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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the map in the article, it looks like it is pretty much a checkerboard. Ie. Half is owned, half is not. So you'd expect a 50% reduction (minus a couple of percent for edge squares which are not yet enclosed)

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Which article has a map of this ranch? I've been looking but haven't found one.

EDIT: I finally found maps in the opinion:

https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...

Inset on the left, about a third of the way down

It's a blurry map, but seems to show this ranch (in yellow)

Oh, yeah, I saw that one, but I wouldn't try to draw any conclusions from it. It's a link to another article[0] that provides the map with a proper caption:

> The area around Elk Mountain is surrounded by a checkerboard pattern of public (yellow) and private (white), as well as state (blue) lands.

So the yellow is actually the public land, and it's unclear how much of the white is actually the ranch in question and how much is just other private land.

[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...

wow I didn't think they meant checkerboard pattern literally. I'd be interested to know why the land was partitioned that way across such a wide area

I remember looking at old Metsker maps of Washington counties when I was a kid and wondering about all those checkerboards of green and white land. My dad told me the green was public land, and couldn't really explain why it was divided that way. So it is, literally, divided up like a checkerboard. Wikipedia has an enlightening article on it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

You can see this pattern all across the west, a result of land grants meant to subsidize railroad development. The federal government platted all the land into sections, then gave every other section along each new rail corridor to the developer. The idea was to encourage the creation of higher-quality infrastructure, by motivating the railroad to increase the value of their land holdings, instead of simply laying track as cheaply as possible like they might do if they were paid by the mile.

Here:

https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...

or here:

https://i.imgur.com/W3FhYz0.jpg

Wow, that’s wild! When I heard about this case, I assumed the rancher owning diagonally-adjacent lots was a rare edge case. From the map, it looks like this strange situation was intentionally created at large scale. Anyone know why?

Mostly from railroad land grants in the late 1800’s. Land along routes was checkerboard divided, odd lots stayed feds, even went to railroad companies.

I was originally remembering a time period when the railroad virtually had public domain authority to seize private lands, but the history of the land grants in Nebraska is actually much worse: https://nebraskastudies.org/en/1850-1874/railroads-settlemen...

Canada did the same.

The company building the railroad was paid not only in cash, but also land (which was suddenly very valuable next to a transcontinental railway).

But to avoid giving them all the prime spots, the checkerboard system was put in and they were given 50%, so the other 50% could be purchased by anyone.

It’s a known way of gaming the system (mostly), and seems like the state and county is generally a fan too, since the owners are pretty rich (and likely curry favors locally), and the public land is federal, so not ‘theirs’.

Trying to interpret your words here - is this a situation where the landowner has to pay the government for the part they own, or pay taxes on it or something, and the checkerboard pattern reduces the payment while giving them effective ownership over the whole area? Maybe the locals are sort of scamming the feds?

It’s a bit indirect. The private land is worth a lot more if they can connect contiguous lots, expressly or implicitly.

It would cause a huge uproar if the fed sold the land, but this allows them to defacto ‘capture’ it as long as no one asserts the right laws.

By stopped the public from accessing the intervening public land, it defacto gives them ‘ownership’ (as in they can do what they want with it) on the federal public land, but without having to pay for it, pay taxes on it, etc.

These rural areas are typically pretty poor, and the private land owners usually have no issues influencing county and state level politics. The county this is happening in (Carbon County) has a hair under 15k people in it, and a median income of $62k. Wyoming overall has a population of $ 570k and most of them live in 1-2 cities.

Dropping $1m in Washington DC will barely make a dent lobbying wise. Spreading the same over the Wyoming and Carbon County gov’t would be… quite powerful.

So if each private section erects a square-shaped pillar which has a side of ~3 feet at each corner, would that be both legal, and sufficient to prevent people from crossing?

Alternately, a tall fence?

No. As the article explains, it's illegal to physically block access to the land, and it's legal to climb over man-made obstacles like fences.

No, the judge said, you can cross the corner as long as you don’t step on the private land. The land owner may not create a physical obstacle at that corner. And if there is one, you are allowed to scale it to get to the other side of the corner.

It would be pretty hilarious if the land owner here gets charged in connection with blocking access to public land with the chains.

Similarly, I wonder if there is any room for suits over valuation of land predicated on the exclusive use of inaccessible public land. Someone at some point has definitely advertised this as a plus of owning the adjacent land.

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