The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit Wednesday against Esmeralda County rancher Ben Colvin, Wayne N. Hage of Monitor Valley in Nye County, as well as the estate of his late father, E. Wayne Hage, for trespassing on federal lands without a federal permit.

The suit also claims the defendants received monetary compensation for unlawfully leasing land owned by the U.S. to other ranchers for grazing purposes.

The suit claims Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service officers observed cattle owned by Colvin and the Hages unlawfully grazing on federal property on 38 different occasions since 2004.

The Department of Justice, in a news release, stated the defendants were sent multiple notices of their unauthorized use of federal land, which were returned to the BLM and Forest Service.

The defendants contended the federal government had no authority to regulate the property.

The trespassing allegedly occurred on four grazing allotments: the Ralston allotment, 368,682 acres in Ralston Valley; the Monitor allotment, 92,463 acres in Monitor Valley; the Silver King allotment around Tonopah, 9,339 acres and the Montezuma allotment, a long, irregular-shaped allotment south of Tonopah into Sarcobatus Flats near Batty, measuring 538,297 acres.

No livestock was impounded as a result of this action, according to the BLM Tonopah field office.

E. Wayne Hage, a tireless campaigner for grazing rights, died last June. His wife, the late Helen Chenoweth Hage, a former congresswoman from Idaho, died soon after.

Wayne Hage had filed suit against the Forest Service and the BLM for $28 million in a landmark case in the federal Court of Federal Claims in 1991 after federal agents seized over 100 calf pairs at gunpoint. In 2002 U.S. Judge Loren Smith ruled Hage owned the water, the ditch rights-of-way and access to the forage on the grazing allotments.

Testimony was taken in May 2004 to determine if that property had been taken by the federal government and to determine whether Hage was entitled to compensation of the value of that property, but his advocacy group, Stewards of the Range, reported a decision on those points hasn't yet been rendered by the court.

Wayne Hage's daughter, Margaret Byfield, who is the executive director of the group, was unavailable for comment by press time.

Colvin lost two summary judgments over his suit about his grazing rights in the Court of Federal Claims; his appeal was denied in federal circuit court late last year.

Part of Hage's case pointed out his grazing rights existed before the creation of the national forest system in 1907. Colvin's grazing rights were on property managed by the BLM.

Colvin said he stopped signing a grazing permit with the BLM in 1996. The problems began when the BLM failed to remove horses and burros off his allotment in the early 1990s, he said. That was followed by a range management plan released in 1993 that Colvin called "the damn biggest joke I couldn't live with."

Colvin's Montezuma allotment abutted Hage's Silver King allotment, he said. Colvin maintains he legally had a right to graze cattle on the allotments under prior rulings.

"If I have a water right out there, a vested water right, I have a claim. It's according to state law and it goes according to the appropriations water doctrine, which is what all the western states are founded under," Colvin said.

Colvin described it as fee land, not public land, which means he has the inherited right to use it based on the water rights. Federal courts have ruled there's no property value in a BLM grazing permit, he said.

Colvin said federal officers were on the allotments and reported observing a certain head of livestock. But he questioned if agents correctly observed his cattle.

"Whether they could read the brands or couldn't see the brands, I don't know. They were out there quite a number of times and saw the cattle," Colvin said.

Colvin said he inherited grazing rights passed on before the federal agencies were created.

"If you look and see what is a trespasser, that's someone that comes later, and if you think about it, the BLM and the Forest Service came later," Colvin said.