Free Land Holders’ attempt to claim 1,460 acres of public land in Colorado hinges on the letter T
Group, which says it’s not FLDS or sovereign citizens, fenced off U.S. Forest Service land; locals tore down the barbed wire
Denver Post, 10/22/24, Noelle Phillips
MANCOS — Stacks of historic documents and copies of nearly 100-year-old deeds blanketed a pingpong table in what Patrick Pipkin described as the Free Land Holder Committee’s meeting hall on his ranch in southwestern Colorado, near where the group recently claimed 1,460 acres of the San Juan National Forest by running barbed-wire fence around the land.
The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago and other documents are all part of Pipkin’s “chain of title” that he said proves the Free Land Holders own the U.S. Forest Service land.
Pipkin’s long narrative twists and turns through U.S. history as the federal government expanded west and signed various treaties with Great Britain, France and Mexico. He does not recognize the authority of the U.S. Forest Service or the Montezuma County sheriff because he claims he doesn’t live in the same United States as them.
The Free Land Holders’ argument essentially comes down to whether or not the word “the” is capitalized when preceding “United States” on various historic documents. Pipkin believes the Founding Fathers established the country as “The United States of America” when they wrote the Articles of Confederation in 1777, which created a republic that he now belongs to.
But somewhere along the way, he said, the king of England tricked the new country into signing documents as “the United States of America” — lowercase T — creating a separate entity from the original republic.
“It’s not the same name,” Pipkin said during an interview on his property last week. “Totally different. That’s why the sheriff has no jurisdiction. That’s why the Forest Service has no jurisdiction. They work for the small ‘t,’ which is the king today. King Charles.”
The Free Land Holder Committee was an unknown entity until earlier this month when Pipkin’s group posted a “Notice of Claim” on a bulletin board at the local post office — declaring their right to the public land as the United States of America Republic — and began stringing barbed wire in the forest. Pipkin, who calls himself a Free Land Holder ambassador, also wasn’t well known in Mancos, population 1,200, even though he has co-owned 180 acres of land outside of town since 2020.
So his sudden declaration that 1,460 acres of the San Juan National Forest belongs to the Free Land Holder Committee has baffled local residents, angered ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts, and made international headlines as another land-rights dispute in the American West unfolds.
The Denver Post met with Pipkin for two hours Wednesday to hear his explanation and to ask about his group’s intentions for the land after people who live in the area disregarded the sheriff’s pleas and took down the fence on their own.
Residents hope Pipkin stands down on his claim and the fence issue fades like a sunset over the mountains.
“I’m curious to see how this all plays out,” rancher Ryan Brown said. “I tried to understand the motivation. I can’t figure out this far-fetched interpretation of deeds and treaties.”
Pipkin insists his group is not connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, nor are they part of the extremist, anti-government sovereign citizen movement.
However, watchdogs who monitor anti-government movements see similarities between Pipkin’s rhetoric and sovereign citizens.
Travis McAdam, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who leads the nonprofit’s Intelligence Project, said it’s early in Free Land Holder history to know where its members stand. But the rhetoric about living in a different United States, using odd punctuation, talk of maritime law and treaties, and arguing over a capital T are standard sovereign citizen beliefs.
“When you start to pile all of those things on, it really does have it,” McAdam said. “Maybe they don’t claim they are sovereign citizens, but it has a lot of pieces that are the hallmark of sovereign citizens.”
Pipkin insisted he doesn’t want conflict.
“It’s going to really open your mind what’s actually going on with the republic and the United States of America, between the two of us,” Pipkin said. “The truth is coming out. We’re here in honor and respect and integrity of who we are and the sacred lands that the people have rights to, and we’ll be able to show that to you where we have the right to it.”
Pipkin’s claim ends with a 1927 deed filed in the Montezuma County courthouse when a man named Fred G. Hallar sold his land to “The United States of America.” With a capital T.
“Fred Hallar deeded these to the republic, OK,” Pipkin said.
The U.S. Forest Service asserts that it has owned the 1,460 acres since Hallar sold it to the federal government for $3,650 in 1927, said David Neely, the San Juan National Forest supervisor. The Forest Service is working with other federal agencies to find an administrative or legal resolution, he said.
And Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin is pleading with both sides to let the matter be settled in court. Both the sheriff and the forest supervisor said Pipkin has agreed to pause any fence-building for now.
Not affiliated with the FLDS
When word of the fence spread earlier this month, many people assumed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamous cult run by the self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, was re-emerging on the property. That’s because the FLDS owned the nearby land until 2020, when it was sold at a courthouse auction.
But Pipkin insists he never was a member of the FLDS and that he is not a religious man.
“We’re not some crazy prairie dress cult thing they had on the news,” he said.
However, the Free Land Holders are concerning to people who live in Montezuma County and who use the forest for cattle grazing, mountain biking, hiking and cross-country skiing. And those residents are increasingly disappointed with the U.S. Forest Service and Nowlin for not stopping Pipkin and his group from building the fence.
That’s why, since Oct. 10, dozens of residents have worked to take down the Free Land Holders’ barbed-wire fence that criss-crossed a huge swath of the forest. The fence came down without violence, and they left posts and barbed wire in a pile where the Free Land Holders could pick it up.
Now locals are anxious about what will happen next with the Free Land Holders and whether the situation could escalate toward violence or some sort of standoff with law enforcement.
They worry that past conflicts between the federal government and armed citizens — the 2014 standoff between Cliven Bundy and his followers over cattle grazing in Nevada, the deadly 1993 standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho — have weakened the resolve of the Forest Service and others responsible for carrying out the law.
“You can’t say, ‘This is going to create an issue so we’re not going to do anything,’ ” said Ryan Borchers, who runs a contracting business in Mancos and uses the national forest for recreation. “What precedent does this set? Could I go out on public land and set up a fence where I want?
“It belongs to the citizens of the United States. They should care about us. It is public land.”
The sheriff does not think Pipkin and his group are a threat and said Pipkin has not broken any state or local laws.
“They seem like nice people,” Nowlin said.
Nowlin does not have jurisdiction within the national forest, although he said the Free Land Holders never should have put up the fence. Pipkin’s claim is just another dispute over public lands and boundaries, as far as Nowlin sees it.
“I don’t know who’s right and I don’t know who’s wrong,” he said. “I’m not siding with anybody. I’m just trying to keep the peace.”
Ranchers who share a boundary with the San Juan National Forest and whose cattle graze on the land tried listening to Pipkin’s explanation as to why he built the fence. They left dumbfounded and angry.
“I listened to them talk just a little bit before I got disgusted and left,” rancher Bruce Tozer said.
Tozer and fellow rancher Gerald Koppenhafer, who is also a Montezuma County commissioner and large animal veterinarian, share a grazing permit on Forest Service property that the Free Land Holders fenced, and they needed to bring their cows down off the land last week.
“It created a mess is what it did,” Koppenhafer said of the fence.
Pipkin’s fences ran into ones that Koppenhafer and Tozer set up, with permission from the Forest Service, to contain their cows during grazing season. The fences’ intersections created wedges that trapped cows, sometimes separating heifers from their calves, Koppenhafer said. And a calf that can’t feed from its mother loses weight, costing ranchers money when it’s time to sell, he said.
Koppenhafer said he called Nowlin and the Forest Service ranger for help. They did not act to stop the Free Land Holders, he said.
“I decided to take the damn fence down,” Koppenhafer said.
“Listening patience”
Brown, whose ranch also borders the forest, said he met six of the Free Land Holders the day the fence came down.
“Even though I was surrounded by six guys I soon realized it’s not going to be physical,” he said. “It’s just going to take some listening patience.”
Indeed, Pipkin can talk for hours about his beliefs.
During The Post’s visit on Wednesday, he never sat down as he sorted through stacks of papers, pointing out highlighted sections of treaties and deeds that he said have importance.
A fire in a wood burning stove heated the meeting hall where the Free Land Holders gather to discuss their claims on U.S. land. The room resembles a church social hall with couches, tables and chairs, a commercial-grade kitchen and a foosball table. One other man sat quietly at a table listening to Pipkin talk.
Pipkin arrived in the Mancos area in 2020 when he bought three 60-acre tracts of land that abut the national forest at a courthouse auction. The land once belonged to Jeffs and the FLDS, which lost the property after Jeffs was imprisoned on rape charges in Texas.
The three tracts feature pine forests, open meadows and gorgeous views of the La Plata Mountains.
A dirt road connects the tracts where various buildings are hidden among the trees. There are small homes, barns and sheds throughout the property, where Pipkin lives with his wife and eight children. He said about 40 other people live on the ranch, although very few people were present the day The Post visited.
Most Free Land Holders are not former FLDS members, Pipkin said, although a few have come to him for help.
The people wear regular clothes, including the women and girls, who were dressed in blue jeans or leggings, not the prairie dresses that are characteristic of the polygamist sect.
Pipkin has had past legal encounters with the FLDS.
He and two other men, who shared a business named Prairie Farms LLC, successfully sued the FLDS and the cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, in U.S. District Court in Arizona for illegal arrest, excessive force, unlawful police practices and discrimination.
Residents of the two towns, and the people who ran, them were followers of the FLDS and took orders from Jeffs. The town marshal twice arrested Pipkin in 2015 for trespassing after he and his business partners attempted to develop former FLDS property in Colorado City. Pipkin was strip-searched and incarcerated for three days, according to a findings of fact filed in federal court.
In 2018, a federal judge awarded $750,000 in damages to Pipkin and $347,934 to Prairie Farms LLC.
Soon after, Pipkin and his business partners began buying property owned by the FLDS that had been taken under control of the federal courts, including the Montezuma County property and land in South Dakota.
Pipkin said he never was a member of the FLDS because he was not baptized into the church. But he said he has five mothers and 37 brothers and sisters.
Polygamy is in his DNA, he said, which is a piece of his reasoning in proving how he owns the land. When Utah became a state, its officials agreed to stop practicing polygamy, but Pipkin said his family did not, so that agreement does not apply to the republic they belong to.
Pipkin also said he was not birthed or born.
“I was created from the trunk of my mother and I landed on a land patent right here on these boundaries of the Guadalupe treaty,” he said.
Pipkin does not have a birth certificate, he said, because he is not part of the United States that issues them. (It also has been documented that people born into FLDS families do not have birth certificates.)
Instead, he uses what he calls a “land patent” as his identification that gives him standing. He showed The Post a document that appeared to be signed by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox that awarded property to Pipkin through a quit claim deed. He said he never recorded the land patent in a county office in Utah because the property would then no longer belong to him.
“I lose my standing as being grounded,” he said. “I’m now anchored. I’m not out there floating as a ward of the state or lost at sea and so I don’t need an attorney or an esquire to represent me or speak for me because I speak my own language. I vibrate my own chakra of my throat. I don’t need to speak the English language.”
Bryan Hammon, another Free Land Holder, said they are members of The United States of America Republic. They do not acknowledge the U.S. government, nor the authority of the president, Congress, governors, sheriffs and other elected officials.
“I’m a living man in The United States of America Republic,” Hammon said. “The United States Republic is a sovereign nation and I’m a living man in this nation.”
Hammon, who also said he was not a sovereign citizen, would not say where he is from when he spoke to The Post by telephone.
Instead, Hammon said he “originated on a homestead in the territory of the Guadalupe treaty,” which was signed at the end of a war between the United States and Mexico. Mexico gave up territory that’s now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.
He also would not say how he met Pipkin, but explained that the two of them have been studying these topics for years.
“We’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, how has this truth been right before our eyes and we’ve never seen it,’ ” Hammon said.
“Essentially a rewriting of the matrix”
Freddy Cruz, program manager at the Western States Center, a pro-democracy group that serves as a watchdog for anti-democratic activity in the Pacific Northwest, said he had never heard of the Free Land Holder Committee until recent news reports.
But he sees similarities between that group and other sovereign citizens and said that people who embrace sovereign citizen ideology often deny they are part of the movement.
“There’s no standard format that sovereign citizens have to these weird rules that are made up,” Cruz said. “It’s essentially a rewriting of the matrix.”
It’s unclear what the Free Land Holder Committee intends to do with the National Forest property. When asked if they would rebuild the fence, Pipkin said the committee had not decided. He also declined to share the group’s vision for the property.
But he promises the group is non-violent and wants to be friends with people in Mancos.
“I just want to be clear with you: We’re here in peace,” he said. “We’re here in honor and integrity of what we’re doing, and the people know who we are.”
Local residents hope that is the case.
The area of the San Juan National Forest that was fenced off is a beloved piece of property where people hike, bike, ski or ride horses daily. They said the Free Land Holders already wrecked portions of the forest by clear-cutting trees and bushes and by driving motorized all-terrain vehicles where they are not allowed.
Most said they would honor a court’s decision should a judge declare Pipkin’s claim is valid. But he had no right to build a fence without legal standing.
“In our mind the fence was trash and a hazard,” said Brad Finch, a Mancos resident who visits the forest almost daily. “It’s not legitimate and it doesn’t belong here.”
His wife, Karen Finch, added: “We mean no harm to them. We just need it to be done legally.”
Updated 8 a.m. Oct. 20, 2024: This story was updated to correct rancher Ryan Brown’s name.