Forty years ago, the ATF led three-day siege at a far-right militia encampment near Pontiac - PART I: The organization and growth of the ‘Covenant, Sword and the Arm of the Lord’

It has now been four decades since hundreds of lawmen stormed a 224-acre compound located on a peninsula just across the Arkansas line near Pontiac, home to the far right wing, anti-government and white supremacist religious group, the Zarephath-Horeb Church, otherwise known as the “Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord.”

On the fateful day in April 1985, officers had one goal in mind, to arrest Jim Ellison, the spiritual leader of the church, who was wanted on federal charges of conspiracy to illegally manufacture automatic weapons and silencers. After three days of negotiations, Ellison and four others charged with a variety of crimes ranging from arson to murder, gave themselves up peacefully.

To fully understand what occurred during the multi-day standoff 40 years ago, it’s helpful to look back much further to the group’s original organization and life prior to the police standoff. 

Connections with extremist groups

Decades before the siege, Ellison seemed to relish in media attention. He gave interviews to a variety of different reporters, which resulted in numerous articles printed in publications across the United States about his beliefs, how they manifested into building the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord church and how everyday life at the compound was based on a strong intertwining of faith and firearms.

Ellison’s connection with white supremacy groups was also well documented. News articles said that Ellison was mentored by Richard Girnt Butler, the founder of the Aryan Nations, and Robert E. Miles, the founder of the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ the Savior in Cohoctah, Michigan, both right-wing extremists who practiced “Christian Identity,” a religious ideology that is included on the FBI’s watch list of extremist religions. The belief system is a Christian interpretation that advocates that only the “Aryan race” are descendants of ancient Israelites and therefore God’s chosen people.

 It has also been said that Robert G. Millar eventually became one of Ellison’s spiritual advisors. Millar founded Elohim City, a private community in Oklahoma. Millar was one of the most prominent leaders to the Christian Identity movement and had ties to members of The Order and convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in the 1990s.

‘Guns and God’

An article titled “Guns and God,” that ran in The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, on Nov. 11, 1981, gave details on how Ellison came to establish the church and base it in the remote Ozark location. 

“A fundamentalist minister of the Christian Church in San Antonio, Texas, Ellison said he began receiving messages from God in the late 1960s, warning him that the country was becoming mired in a spiritual and economic mess. 

“‘In the early part of 1970,’ he said, ‘God spoke to me and told me to come to this part of the country. He didn’t tell me exactly this spot. He showed me on a map an area between Springfield (Mo.), Little Rock (Ark.), Memphis (Tenn.) and St. Louis.’

“After an initial stab at establishing a community in Missouri floundered, Ellison and about 25 holdovers from that settlement moved in 1975 to their current location, about 150 miles north of Little Rock. They named it Zarephath, after the biblical place where Elijah took refuge during the famine, and Horeb, an ancient name for Mt. Sinai, where Moses received the law of God.”

The Encyclopaedia of Arkansas website says that the isolated location was suitable for Ellison’s intentions “because it is demographically concentrated with a predominantly white population, is secluded in rural terrain that makes monitoring by law enforcement agencies difficult, and is positioned on the border between two states, complicating jurisdictional responsibilities. 

“The CSA was one of many militias that supported the American Christian Patriot Movement. Followers of this ideology support hostility against any form of government above the county level, vilify Jews and non-whites as children of Satan, obsess about achieving religious and racial purification of the United States, believe in a conspiracy theory that regards Jewish leaders as controlling important financial and media positions within the U.S., and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

The Spokesman-Review article explained that by 1981, the community had quadrupled in size to more than 100 members with more than 40 children living among the ranks on the property. The farm was transformed into a guerilla training camp, complete with firing ranges, stockpiles of supplies and accommodations for hundreds of people. 

“During this period, Ellison explained the CSA mission as establishing an ‘Ark for God’s people’ for the coming race war. Ellison viewed “God’s people” as white Christians. In 1982, at the height of the CSA’s activities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suspected that it had just over 100 active members,” the EoA article said. 

The group was organized in a way which it pooled its money together and shared much of the food that residents hunted or grew. The community hosted a communal garden and raised hens, goats, sheep and rabbits as food sources.

Although there were communal aspects to the CSA, the members did not live communally. Instead, individual families resided in a variety of rough-cut cedar cabins and trailer houses. Ellison lived in the largest house, and one of the few with running water and electricity.

The men of CSA reportedly cut wood for local farmers and a nearby cedar mill. They also took on other odd jobs like construction work, to help earn money for the settlement and fellow members. They were known to be friendly with many of their neighbors, and even joined the Pontiac Volunteer Fire Department to give back to the greater community. In 1981, then Marion County Sheriff Roger Edmonson was quoted as saying, “They all seem like real good people,” in an article that ran in the Fort Meyers News-Press that September. Although, other neighbors expressed worries about the community’s extreme beliefs and seemingly growing stockpile of firearms.

With the exception of a few women who served as school teachers and provided lessons for children in a small on-property schoolhouse, most of the women who lived there served a very subservient role.

The Spokesman-Review interviewed one woman on the property, who said most of the women there enjoyed their role very much. “‘Women who want equality are messing up bad,’ said Donna Watts, the mother of four children with a fifth on the way. ‘They don’t know how good they’ve got it.’

“‘We can talk about equal rights all day long, but when it gets down to the fistfighting, see who overcomes who,”’ snarled her husband, Ancel,” the article said. 

Most CSA women had lives solely centered around taking care of the home, caring for children, growing and harvesting gardens, canning food and making meals for their families. 

Strong emphasis on the ‘Sword’

Ellison was not shy about sharing the community’s belief that war was on the horizon and the community’s continued preparation for facing the battle when it arrived. Families attended church twice a week and Bible classes three times a week with this ideology at the forefront of the lessons.

“Christianity is not a pacifistic religion,’ Ellison told a reporter. “The enemies of God and the enemies of Christianity have tried to make it appear that way, but it’s not true.”

The CSA’s beliefs were founded on verses in the Bible, but not gentle admonitions to turn the other cheek or convert swords into plowshares. Ellison said his inspiration came from passages such as Matthew 10:34: “Think not that I come to send peace on Earth,” Jesus said in that chapter. “I come not to send peace, but a sword.”

And it was easy to see how the inspiration of the sword was woven not only into the community’s name but also into the fabric of its strongest beliefs. 

“The men stroll the encampment in military-issue fatigues or camouflage uniforms, German army boots on their feet, ammunition clips, knives and sidearms on their belts and semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders.

“Although he refused to disclose the exact size of the camp’s arsenal of weapons, Ellison boasted that it is extensive and includes almost any weapon legally obtainable today. Each home here is well stocked with arms, and the arms are kept loaded at all times. 

“All the men here have guns. They clutch their rifles as a mother does a newborn baby. Weapons are worn casually in the home and carried into the one-room cedar church, where song and prayer often dwell on the upcoming struggle,” The Spokesman-Review article said. 

Unlike other religions who use Sunday as a day of rest, the CSA community used the sacred day to practice military drills and other maneuvers.

“The soldiers are given extensive practice in both wilderness and urban survival. For training purposes, they have erected a small town of cedar huts and towers, which they use in their war games.

“It is called Silhouette City, for the cardboard human silhouettes instructors tack up in the various huts. The invaders must learn to choose quickly between enemy silhouettes, which are to be killed, and friendly figures, which are to be left alone,” the article reported. 

Teaching others at survival school

In addition to its own preparation, the CSA community found a revenue stream in operating a “settlement survival school” in which they offered the “survival and defense courses to the public, sharing skills of wilderness survival, personal home defense and urban warfare, basic weaponry, military fieldcraft, Christian martial arts and Biblical applications of force and defense,” according to an article printed in the News-Press. 

CSA community member Randall Rader, then 30, told the News-Press: “We are on the verge or at the beginning of what’s called the tribulation. There are going to be some rough times. Two-thirds of the world population is going to die.

“If I can save the life of one of God’s people, I’ve succeeded. If I’ve trained some grandmother to shoot a gun to protect herself from getting robbed or mugged, I done well. If I train one policeman to shoot better, or fire fight, I done well,” Rader said.

Trainees of the week-long survival school were only asked to pay what they could afford, as Ellison and the others operated the school on a donation-only basis. 

Silhouette City was the centerpiece of the trainings. [It is] a block-long ghost town strewn with rubble and burned-out, bullet riddled cars, is one of the training grounds... The buildings are hollowed out and dilapidated, constructed that way to simulate a city destroyed by looters or blown up in a nuclear blast. ‘Quite often we will put dead animals around here to make it more real,’ Rader said. ‘If you can get to where that stuff doesn’t shock you, you can handle it a lot better.’ ... A sign on a tree says, ‘Silhouette City, Pop.: Perverse Enemies of God.’ A likeness of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini peers out from one of the buildings. A broken sign near a hollowed out-shed reads, “U.S. Embassy, Tehran, Iran... Trainees practice house-to-house combat here and various offensive and defensive tactics. Often they set fire to the rubble in the buildings and train under those conditions.”

The camp attracted groups from a number of right-wing paramilitary groups, including the Christian Patriots Defense League, the Ku Klux Klan and Posse Comitatus. 

By 1984, Ellison and another primary CSA spiritual leader, Kerry Noble, gave an interview with The Atlanta Journal saying that they’d closed the camp down a few years prior and softened some of their beliefs. 

“‘We shut down the school a couple of years ago,’” Noble said in the interview. At that time, about half of the encampment, termed the “most radical” by Ellison, drifted away. He said many of them went deeper into the mountains of Utah and Idaho to practice their survivalist ways. 

“‘I used to be a lot more radical than I am today,’ [Ellison] said, smiling. ‘You know how people put bumper stickers on their cars saying they had rather be doing this or that? I had one on my car that said, ‘I’d rather be killing communists.’ But that generated a little too much attention.’”

Editor’s note: This series of articles will continue in next week’s Ozark County Times with information on the April 1985 standoff with the ATF and other police organizations.