American farmers betrayed, beaten, tear-gassed, herded and imprisoned by their own government for daring to protest authority? Welcome to rebellion.
One giant cause for U.S. agriculture began with one small cut when a Missouri farmer pulled a knife. As government gunmen hovered on rooftops and baton-wielding police closed ranks with tear gas, Jessie Small, alongside his son, Joe Small, darted between the cab and trailer of a U.S.-bound produce truck and sliced through the air lines, locking the vehicle’s brakes and turning a giant hissing into the sound of defiance.
Backed by 250 fellow farmers, Small exposed a government narrative and lit the fuse on one of the most significant, yet forgotten, episodes of modern U.S. agriculture record.
A protest march by a small band of farming brothers careened into a buck-wild physical melee and mass arrest, followed by thousands of incensed growers from across the U.S. descending on the border town of McAllen, Texas, threatening to tear down a county prison with tractors and trigger a breakout with a break-in. As the clock rolled on three surreal days of incarceration in 1978, farmers Jericho-marched around the facility as violence waited in the wings.
“It may be hard for some folks to believe, but it all happened,” Joe Small says. “Every word and then some more.”
“Helluva wild time,” he adds. “It was about American farmers refusing to sit back, obey, and do nothing, and it’s one of the damnedest stories that nobody knows.”
Bloodshed Cometh
In the late 1970s, farm country faded from a financial shine. A deep market rut and high interest rates pushed many farmers toward a desperate fork—pathetic commodity prices to the left and foreclosure to the right.
In 1977, at a gas station-diner in Campo, Colo., five producers tapped a groundswell of populist discontent and seeded the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), sparking an explosion of farmer meetings across the U.S. and drawing participation from 1.5 million farmers only a year later. Addressing the need for change, AAM’s dual pillars rested on the need for parity (a crop price to cover production costs and enable a survivable living) and country of origin (COOL) changes.
“When you have desperate men losing family land or watching their children’s future slip away, they can turn to violence really fast,” says David Senter, a former Johnson County, Texas farmer and current AAM president. “Instead, AAM gave farmers an outlet and they knew they weren’t alone—otherwise American agriculture was going to see bloodshed.”
15 Hours to Mayhem
Perhaps better suited to a Twain novel rather than a farming career, Jessie Small (decd. 2021) and Joe Small, 72, are agriculture legends after decades spent buccaneering in combine convoys across almost every state in the Union, cutting grain from California to the East Coast.
In the 1970s, the father-and-son duo, along with nephew, Chris Small, lived in the Missouri Bootheel and farmed in Kennett. They grew 600 acres of soybeans and wheat, but their main income derived from custom cutting.
“I was 24, dad was 54, and making money was over,” Joe emphasizes. “There was a dark mood across farming country and you could almost touch it. We were trying to get politicians to see this downturn was real and getting worse. I remember $1.80 per bushel of wheat. You couldn’t grow crops and make money, and farmers couldn’t afford to pay us to cut crops.”
“People were losing farms on 18, 19, and 20% interest, but our reps and senators did nothing. Prices for cattle, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and row crops were all a joke. It was like being forced down a one-way road with no intersections and not being able to turn around—you’ve got too much invested and can’t sell. You go forward or bust.”
“What was the only solution when our elected officials wouldn’t help? Do it ourselves.”
Jessie, Joe, and Chris began attending AAM meetings with roughly 25 other Bootheel producers in an abandoned service station in downtown Kennett and heard details about a flurry of strikes and arrests.
Out of the gate during the first two months of 1978, AAM-related protests broke out across the U.S. On Jan. 4, farmers set up nine-day roadblocks at three spots along the Canadian border and denied entry to cattle trucks. A few days later, farmers set up pickets in El Paso, Texas, and blocked incoming cattle loads at the border. Continuing the momentum, in Laredo, Texas, producers encircled a freezer storage plant filled with multi-million pounds of Mexican beef. In Tacoma, Wash., several farmers were arrested at the docks for attempting to prevent wheat loading onto a transport ship. In Portland, Ore., farmers surrounded a cold storage warehouse and protested meat imports.
Next on the schedule? Via old-school prayer chain transmissions and word-of-mouth declarations, AAM beckoned the faithful to a bridge over the Rio Grande where produce and cattle flowed in from Reynosa, Mexico.
“Details? We knew hardly nothing at all,” Small says. “Just get there. Go see what is happening and if we can help. That’s it: Load up and go.”
Piling into a brown 1975 Ford station wagon wearing wood grain trim, the Small trio fell into a convoy with several other Bootheel farmers and hit the highway for McAllen, Texas.
Hellbent behind the wheel of the rumbling V8 Country Squire, Small had no inkling of the turmoil ahead: He was on a 15-hour drive to mayhem and the Great Bridge Rebellion.
Into the Trap
Spanning the Rio Grande River at McAllen (technically Hidalgo) in south Texas, the McAllen-Hidalgo Bridge was a funnel for incoming agriculture goods—imports that incensed AAM farmers.
“In Mexico, crops were sprayed with DDT or other chemicals banned in the U.S., and they were bringing vegetables, fruit, and beef in, all produced in ways that USDA would never tolerate on U.S. soil,” Small notes.
“We were sick of the double standard,” he adds. “There was nothing on the Mexican products to tell American consumers where this stuff was grown or raised.”
Othal Brand, McAllen’s mayor, was a flashpoint of farmer anger. Brand farmed ground in both Mexico and the U.S. and was “buttering his bread” on both sides of the Rio Grande, contends Small.
“It was shameful,” Small says. “Brand was bringing his Mexican crops across the border and putting USDA labels on them to pretend they were grown in the U.S. He wasn’t the only one, because several packing plants were involved, and everybody knew it. That’s why we wanted a way to show how bad this was hurting American farming.”
The solution? A staged border incident to highlight the situation for the U.S. media and public.
With farmers from roughly 20 different states steadily checking into McAllen-area motels and congregating in local halls or gyms for meetings, AAM made no attempt at secrecy or surprise: They approached Brand and requested permission for a prearranged bridge stoppage and photo opportunity.
Brand agreed to allow the gathering, provided the farmer group behaved in an orderly manner: Walk onto the bridge, stop a truck for show, gain media attention, take pictures, and leave McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge. No harm, no foul.
However, Brand dealt from the bottom of the deck, according to Don Kimbrell, a renowned northwest Texas farmer. (A year later, in 1979, Kimbrell drove an open-cab tractor 1,800 miles in dead winter for 21 days from the Panhandle to Washington, D.C. to demand congressional attention.) Kimbrell answered AAM’s phone tree alarm and hopped into a crammed sedan with five other farmers for a 12-hour trip from Swisher County to McAllen.
“The fix was in,” Kimbrell says. “Brand was going to try and make us look like fools, but he bit off much, much more than he could chew.”
“It was rigged from the get-go,” Small echoes. “We were walking into a trap.”
Pulling the Blade
On March 1, Small and Kimbrell, along with almost 250 like-minded farmers, parked roughly a quarter mile from the bridge and began walking toward what they believed was a ceremonial protest.
Small quickly caught wind of a setup. “We headed toward the bridge and started seeing law enforcement on top of nearby buildings with rifles. We were pointing up at the rooftops and counting about 50 armed gunmen. What the hell was going on? This was before we even reached the bridge.”
“When we got on the bridge, there was law enforcement everywhere, but it was strange because they didn’t have any regular markings on their uniforms.” Small’s recollection is backed by Gerald McCathern, an AAM leader and high-profile Texas farmer from Deaf Smith County, who described police with no name plates or visible identification in From the White House to the Hoosegow.
Kimbrell claims state authorities were in overkill mode. “Brand brought in five divisions of police to control us and had troopers ready. They were going to make an example of us. There was even a machine gun on a tripod under a tarp at the middle of the bridge, and I don’t know if Americans or Mexicans set it up, but it was sure there.”
The Smalls were among the first farmers to reach the bridge’s center, and the trio helped stop the first truck to cross—as allowed by Brand. All other traffic, by agreement, had been held on the Mexican side. “We stopped an 18-wheeler loaded with watermelons bound for U.S. customers who assumed the melons were grown in America, but were sprayed with every banned pesticide you could name,” Small explains. “One of our boys slipped the driver a $20 for his trouble and the driver ran clear back to Mexico and off the bridge. I don’t what happened to the damn keys.”
“It was supposed to be genuinely peaceful,” Small recounts. “We stop one truck, protest, get pictures, and tell the truth to the country. That was the deal, but Mayor Brand had other plans.”
The McAllen Bridge protest went sideways. “Brand shrunk a 2-hour permit into minutes, even though we’d come from across the country to join in,” Small says. “He shut us down after no more than 15 minutes and figured he’d make us look like fools by provoking us. The police started moving around the edges of the bridge, but we couldn’t tell what was happening.”
As a single-axle, boom-and-cable wrecker rolled to the bridge’s center and hooked onto the watermelon truck, Jessie Small read the tea leaves faster than any other producer and prepared to foul Brand’s plans. Having forgotten his pocketknife on a motel bedside table, Jessie called out for a knife, and a Georgia farmer slapped a 4” double-bladed, lock-back in Jessie’s hand.
Leaning over the rails between cab and trailer, Jessie sliced through the brake lines, releasing a gush of air and locking the truck’s brakes. He pivoted to return the knife, but realizing the gravity of the offense, the Georgia farmer recoiled and ceded possession. “Hellllll no, Jessie, that’s your knife now.”
Jessie slipped the blade into his pocket and waited for the fireworks to begin. The wrecker driver didn’t have a clue the truck was locked solid.
“My daddy had cut those lines and that truck was going nowhere. Nowhere,” Small says. When the driver let out the clutch, the front end of the wrecker went straight up in the air and scared the living hell out of the driver. The wrecker crashed back down on the bridge and both front wheels broke off and the tires blew out.”
“Brand had factored in everything but cut brake lines,” Small continues. “He was furious because we crashed his party. That’s when he made his biggest mistake.”
As police barked bridge evacuation orders on bullhorns and loudspeakers, 250 red-blooded farmers were caught in a pincer movement. Noise, distance, confusion, separation, billy clubs, tear gas—chaos.
“Had they resisted,” McCathern (decd. 2021) wrote in Hoosegow, “there surely would have been bloodshed greater than that which developed at Kent State.”
“They Couldn’t Shoot Us”
“You couldn’t hear the police orders because we were stretched all over the bridge,” Small says. “We had the Mexicans blocking us from behind, and U.S. police along the sides of the bridge and front of the bridge squeezing us and coming in swinging batons. It’s a lie that we were anything but peaceful, and anybody on earth who knows anything about farmers knows 250 of us could put up a helluva fight if we chose violence.”
“We were on the bridge for just a handful of minutes when the police got on their bullhorns and ordered us off,” Kimbrell concurs. “No way. At the back, our guys couldn’t even hear everything being shouted, and everything went crazy when they gassed us.”
Police, in riot gear and gas masks, attempted to herd the farmer cluster off the bridge. Senter emphasizes the watershed moment: “That’s how sad the situation in America was for U.S. agriculture in the late 1970s. They teargassed hundreds of American farmers on a bridge for trying to expose what was happening with food imports.”
Prison buses were parked beside the bridge’s exit in a fenced-off compound, waiting to collect the protesting farmers. “Try to imagine the chaos for 250 farmers trapped on a bridge,” Small says. “You’re bunching up to escape the gas, trying to dodge swinging batons, trying to listen to bullhorns you can’t hear, all while staying peaceful. They were only able to round up 200 of us on the buses and I’d estimate 50 guys got away and several got put in the hospital because of injuries. If prison buses sitting there waiting to haul you away isn’t evidence of Brand’s preplan, then I don’t know what is.”
The buses rolling to the Hidalgo County jail were filled with coughing and cussing, but the farmers had no fear, Small recalls. “We weren’t afraid to go to jail to see what’d they’d cook up next. We knew they couldn’t shoot us. Yes, they could beat us even more, but what we were doing was worth it. We were men with a just cause.”
Kill-Dozer
The Hidalgo County Jail received 200 farmers—most of whose worst crime in life to that date was a speeding ticket.
The farmers filed into the jail’s inner courtyard and were processed one-by-one: Miranda rights, fingerprints, and a Class C felony charge. But after paperwork completion, what were the screws to do with 200 farmers in a jail that was already at near-capacity? Dump them in the courtyard to sleep on the grass.
“We were wandering around all over the place and they had no idea what to do with us,” Small says, “and Brand’s plan got torpedoed because he put 200 men of one mind in the same location and wrote a recipe for his own public relations disaster.”
Jail officials provided access to a single room and telephone for individual calls, but the AAM farmers turned the room into a strike headquarters, manned by Levelland producer Bobby Jackson, who took on the role of unofficial communications director. An outgoing deluge of all-hands-on-deck calls roared out of the jail from afternoon through the night to hometowns, AAM strike offices, politicians, and farmers across the country.
Several farmers who escaped the law enforcement perimeter during the bridge arrests rounded up dozens of blankets and delivered the load to the jail, providing their brethren with cover at nightfall. “They couldn’t get hold of nearly enough blankets, so they brought a lot of newspapers too—anything to make sure we stayed warm,” Kimbrell recalls. “That place was more like a prison, instead of a jail, and we were herded like cattle. There wasn’t enough room in the cells for so many of us, so we spent the night outside in the rain.”
By the following morning, the story was on national news and McAllen officials realized the farmer protest had gone viral—even in the pre-digital age. Ants to sugar, 3,000 farmers from New Mexico to Georgia poured into McAllen, and soon surrounded the jail in a Jericho march, demanding immediate release. “The police said they’d reduce the charges if we pled guilty,” says Kimbrell. “No sir. We did nothing wrong.”
McCathern, affectionately and respectfully dubbed as “Little Napoleon” by his fellow farmers, was raising awareness for AAM in Washington, D.C., when the farmer arrests were made. He hopped the first flight to McAllen and negotiated with Hidalgo County officials. “I was amazed when I entered the inside of the compound and saw exactly how many were actually being held,” McCathern described. “Since I knew most of them personally, there was much handshaking and backslapping as I moved through the crowd. I was very relieved to see that the extent of their injuries seemed to be only cuts and bruises. Later, I learned, however, that three of them were still in the hospital under treatment.”
“It rained that night and that helped wash off the tear gas, which still burned whenever you touched your eyes or mouth,” Small details. “We weren’t rolling for nothing, even when they reduced bail to $50. We were willing to take the rap because we weren’t violent and in our hearts, we knew we were doing right.”
Brand had a tiger by tale. Inside the jail, the farmer-prisoners were calm, collected, and calculating. However, outside the jail, tractors rumbling, the farmer-rescuers were threatening to tear down the front walls of the facility in kill-dozer style.
Prayer and Pledge
McAllen officials realized the pressure was ratcheting by the hour. “At some point on the second day,” Small recounts, “they moved some of us to cells on the second floor and there were a couple spots with a view outside. I could see farmers circling the prison around five, six, or eight abreast. They were marching and hollering and I’m talking about men, women, and kids—farm families that were as pissed off as you could get. But at the very front entrance, that’s where things were getting real. By the third day we were afraid people were gonna get killed.”
At the jail’s entrance, according to McCathern, farmers began driving tractors onto the front steps, threatening to smash down the prison walls. Royce Harvey, of Brownfield, Texas, joined by Georgia farmer Layton Kersey, drove the lead tractor.
“They had this John Deere 4-wheel-drive tractor with steel around the motor with a dozer blade on it, sitting there running outside the main doors,” Small explains. “Then there were three or four tractors idling behind. They told the sheriff and all the officials that if we weren’t released by the third day, they were gonna straight up tear down the jail. They meant every word and we were on the third day.”
“It was tense like you couldn’t believe with farmers still racing into McAllen in by the hour and more on the way,” Senter echoes. “Somebody pulled a tractor onto the jail’s front entrance and the police cars were blocked by other tractors and most of the police were holed up inside the jail, keeping away from the anger building outside. It was getting close to a deadly outcome.”
Tension mounting, jail officials locked the farmers into jail cells and prepared for a bullrush. As the impasse reached fever pitch, McAllen officials finally caved, agreeing to reduce all charges as no-record paperwork and allow another bridge protest the following day.
At 7 p.m., the farmers walked single-file out of the Hidalgo County Jail to a cheering crowd, bowed their heads for a prayer of thanks, and followed with recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Case Closed
The following day, the farmers set course for the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, hellbent on another protest. “This time, the machine gun at the middle of the bridge was ready and it wasn’t covered by the tarp anymore,” Kimbrell says, “but sometimes, you gotta be willing to pay the cost for what’s right.”
The change in fortune from farmer lock-up to farmer photo-op was extreme, Senter describes. “We marched right back to that bridge. We stopped a truck loaded with onions coming from Mexico that actually said, ‘Product of Texas—Brand Co.’ It was Othal Brand’s own vegetable produce rolling into the U.S. from south of the border. And the media got pictures of it all. Case closed.”
In the moment, and for years afterwards, Small says the participants in the bridge protest attached no historical significance to the event. “We weren’t special people, but we were united and refused to dance to the government’s tune. We were proud to join the least criminal protest ever. They thought we would roll, but we wouldn’t plead to nothing.”
Would Small do it all again? “You bet I would. It makes people wake up. Everything you do in life as a farmer can’t all be about profit on your farm. Sometimes you better make a stand for truth or else you’ll lose all that profit later down the road. I’m not too impressed with farmers that never speak up.”
(One year later, partially due to momentum gained at the McAllen Bridge protest, AAM launched a coast-to-coast Tractorcade in January 1979, featuring an epic 5,000-tractor army that crossed the country and occupied the National Mall in Washington, D.C., rattling politicians and drawing congressional attention to an agriculture industry in collapse.)
Forty-five years after the bridge protest, what happened to the knife that Small’s father, Jessie, wielded to cut away the government narrative? Jessie kept the knife as a memento of March 1, 1978, storing the blade in his gun cabinet until his passing in 2021. Currently, the Small family proudly retains possession.
“The knife is part of a history that should be preserved whether you like it or not, but people nowadays want to pick and choose which history is worth keeping according their latest views,” Small concludes. “I don’t care what you think about our story—just don’t erase it because it’s about making sure you’ve got something to eat on your plate.”
For more from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com 662-592-1106) see:
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Young Farmer uses YouTube and Video Games to Buy $1.8M Land
While America Slept, China Stole the Farm
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
The Arrowhead whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History
US Farming Loses the King of Combines
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Rat Hunting with the Dogs of War, Farming’s Greatest Show on Legs
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
