U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Travis Lunders appeared unannounced, armed and in full tactical gear at the home of Charles and Heather Maude of Caputa, South Dakota. He served them each with federal grand jury indictments for theft of government property. This stemmed from a boundary dispute and associated in-holdings that have been managed by the Maudes in the same way for generations.

Charles Maude purchased the operation from his family when he was just 17 years old, and he is the fifth generation on the farm and ranch. He was gifted his first cow to begin his own herd before he was born, and his love of the land hasn’t wavered. His grandfather, Walter Maude, challenged him to a wheat growing contest and Charles was game, dragging a hose from the yard and across the driveway to “irrigate” his crop in hopes of ending the season with a higher yield than Grandpa. Grandpa won.

Heather grew up in eastern Wyoming and is also the fifth generation to grow up working on her family’s cattle-and-sheep ranch. The ranch was 56 miles from town, 20 of which were gravel and Charles joked when they were dating she lived “16 cattle guards off the highway.”

They both earned degrees, Charles in 2007 from South Dakota State University in animal science with minors in ag marketing, range and pasture management, and agronomy, and Heather in 2008 from the University of Wyoming in animal science with production and communication options. They married in 2013 and raise their young children on the Maude operation, as well as cattle and hogs.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

This is neither a ploy for sympathy, nor a call to arms. This is a cautionary tale that should raise the hackles of every American who benefits from production agriculture and multiple-use public lands. The USFS says they want to be good neighbors, but taking shots at easy targets isn’t how that’s accomplished. There is a time and place for tactical gear and federal indictments, but serving up both to a family fully cooperating and working in good faith toward resolution is deplorable.

It was just 87 days between the day Charles and Heather Maude were asked to remove a no trespassing sign hung on a 75-year-old fence and the day Special Agent Lunders appeared at their door. However, it did not take long for word of this situation to filter through local and state association leadership and make its way to D.C. The cause was quickly carried to the top of Capitol Hill by both the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Public Lands Council.

Ethan Lane, NCBA’s vice president of government affairs, said though the D.C. groups involved in oversight were furious, they weren’t particularly surprised. He said it was received with the same anger as he received it, and the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and his staff are “acutely aware of this long history of abuse by the Forest Service in this part of the world.”

As I reported in The Fence Post Magazine in March, Special Agent Lunders and U.S. Forest Service Patrol Captain Jeff Summers appeared at the Maude’s home and said they received a complaint from a hunter a no trespassing sign was posted on a fence built upon the correct boundary. The Maudes removed the sign from the fence, which was built sometime prior to the 1950s. The family’s owned their property adjacent to the U.S. Forest Service-managed Buffalo Gap National Grasslands (BGNG), which is part of the Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands, since 1910.

Sometime between 1910 and 1950, William Maude built a levy and a fence, and that fence served as the physical boundary between the acres owned by the Maudes and the BGNG. That boundary fence and related in holding has been accepted by the USDA annually through the certification of acres by the USDA Farm Service Agency every year since the National Grasslands came into existence in 1960.

The Maudes met on May 1 with Special Agent Lunders and Julie Wheeler, USFS district ranger. The conclusion reached was a land survey was needed first and foremost and that would take time, up to a year, according to Wheeler. The Maudes scheduled a meeting at the allotment so the District Ranger could see the fence and move toward a resolution.

This, though moving at the speed of federal government, would have been a business-like, reasonable course of action.

Five days later, Special Agent Lunders arrived with a survey crew to complete a survey the Maudes were not a party to. Neither a copy of the survey nor a copy of the original complaint allegedly issued by a hunter has been made available. The federal indictments followed, and it is the first time a husband and wife have been indicted separately in a case like this.

These charges should be dismissed immediately. This has gone to the top in D.C. and, because the Maudes are in the right, the systems in place will work to resolve this without torches or pitchforks, though this should be headline-and-coffee-shop news until accountability is delivered in the USFS from the top down.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.