of the end of the world?”
“More or less,” Randy said.
“And you will have to take your groceries by violence and shoot your neighbors?”
“More or less.”
“Randy, whatever God you serve, when you come down that mountain, and He tells you it’s time to shoot your neighbors, turn left at my driveway, don’t turn right. Because if you come to my house … I’ll tie you up by your big toes, I’ll cut off your fingertips, and I’ll drip you dry, you sucker. I’ll torture your ass. Don’t screw with my family. That goes for you and all of you G.I. Joe haters. I’m tired of it. You’re not going to intimidate me.”
Later, Sam Wohali and Weaver made up. But Terry Kinnison never got over his problems with the Weavers. He said Randy sold him half interest in the Weavers’ twenty acres for $3,000, just so Terry would have a place to move a trailer and build a barn. And then, Kinnison said, Randy kicked him off the land. Randy said it didn’t happen that way at all. Whatever happened, Kinnison and his family moved up to the mountaintop and then quickly got into a fight with the Weavers.
Finally, an argument over some firewood nearly started a fight between the two men when Randy came into the barn and told Kinnison he was a liar and a cheat. Terry held up the hammer in his hand but decided against it. “You’re not even worth it.”
After that, Kinnison moved off the mountain, filed a lien for the $3,000 he said he’d invested, drove into Bonners Ferry, and told the sheriff that Randy was nuts and was possibly even going to kill the president.
KINNISON WROTE LETTERS and spoke to the FBI, the Secret Service, and the local sheriff, claiming Randy had threatened President Ronald Reagan and Idaho Governor John Evans. He said Weaver had a cache of guns and ammunition, including automatic weapons, and had rigged his driveway with bombs. Wohali talked to the agents, too, and said he’d heard many of the same things, that Randy’s wife was “a crack shot” and that anyone who went up there would face three armed people: Randy, Vicki, and six-year-old Sammy. The federal agents interviewed several other friends and neighbors but had to wait to interview the Weavers because a late winter storm snowed the family in. Finally, though, the Weavers drove down the hill to talk to federal agents.
So this was how the end would come, Randy and Vicki realized, through betrayal by their former friends, who brought an invasion of federal agents—toting guns and extending the rule of the Jewish-controlled government. They had chased Randy out of the John Deere factory, bugged the family’s phones, and now were accusing Randy of threatening to kill the president, just so the family would be killed or scattered and Terry Kinnison could get their land. There really was nowhere to hide.
As they always did when trouble began, Randy and Vicki—ever the good executive secretary—sat down to write a letter, official and precise even in her feminine, cursive handwriting.
Thursday, February 28, 1985
To Whom It May Concern:
We are the victims of a smear campaign of our character and false accusations made against us to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service by some local residents who have a motive for my decease. These local residents are named:
They listed the Kinnisons and three others.
She wrote the names of the FBI agents and other officials they’d gone to for help and noted that they might have to defend themselves from attack. She wrote that there were witnesses to a conspiracy against them and said the Secret Service was building a fraudulent case against Randy because they didn’t like his beliefs. Years later, when a reporter uncovered the old affidavit, it seemed to be an eerie prediction.
My accuser set me up as a criminal member of the Aryan Nations. They accused me of having illegal weapons. They accused me of saying I was going to assassinate the President of the United States and the Pope. Very possibly, a threatening letter was sent to the President with my name or initials forged. My accusers hoped the FBI would rush my home with armed agents hoping I would feel the need to defend myself and thus be killed or arrested for “assault on a federal officer.” Fortunately, bad weather (the first part of Feb. 1985), witnesses to this plot and our God, the Lord Jesus Messiah, King of Israel prevented a disaster.
Two months later, they wrote the Secret Service agent who had interviewed them, demanding an apology and a copy of a “forged letter” that didn’t exist. Then, they wrote a quick note to Ronald Reagan, apologizing and explaining what had happened.
Apparently, some local residents, who wished me ill fortune, carelessly used you and sent you a threatening letter (which I’m confident you never saw) and forged my signature on it hoping I’d be sent to prison so they could harass my wife and squat on my land.
Please let me apologize for their evil in using you to get at me. I’m sorry such a letter was ever sent …
Then, the Weavers asked for his help. If someone on his staff could mail the letter to the Boundary County prosecutor, perhaps they could prove who forged the letter. Apparently, President Reagan didn’t write back.
The rumors doubled the Weavers’ fear and paranoia. As always, contention drew the couple closer together and convinced them that the end was at hand. In fact, it was right on time, according to Vicki’s predictions.
Suddenly, everyone around them seemed to be traitors and conspirators. The Weavers responded the way they always did when they felt pushed—going a little further out on the fringe. Soon, Randy decided to check out the group he’d heard about from his survivalist buddy, Frank Kumnick. In the summer of 1986, Randy and Frank drove down the road a stretch to the annual Aryan Nations World Congress.