The Nature Conservancy, with Chisholm as its front-man, and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) occupied decisive seats along with Pelcyger in 1994 negotiations on Reid's farm-splitting act. By then, Graham had already spent more than two years ingratiating himself to the Lahontan Valley farmers and their own environmental organizations formed with the intention of self-preservation.
But, despite all his carefully-nurtured close local contacts in the valley, Graham and his EDF counterpart David Yardas held out on supreme moral high ground, insisting with restrained academic frustration that change was already under way on the old federal reclamation project, and that, at best, farmers could be given a 5-year period to come to grips with the inevitable legal loss of their water. The Nature Conservancy, as Graham suggests, stood ready as always to assist them to find a way that would be helpful to everybody.
That, evidently, is Chisholm's role -- to be helpful in assisting the sale of land for the greater cause of environmental protection. He's offended by suggestion of anything less than that high calling, but he fronts for Del Webb money just the same. It's an arrangement that seems to work out for the most heavily endowed environmental organization on the planet and their own private bank.
Randy Weishaupt hasn't said what he was paid by Del Webb for his 600-acres ranch and future visitor center, but chances are it was way beyond the county's $100,000 assessment. Most farmers in the valley, in fact, don't want to talk about what is being offered to them, although generations of small farm families are being lured off their land in the process.
And even so, BLM officials in Las Vegas doubt whether whatever's paid farm by farm will anywhere near match "dollar for dollar" what Del Webb has in mind to make from the land swap.
Churchill County Commissioner Gwen Washburn who took office last year after referring to federal bureaucrats as "playground bullies who make up their own rules," questioned good-guy Graham about it all and was told that "a good number" of the farms the Nature Conservancy is buying up in the valley would remain in agriculture and thus at least on the tax rolls for five years.
But when Washburn checked on the one property that Chisholm offered as proof of that, she found that the farmland would be offered only for temporary lease.
Still, other county officials hesitantly conceded that Graham's proclaimed "visitor center" in the showplace 1990 farmhouse with its panoramic view and broad living areas might be beneficial to the currently almost non-existent tourist trade on the wetlands.
Washburn was disappointed, though, when Chisholm told her that under present plans, the visitors center would only be open "one or two days a week".
Only one or two days a week? After plans announced by Chisholm to create a winding display area on early Indian history, a teaching area on wetlands, a big parking lot with bus turn-arounds and an information kiosk and all $1.5 million of it handicapped accessible -- but open only two days a week?
What else on the edge of a notable duck-hunting range could the Nature Conservancy be planning for its $1.5-million tax-free wetlands center?
Only a person more rude and insensitive than Graham Chisholm would suggest that on the other five days residents of Churchill County could travel to Las Vegas to visit their former tax base in Del Webb's development.
"Sure I agonized over it, I lose sleep thinking about it," said County Manager Bjorn Selinder. "But, outside of going to court (to demand a full environmental study), I don't know what we can do."
Paradoxically, his county continues to grow in little one-acre parcels and subdivision popping up around the town of Fallon. The newcomers are often retired former residents of California or young families related in one way or the other to the expanding U.S. Naval air station outside of town.
Few, if any of them, are aware that if the full impact of Senator Harry Reid's law goes through, the county won't have enough water to support their wells or enough tax revenue to keep their schools open or, for that matter, that their own properties could become small pieces of a worthless glut of land nobody wants.
"If it all happens the way the federal government wants it," Selinder said, "it will remove 88 percent of the agricultural base in the county."
Churchill's annual budget of $18 million is almost spare change against the hundreds of millions in revenue imported by the Nature Conservancy alone, putting aside Del Webb. But the county's budget base is heavily reliant on the $90 million in revenue generated annually by agriculture.
"It all happens the way the federal government wants it," Selinder says bluntly of the combined federal and Nature Conservancy actions.
Selinder is not an outspoken public official. The county government in general has been reluctant to enter the fray over federal control, but now he sees the combined forces "adroitly slipping into a take-over position, manipulating the regulations to make it work."
Federal pressure on the farmers to sell out, he said, is "more that just subtle, it's blatant coercion."
Given the benefits to a private developer in Las Vegas and to the fatly fed righteousness of Graham Chisholm's cause there might be an even harsher word for it.
Locally, however, almost none would be so impolite. What is happening to their valley seems to be drifting by the people and the farmers of the Newlands Project in Nevada like the solemn breath of winter frost known in these parts by the Paiute word, "Pogo Nip," meaning literally, "White Death."
It's lovely to see, but fatal to breathe, when the combined chill, fog and frost condenses in whatever warmth is left.
Tim Findley, a former United Press International bureau chief and an editor on the original San Francisco Rolling Stone magazine, currently also serves as Associate Editor, Nevada for the Hatch, New Mexico Courier (which bills itself as 'The Most Cussedly Independent Weekly in the West --And Proud of it!!!'. Next week Tim, who comes from a Fallon, Nevada Indian family, writes on "Serious-Joke Medicine: The Up-to-the-Moment Complete Adventures of Fortunate Eagle."