Power of the County

The convicted spy of The Falcon and the Snowman broke out of federal prison in 1980 and vanished into the Idaho Panhandle — robbing banks and plotting to defect to the Soviet Union, with help from locals. This episode of Power of the County follows Christopher Boyce, the TRW analyst who sold U.S. satellite secrets to the KGB, through his 19 months as a fugitive near Bonners Ferry under the alias "...

Before the Posse and the Aryan Nations, there was the John Birch Society — anti-UN billboards, conspiracy politics, and a milieu that, for some, shaded toward something far darker. This episode of Power of the County examines the JBS in the rural Northwest: Robert Welch's 1958 founding, the "Get US Out! of the UN" campaign (and the billboard a young Forest Service worker remembers near Sandpoint i...

August 27, 1976: two young researchers measuring trees deep in the Idaho wilderness look up to find three armed people ordering them off "their" mining claim. This episode of Power of the County tells the confrontation itself — from the worker's own contemporaneous account, "four chains up the hill": the rifles, the army-jacket detail, the standoff over an unpatented placer claim, and the drive ba...

In 1975, a Posse Comitatus leader told a Sandpoint crowd that a 30-30 rifle made a good substitute for a building permit. One year later, to the day, someone acted on it. This episode of Power of the County explains the Posse Comitatus — Henry Beach and William Potter Gale's "county supremacy" doctrine, the idea that the sheriff, not Washington, holds the highest lawful authority — and tracks its...

In 1977, a north Idaho Posse Comitatus leader announced his group had "pretty much disbanded" — its survivors flowing into a white-supremacist successor. That was the seed of the Aryan Nations. This episode of Power of the County follows the turn from anti-government grievance to overt racialism: Richard Butler, the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian at Hayden Lake, the tax-exemption gambit, and the...

How does a corner of the rural Northwest move, in a single generation, from ordinary resentment of federal land rules to armed anti-government movements? This episode of Power of the County traces the whole arc across the Idaho Panhandle: the 1941 "State of Jefferson" secession, the John Birch Society, the Posse Comitatus, an armed mining-claim confrontation, the Aryan Nations at Hayden Lake, Ruby...

In 1976, three armed members of one Idaho mining family held two federal research workers at gunpoint — and two years later their convictions were thrown out on a jurisdictional technicality almost no one saw coming. This episode of Power of the County follows United States v. Patrin from the confrontation to the courtroom: the deadly-weapon charge struck when the government couldn't prove the rif...