A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! —John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911

Grafton’s road crew, tiny and ill-resourced, was quickly overwhelmed by the scope of the work that faced them after the floodwaters receded. In a typical example of Grafton’s municipal dialogue, someone responded by angrily smashing the windows of the town dump truck.

One day in early summer, he headed out to his pasture and first saw the immense bear about seven car lengths away (a measure that would have perplexed Eleazer, as cars had not yet been invented).

In addition to corn, the bears were fond of sweet apples. They were drawn in great numbers to sheep. They devoured barnsful of young swine. At times, it seemed that New England’s entire agricultural economy was in danger of disappearing down their bottomless gullets.

Bears browsed through barns and peeped into kitchen windows, burly bundles of ursine meat watching ambulatory hominine meat cooking juicy chunks of ovine meat.

What an incredible sentence

England’s monarchs, separated by an ocean from the colonists, never quite grasped the immediacy of the American bear problem, any more than they understood a host of other gripes. The British Crown’s failure to engage in bear management was a natural feature of a nation built on belief in a greater power—for millennia, any state-sanctioned killing of bears would have been acceptable only if it were done in the name of gods or monarchies.

Shortly after embracing the somewhat novel concept of individual rights, America’s postrevolutionary leaders took up the bear problem. They soon found themselves, however, in a dilemma of their own devising: how to kill bears in the name of liberty.

Long after it was no longer practically necessary, killing bears remained popular. Boys grew up eager to shoot a bear as a rite of passage; middle-aged men shot them as an assertion of manliness; old men prowled the woods with guns at the ready to show that, for now at least, they still had the ineffable “it” that could otherwise be expressed only by dropping one’s trousers, ruler at the ready.

In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)

It took years. It took decades. Untold thousands of animals were slaughtered, bear by bear by bear; untold millions of trees were felled, trunk by trunk by trunk. Untold billions of dollars in natural resources were liquidated, pelt by plank by perch. When it was over, the settlers raised their grandchildren in a new world, built from the bones of a wilderness that—seemingly—had been vanquished.

INTO THIS INTENSE cauldron of deprivation and bear-battling came Grafton’s first settlers. Military captains Joseph Hoyt and Aaron Barney brought one hundred apple trees, their families, and a few dozen other optimists, hoping to carve new lives from the bear-infested Connecticut River Valley.

The settlers hated bears with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear. But there was something they hated even more—taxes. Grafton’s founders had not braved the throat of this godforsaken wilderness to pay taxes. In fact, they demonstrated very little appetite for law of any kind.

Once the Abenaki were safely cut out of the picture, Grafton’s second order of business became overthrowing King George, who God had also, it turns out, imbued with the divine right to impose onerous taxes and policies.

safely beyond the reach of both Abenaki and royal law, Grafton’s third order of business quickly became the avoidance of US taxes. It’s a pursuit that continues today.

Even accounting for a certain looseness in spelling common to the period, the petition was glorious in its semi-literacy. It got off on the wrong foot by mistaking the state in which they lived as “New Hamsheir” and went rapidly downhill from there, referring to state officers as, variously, “your honours,” “your Honners,” and “your Onners.”

Two years later, the town sent another, even more strenuously worded (and semi-literate) petition seeking tax relief. This one was written by Jabez Barney, whose marriage to his cousin had apparently not disqualified him from taking a leadership role as Grafton’s town clerk.

Grafton’s petitions were in fact part of a simple, two-step plan. Step 1: Ask not to pay taxes. Step 2: Just don’t pay them.

The Hoyts and Barneys may have lacked a Harvard degree, but they understood that simply withholding payment wouldn’t stave off Weare’s tax collectors forever. And so they did what any community of reasonable people would do. They voted to secede from the country.

Libertarians have a vision for America that includes lots of personal freedom, very little government, and a pure marketplace that will sort out societal problems like climate change, education inequality, and rising health care costs.

AFTER A STINT in Vermont, the Babiarzes quickly realized that New Hampshire was a better bet for those who wanted to “Live Free or Die”—a state motto so beloved that, in the 1970s, when a Jehovah’s Witness covered up the words “or Die” on his license plate because they offended his religious sensibilities, the state jailed him.

according to a website created by Pendarvis, citizens should assert certain inalienable rights, such as the right to have more than two junk cars on private property, the right to gamble, the right to engage in school truancy, the right to traffic drugs, and the right to have incestual intercourse. Oh, and also, Pendarvis sought to assert the right to traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights, in which people who are homeless or otherwise indigent are paid small amounts of money to engage in fisticuffs. Logic is a strange thing.