BOISE, Idaho -- Wildfires in Idaho, Montana and other western states have stirred embers of the "Sagebrush Rebellion," as ranchers and politicians -- fairly or otherwise -- blame federal agencies, the courts and environmentalists for stoking firestorms on thousands of square miles of sagebrush, grass and forest.

In July 2006, then-U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., told federal firefighters they'd done a "piss-poor job" on an eastern Montana blaze. He also said Boise was a ridiculous site from which to coordinate national firefighting strategy in the National Interagency Fire Center.

This year, Nevada's Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., claimed environmental groups and federal bureaucracy have contributed to fires, including the Lake Tahoe blaze that burned more than 250 homes.

And this week, Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, a rancher, and this state's two U.S. senators, Larry Craig and Mike Crapo, joined ranchers who blame federal safety rules for crippling early efforts to douse the 1,000-square-mile Murphy Complex wildfire.

The Sagebrush Rebellion emerged in the 1970s in Western states dominated by federal land, as a coalition of mining and grazing groups pressured federal policy makers to cede control to locals. Today, fire seasons often result in a resurgence of this animosity among independent-minded Westerners who have spent generations on the land and bristle at being told what to do -- by the courts or the feds.

"The background static out here in the West is, the federal government can never do anything correctly," said R. McGreggor Cawley, author of "Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics." "They have this notion if they've been able to keep the ranch going for that amount of time, maybe they know what they're doing. So they get a little grumpy when 'wet-nosed kids' from the Bureau of Land Management start coming out and telling them how to run their operations."

This week, Republicans Otter, Craig and Crapo laid out a litany of complaints: When a July 16 lightning storm rolled through Idaho and Nevada's remote border country, locals with bulldozers stood ready to help build fire lines-- only to be told by BLM officials to stay put.

And they blame a 2005 federal court ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Hailey, Idaho-based environmental group Western Watersheds Project for reducing cattle grazing and allowing fuel buildup, conditions they contend fed the flames that burned an area the size of Rhode Island and cost $9 million to fight.

"The current (federal) management practices helped contribute to this devastation," Craig said.

Otter demanded a suspension of federal rules governing the circumstances under which firefighting equipment can be deployed, including a requirement that qualified bulldozer supervisors be present to coordinate safety and fire communication.

"For lack of a decision going forward, we lost 700,000 acres," Otter said.

Katie Fite, of the Western Watersheds Project that aims to end grazing on public lands in the region, counters that ranchers and Idaho politicians want to exploit the Murphy fire to expand cattle industry muscle -- at the expense of habitat for species such as sage grouse.

"Ranchers have a sense of entitlement, and it comes in some ways from being able to push the BLM around in the past," Fite said. "All of a sudden, there's somebody that's not letting them run over the BLM and letting them put more cows out there."

BLM officials say they sympathize with the region's cattlemen, many of whose livelihoods are threatened.

A scientific panel is being formed to study the Murphy fire -- and what fire managers described as its "unusual intensity."

Still, singling out grazing reductions as the major culprit obscures the complexity of the situation, said Barry Rose, a BLM spokesman. Years of drought, climate change, high temperatures and other factors, coupled with a storm that in 24 hours blanketed the landscape with 2,600 documented lightning strikes, created an environment where wildfire could spread out of control.

It's unrealistic to believe that a fire of the Murphy Complex's intensity could have been stopped cold, Rose said: The initial flames were 13 feet high and moving at 8 1/2 mph -- faster than the 2 to 3 miles of fire line that can be constructed by a bulldozer in an hour.

"People have gotten hurt and killed doing it on their own," he said.

As the West fills with people -- Idaho, Nevada and Arizona were among the nation's fastest-growing states in 2006, according to the U.S. Census -- these conflicts are likely to continue to simmer, especially if wildfires keep their current pace. Wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres last year, a record. Halfway through 2007, 4.92 million acres have burned.

"There is and has been and probably always will be friction between a sovereign state and the federal government, in a state (like Idaho) where the federal government owns two-thirds of the land," said Idaho Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, a rancher and lawyer. "... It's always there, it's always under the surface, and it's something that's a fact of the geography."

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D5.