Photo by: AP photo Grant County, Ore., residents voted to ban the United Nations and allow trees on federal land to be cut without U.S. Forest Service approval.

JOHN DAY, Ore. - Grant County residents have a message for Washington and the United Nations: Leave us alone.

By about a 2-to-1 margin, voters approved measures banning the United Nations in this ranch and timber county and allowing people to cut trees on federal land without U.S. Forest Service approval. ``We intend to push the limit, push the envelope on this,'' said Dave Traylor, who helped write the measures.

Home to about 7,500 people, Grant County is a place where cowboy hats, hay farms and horse trailers are ubiquitous and the two radio stations play Christian or country music.

More than 60 percent of the land - about the size of Connecticut - is managed by the federal government. The 13.5 percent jobless rate is second-highest in Oregon.

The first measure says the United Nations wants to take away people's guns, seize private property, control the education of children and establish ``one world religion-Pantheism [and] world taxation.''

Signs declaring the county a ``UN- free zone'' are going up.

``The U.N. scares me. If anything ever got bad, we could have foreigners here controlling us,'' said John Day painter and muralist Patricia Ross, 55.

Bud Trowbridge, whose family settled John Day in 1862, said he's ready to use force to protect property from the United Nations: ``We're trying to avoid a fight. But we still got our guns.''

Backers of the measures blame federal timber policies and environmental restrictions for keeping them off lands that had given them jobs as loggers, mill workers and ranchers.