FEW MILITANTS DAUNTED BY FREEMEN JAILING.

Byline: David Foster Associated Press 

Even as a weekend rodeo replaces defiant Freemen as this town's chief roadside attraction, Americans elsewhere should brace for more Freemen-like extremists, watchdog groups say.

``This is a movement, not just a few people out on a ranch in Montana,'' said Bill Wassmuth, executive director of the Seattle-based Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment.

On Saturday, the steady rhythms of farm life replaced high anxiety around Justus Township, the foreclosed wheat farm where Freemen held the FBI at bay for 81 days until their surrender Thursday.

Black Angus cattle wandered down a dirt road where black armored vehicles rolled just days earlier. And neighbors pitched in to help rancher Dean Clark cultivate a field off-limits to him throughout the long siege.

Clark bought the land at auction last fall, but Freemen - some of them his relatives - ordered him to stay off.

Now those Freemen are gone. Most are sitting in a Billings jail awaiting trial on charges that include writing bogus checks worth millions of dollars and threatening a federal judge.

But the philosophy of the Freemen and one of its leaders, LeRoy Schweitzer, lives on. Wassmuth said some 800 people attended seminars at Justus Township, learning the Freemen recipe for clogging courts with phony liens and collecting free money from unsuspecting companies and government agencies.

``Their activities are showing up in 18 states,'' Wassmuth said. ``People are filing bogus financial statements, trying to cash bogus checks. Many of them are identifiable back to LeRoy Schweitzer.''

Those who monitor far-right extremists said the Freemen and other groups - militias, tax protesters, white supremacists and common-law advocates - share anti-government beliefs that invite confrontations with established authorities.

The Northwest has a big share of those groups, from northern Idaho's white-supremacist Aryan Nations to the Militia of Montana, which sells conspiracy-theory literature by mail.

Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann agreed that the arrest of Jordan's Freemen would not dampen the zeal of other far-right activists. Even he believes the Freemen looked foolish, but he said their coming trial will be a forum for his own group's claims that U.S. currency is illegal.