A visit to the heart of darkness - May 17, 2001

I knew Tony Stewart was up to something when he invited me to join him on a tour of the old Aryan Nations property. It was May 17, 2001. And the compound was awaiting the wrecking ball and fire.

“I want to take you there personally because of your ancestry,” Tony said as he pointed his Mazda for the Rimrock above Hayden Lake. “(Richard) Butler would never have allowed you there.”

I’m 97 percent Portuguese, according to the Ancestry.com DNA test. An Aryan once told me Portuguese were “OK.” But I got Tony’s point. I’m darker-complected than most Inland Northwesterners.

For 17 years, I had been assigned by The Spokesman-Review to cover the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. Colleague Bill Morlin reported on Butler, the annual congresses at the 20-acre Aryan Nations compound, and all the criminal activity spawned by neo-Nazis who gathered there.

I reported on the good guys. Bill wrote about the bad guys.

I had never been to Butler’s compound until Tony and I drove through a green cattle gate that spring day. The path led to a small guard house with a crossing arm bearing a “Whites Only” sign. Beyond was the erstwhile heart of darkness - a variety of nondescript buildings that formed a horseshoe, with a raised platform for speeches and Butler’s Christian Identity church building on the far side.

Except for the large swastikas carved into two ponderosa pine, the place resembled a ramshackle church camp. In a commentary for the Spokesman-Review after my visit, I said the 10 buildings had “ill-fitting doors made of plywood, rotting sheet siding and walls set on crumbling blocks. Exposed wiring showed through crudely cut holes between rooms. In the skinheads’ barracks, the main living area for guests and the only building not piled with garbage, 13 beds lined two walls, with a desk and a mirror by each. Stripped of the people, the toxic ideas and the drama, such was the extent of what Tony had referred to as the ‘Campus of Hate.’ Up close, it seemed too shabby. Small.”

Yet, from this small base in rural North Idaho, Butler and friends published millions of pieces of hate literature on an old press that ran 18 hours per day. The Order, founded by Robert Mathews in 1983, got its start printing counterfeit money on that press. In September 1986, The Order II bombed the home of the late human rights leader Bill Wassmuth and three downtown Coeur d’Alene buildings.

Everywhere Tony and I walked that sunny spring morning had been traversed by racist men and women who conspired against civil society. In a phone call this week, Tony estimated that more than a thousand felonies and nine murders were connected to people with ties to Butler and his compound. Randy Weaver, the infamous separatist who fought U.S. Marshals on Ruby Ridge, spent time there.

Again, I turn to my 2001 account:

“It was eerie to walk where the who’s who of the American neo-Nazi movement had lived, visited, plotted, hated: Robert Mathews (founder of The Order I), Bruce Pierce, Gary Yarbrough, David Lane, Elden “Bud” Cutler, David Dorr, Chevie Kehoe. When Tony stopped his red Mazda at the front gate, I half expected security guards to burst out of the scrub pine in a rage … as three Aryan security guards did on July 1, 1998, after Victoria Keenan’s car backfired.”

It was evident that Butler & Co. had left the grounds in a hurry in October 2000 when a bankruptcy court evicted them. Two hands of cards were displayed face up on a table in the 40-foot guard tower, as if the players had been Raptured while playing. The tower looked down on a large swastika painted on the red roof of a concession stand, where a hand-written menu on a chalk board offered a “Nazi burger” (with extra sauerkraut) for $1.25. Behind the tower were the burnt remains of crosses in a pit and a target practice area with a bullet-pocked photo of a mixed-race couple.

I wanted to snag that menu as a souvenir. But resisted temptation.

I also wanted to rescue a New American Standard Bible left in the fellowship hall of Butler’s religious center. I wondered how things might have turned out had Butler believed the words in that Bible and loved his neighbors rather than loathed them.

In the chapel of the religious center, a converted milk barn, Butler’s pulpit stood at the far end facing rows of pews. The pulpit contained a drawer full of literature, including Butler’s “Farwell (sic) Address,” German sheet music, and a pamphlet about prostates for men over 50.

A broken stained-glass window with a Nazi symbol looked down on the pulpit.

In Butler’s two-story farmhouse, dirty dishes filled the sink with a jar of coins nearby on the counter. Butler left in such a hurry that he took only two keepsakes: a bust of Adolf Hitler and a sword he used to honor subordinates by tapping them on the shoulder, like a king bestowing knighthood in days of old.

Shortly after our visit, work crews demolished the guard tower and the concession stand. Weeks later, the Northern Lakes Fire District razed the buildings for firefighting practice.

At first, human rights advocates had planned to transform the unholy ground into a retreat center or a children’s diversity camp or a museum. But reporter Bill Morlin suggested that those ideas might attract angry supremacists. Staff and visitors couldn’t be protected.

Aryan security guard Shaun Winkler didn’t like the original plans either: “I’d rather see it burned down and left in a pile of ashes than turned into a human rights museum,” he told Morlin.

Eventually, it became a peace park.

A year after our visit, Tony and I returned to the property. Not a board or stone affiliated with the former hate center was left. The two trees with the swastikas were gone. A stranger would never know that the place once housed the epicenter of domestic terrorism in the Northwest.

Two years ago, Butler’s former acreage was sold to a neighbor. The money, plus additional cash provided by philanthropist Greg Carr, will be used to bring human rights speakers to Coeur d’Alene.

All that remains of the Aryan Nations compound today are a grazing meadow and flowers. The land is at rest. The neighbors are at peace.

Dave Oliveria is a Press columnist. His Huckleberries column appears every Friday.