KALISPELL -- John Stokes, the on-air personality who once called environmentalists "green Nazis" and burned green swastikas at rallies, has put his radio station here up for sale with a national brokerage house specializing in moving media outlets.

The move follows recent Montana Supreme Court rulings that Stokes did not have rights to as much land as he claimed, and that the state had not, as Stokes alleged, bribed landowners to eliminate the easement upon which his radio towers sit.

It's a low-key conclusion to a volatile era in the Flathead, an era in which the community was explosively divided over the scope of government, and the traditional freedoms of the West.

What the pending sale of his radio station means depends upon whom you ask. His detractors say he has ranted his way out of business. Stokes says he's just gearing up for bigger and better things, including perhaps his syndicated debut on the national stage.

Either way, it signals a change, a revolution that seems to have been triggered not, as some feared, by the shot heard 'round the valley, but by the ka-ching of the cash register.

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Stokes moved to the Flathead Valley in the early 1990s, just as a countywide land-use plan was working its way toward completion.

Those were tricky times in the Flathead, times when traditional woods workers found themselves out of a job and pushed to the brink. Unemployment was high, and wages low.

The reasons for timber's decline were many, but the easiest targets the most visible and accessible were environmentalists and the government, in particular the U.S. Forest Service.

It was, in some ways, a perfect storm of Sagebrush Rebellion, during which an unexpected alliance was formed between blue-collar locals disenfranchised by the flagging timber industry and ideologues already opposed to government rule.

And so when the government Flathead County, this time started making noises about controlling individuals' use of their private property, it was a bit like "putting a match to tinder," in the words of former county attorney Tom Esch.

Whatever else he might have been, Stokes was provocative, and though he wasn't elected he had certainly made his mark. His full impact on the valley, however, would not be felt until 2000, when Stokes bought an AM radio station south of Kalispell. Suddenly he had a pulpit, a place where the phones were constantly lit up.

He called liberals and conservationists "pure, unadulterated satanic evil," and equated them to terrorists.

Stokes' advice: "Finish them off and make sure they don't have babies."

He named names, even announced where some high-profile environmentalists lived.

The more he talked, the more the phones lit up. This was no radical fringe; this was Main Street calling.

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During that decade, every single elected official winning a partisan race at every level of government in the Flathead was a Republican.

"The Old West myth of unlimited space and freedom was unraveling, and I think there was a real feeling of every man for himself, and in the name of God everybody get a gun," said Kate Hunt. "Everything blew up in fear and panic. I definitely didn't feel like I was represented by my government."

Hunt has become something of an arch-nemesis for Stokes, a liberal watchdog who listens to and even tapes his shows to use against him. She joined the Montana Human Rights Network, formed a Flathead chapter, launched a Web site to both track and attack Stokes.

It was a time of documented death threats coming from both sides, of tires flattened and windshields smashed. It was easy to get paranoid back then, Hunt said. People were, after all, coming to public meetings with guns on their hips.

"It was a nasty, messy business that for a while captured the Flathead County electorate," said George Darrow, former Republican head of the Montana Senate. "There was a very unfortunate cast of characters framing the discussion."

These days, the cast of characters remains much the same, but the discussion is framed in an entirely new way.

It's mind-boggling, really, to hear Hunt say this about Stokes: "You know, I have to admit, sometimes I agree with him these days. He gets going on the insurance industry, or corporate greed, and he's dead on. I'll agree with him, but his reasoning is just nuts."

Again, who's nuts depends upon whom you ask.

Today, the time of sharp division between party lines appears to have passed.

"The extreme voices seem to have overplayed their hand," Darrow said.

Tom Esch never much liked all the name-calling and anger, especially when he found himself on the receiving end, but he's as quick as Hunt to admit, surprisingly, that at least part of him misses those years of vigorous debate. Is it better, he wonders, to be a flavorless oatmeal in a very expensive bowl, or a spicy hot tamale on a paper plate?

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Hunt, liberal as she is, complains that the parties sound too much the same these days, "reduced to set statements so similar that you can't tell them apart."

And Stokes who opposes U.S. involvement in Iraq but for reasons very different from Hunt's now grouses about the "well-heeled," the rich who move in, buy a big house, "get bored and start developing things. Chill out," Stokes said. "Relax. You don't have to build a mall or a golf course. Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

So what has happened in the Flathead that these two now agree on so much, and does it have anything to do with the pending sale of the station?

Some have said Stokes' brand of rabble-rousing has become irrelevant, but Esch wonders if it's not that the whole conversation has become irrelevant.

"People here aren't talking about timber sales anymore," Esch said. "They're talking about the new $30 million high school, or the investments at the community college."

When you have a house and a steady paycheck, Hunt agreed, it's harder to keep up the anger and the passion.

"They've shut down the resource industry," Stokes admitted. "There's no argument there anymore."

Stokes, however, does seem to have an argument with just about everyone else.

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He fought the Montana Department of Transportation over a right-of-way, then fought his own lawyer in that case. The state wants to rekindle that court battle to recover attorney fees.

He fought the landowners over whose field his towers tower, and he lost. He fought the state, arguing officials had bribed those landowners to reel in his easement, and lost again.

Now, his FCC license is being challenged, because "the Montana Human Rights Nitwits have an agenda to shut me down." And, he's fighting the city of Kalispell because they want his towers gone so they can expand the municipal airport.

That he could survive the many legal battles is, perhaps, testament to the level of support he enjoyed for most of a decade here.

But that he's put the station on the market, Hunt said, is testament to how a changing culture tipped the scales.

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Changing times aside, it would be a mistake to count John Stokes out.

The timber wars may be over, and Stokes may not like the result, but these days he has bigger fish to fry. Today, he's wearing a bright-red sweatshirt that says "Yum: start a feeding frenzy," and you can't help but get the idea that's just what he's going to do.

That despite the fact that Stokes recently was referred to by the local press as the "once-controversial" radio host at KGEZ.

"Maybe everyone's agreeing with me," he laughed. "Maybe that's why I'm not controversial."

In fact, he said, "I haven't backed off a bit. I scare myself sometimes with the things I say."

Stokes is eyeing a national radio platform from which he can tap that anger.

Hunt believes that anger, and Stokes' appeal, "diminishes in relation to the valley's increase in jobs and opportunities."

Many of those opportunities result from exactly the sort of environmental conservation Stokes fought against. Columbia Falls used to advertise itself as the "industrial hub of the Flathead Valley." Now, it's the "gateway to Glacier Park."

Also, Hunt said, the newcomers and there are many of those don't even know about the timber wars and the planning fights.

"We just got tired," Hunt said. "You can't keep up that level of intensity forever."

But, she admits, "if he sells the station there is a side of me that will miss him. He's a whacko, but he's our whacko."

And maybe, just maybe, John Stokes helped the Flathead retain its blue-collar roots, she said, and not become an over-regulated playground for the rich like Jackson Hole.

"He's abrasive," she said, "and too harsh. But he's not all wrong. Sure, we liberals want open space, but at what price? On a farmer's back? That can't work. Now that he's in perspective, and you can hear what he's saying, he's not always wrong."

She actually dreads the day he sells and is replaced by "some generic corporate programming."

"There's a side of me that regrets this whole thing," Hunt said. "We all thought it was going to end in some huge explosion, but it's all come to a kind of pathetic, depressing, dismal end."

Well, not if John Stokes has anything to do with it.