BURNS, Ore. -- One of the largest wood mills in the West once belched its steam on the edge of town, sawing ponderosa pine. Out in the woods, tree fallers like Tex Ward were proud and prosperous.
Ward, 54, a lifelong resident who has lost his job twice and has filed for bankruptcy once, said that was not the case anymore. He now works for the state as a prison guard, a job he said he hated.
On a recent frosty morning, before heading off for his shift, he and his wife, Shelly, fed the 30 head of cattle that are the closest thing the Wards have to a retirement fund. "You do what you have to do to stay alive," Ward said. "But I'm sour as hell."
Times were once very good out here on the high desert of east-central Oregon, and a place like Burns -- remote and obscure until a group of armed protesters took over a nearby federal wildlife sanctuary early this month -- was full of civic pride and bustle. In their heyday, Harney County and its largest town, Burns, were economically important in a way that now seems unthinkable in the rural West.
These days, cities like Portland, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, are gobbling up more of the jobs than ever, especially the good ones. Half the jobs in Oregon, for example, are now clustered in just three counties in and around Portland, according to a study by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Mont. Almost two-thirds of Utah's jobs are along the Wasatch Front, which runs from Salt Lake City to Provo.
And isolated, rural counties like Harney -- with 7,126 people in an area about the size of Massachusetts -- are too far away from those urban centers to catch the economic uplift, the study said. So the population grows ever older, poorer and less-educated, and opportunities continue to dry up: The county has 10 percent fewer jobs than it did in 1979, according to state figures.
The pattern of poverty has shifted nationally as well. In the four decades since the late 1960s, poverty rates fell or remained stable across the Northeast, South and Midwest -- but rose significantly across the West, a Pew Research Center study said in 2014.
"High incomes, great schools -- it was a Norman Rockwell rural America," said Timothy Duy, an economist and senior director of the Oregon Economics Forum at the University of Oregon, describing the arc of places like Burns. "It's reasonable for people to say, 'We'd like to turn back the clock,' because it was for many people an ideal time."
What happened was a steep downturn, especially in the timber industry, which has all but disappeared. Oregon lost about three-fourths of its timber mills between 1980 and 2010; Harney County lost all seven, including the one near Burns where Ward worked, which closed in the mid-1990s.
Changes in the wood industry were clearly also having an effect over those years, with more wood buyers shopping in Canada and more mills becoming automated, but many people here also said they thought the U.S. Forest Service did not fight back to save the mills and jobs.
"You didn't stand up for us then. Why should we stand up for you now?" asked Shelly Ward, 51, referring to federal officials.
The Pew statistics also suggest a structural change in poverty in rural America. In the 1960s, when images of the poor in rural Appalachia and elsewhere in the South galvanized the nation, children and older people were largely the faces of economic struggle. Comparatively speaking, there are now much higher numbers of people in their prime working-age years whose incomes are below the federal poverty measure for a family.
The armed protesters who took over the headquarters buildings of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near here have tried to tap into the local reservoir of anger and nostalgia. They preach a vision of rural America on the rebound if only "government oppression" -- in land use, ownership and management -- could somehow be rolled back.
"Government controls the land and resources," said the group's leader, Ammon Bundy, at a news conference last week. And that, he added, "has put people in duress and put them in poverty."
But the role of government in what happened here is also more nuanced and complex than the black-hat/white-hat imagery presented by Bundy and his companions.
Government paychecks, like the one Tex Ward earns at his job at the prison, have helped keep Harney County afloat as private jobs have declined. With nearly 60 percent of the pay earned in the county now coming from the public sector -- including schools and federal management jobs at the 188,000-acre wildlife refuge -- this was the most government-dependent county in Oregon in 2013, according the most recent analysis by the state.
People like the Wards said that when environmental groups filed lawsuits and applied pressure at the state Capitol in Salem or in Washington, D.C., to reduce logging, forest managers just surrendered. The residual anger of people caught in the economic undertow now affects how residents here think about the takeover at the refuge, and the arguments about what should happen next.
Some residents and local officials say they believe that the history and relationship between the people and the government is being distorted by the protesters and that cooperation across lines has worked well, to the benefit of the community. For instance, an arrangement with private landowners to protect a threatened bird species, the sage grouse -- and to prevent even more restrictive government protections -- was a model of how cooperation can work, they said.
"Those are things that Mr. Bundy doesn't know about or care about it," said Steven Grasty, the county judge and chairman of the county commissioners. "We can keep building on those things if he would get out of the way."
But the sense that government -- not just federal but state as well -- no longer hears the voice of places like this echoes through the community, even among those who wish Bundy and his supporters would go home. Harney County has lost 4 percent of its population just since 2010, according to U.S. census figures, even as the state's population, especially in and around Portland, has surged.
"People feel powerless," said state Rep. Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district covers much of eastern Oregon, including Harney County. "As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there's a shift in power."
Shelly Ward's father, Al Albertson, 73, who also once worked at the lumber mill here, put it more bluntly. "People in western Oregon don't even know where Burns is," he said.
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