Richard Butler Establishes Aryan Nations Compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho

In 1974, Richard Girnt Butler, a 55-year-old retired aeronautical engineer and Christian Identity adherent, uses proceeds from a profitable invention to purchase a 20-acre property near Hayden Lake, Idaho, establishing what will become the nerve center of the white supremacist movement in North America for the next quarter century. Butler, who had been mentored by Christian Identity pastor Wesley Swift and served as director of the Christian Defense League, moves from California to north Idaho with the explicit goal of creating an “Aryan homeland” in the Pacific Northwest.

Butler initially forms a “Christian Posse Comitatus” group at the old farmhouse property, then by 1977 establishes the Church of Jesus Christ Christian with its political-paramilitary wing called Aryan Nations. The organization blends Christian Identity theology—a racist interpretation claiming white Europeans are the true Israelites and Jews are satanic—with explicit Nazi ideology and symbolism. The compound features guard towers, barbed wire fencing, and buildings decorated with swastikas and white supremacist imagery.

Beginning in 1979, Butler hosts annual Aryan World Congresses that draw hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and skinheads from across North America and internationally. The gatherings become crucial networking events for the violent far-right, facilitating coordination between previously disparate hate groups. In the 1980s, Butler deliberately expands recruitment efforts, capitalizing on agricultural economic distress by inviting struggling family farmers to live at the compound for free in exchange for participation in the movement. He also targets youth through an Aryan youth academy and annual skinhead music festivals held every April in honor of Hitler’s birthday, and begins recruiting prison inmates through a newsletter titled “Calling Our Nation.”

The compound’s influence peaks in the mid-1980s with direct connections to The Order, a terrorist splinter group that conducts armed robberies stealing over $4 million, bombs a Boise synagogue, and murders Jewish radio host Alan Berg in 1984. Butler faces federal charges for seditious conspiracy related to plots to overthrow the U.S. government but is acquitted in 1988. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Aryan Nations regularly blankets Coeur d’Alene and surrounding communities with white supremacist propaganda and holds intimidating parades in downtown Coeur d’Alene, though local residents immediately form the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in response. In 1986-1987, a series of bombings targets the homes of local human rights activists.

The compound’s reign ends in 2000 when the Southern Poverty Law Center wins a $6.3 million civil judgment against Aryan Nations on behalf of Victoria Keenan and her son Jason, two Native Americans beaten by Aryan Nations security guards in 1998. The judgment forces Butler into bankruptcy and the compound is sold at auction. The new owners demolish the buildings in 2001. Butler’s establishment of the Hayden Lake compound exemplifies how extremist movements strategically selected Idaho’s rural areas for organizing bases, exploiting weak local law enforcement capacity and limited government oversight to build infrastructure for domestic terrorism and white supremacist recruitment that influenced Idaho’s political culture and created persistent patterns of intimidation against minority communities throughout the region.