In case anyone was wondering about the $7.75 million clamed damages,
the claim is that allowing corner-crossing would cause the ranch to lose 25% of its value, and the ranch is currently valued at $31.1 million. Details: https://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/wyoming/article_a519...
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
Edit: the number came from a real estate agent acting as an expert witness, who said he would drop the value by 25% or 30%; it's not a mathematical/geometrical
argument.
The horrific reason for this figure is that owning a square in this ridiculous checkerboard is equivalent to owning 1/4 stake in the squares of public land that it's adjacent to. If you own four black squares on the checkerboard on all sides of a single white square, you also own the white square, because you are the only person who can legally pass through onto the public land.
By citing this figure, the plaintiffs are essentially admitting that they are claiming de facto ownership over the public's land.
Indeed, the actual buying of land in a checkerboard like this with this obvious intent is the most cynical, greedy thing, and I assume the only reason the government sold them the land in that pattern in the first place is because the rules allowing that were written by someone in the pocket of the folks looking to do this practice.
Actually, it's a lot older than that and seems to have been an honest mistake. From the ruling [0]:
> History and politics have complicated the pattern of land ownership in the West. To promote western expansion in the nineteenth century, the federal government encouraged the construction of rail lines through the West by granting every other 640-acre parcel along rail corridors to a railroad company. The hope was that the lands remaining with the government would increase in value as the companies built rail lines, which the government would later sell at high prices. The plan was successful further east, but the government struggled to sell the lands in the arid West. The result of this failed venture is the checkerboard pattern of public and private land that now plagues much of the West.
Thing is, nobody in the right mind back in 1850 or whathaveyou would have thought of "walking across private land to get somewhere" as some sort of civil or criminal trespass.
That's... how you got places.
If you actually damaged something -- broke a fence, stole a horse, dug a ditch, whatever -- then, yeah, you'd get in trouble if you got caught.
I heard from a friend that moved out to a rural area that especially the newcomers moving in from cities are super-sensitive about "their property". His neighbor -- from NYC -- threatened a lawsuit because my buddy's truck broke off some branches that extended out into the common road.
Folks that have been living out there awhile are cautious with outsiders, but overall a lot more neighborly, just because you have to be.
“The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".
[…]
The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.”
In Bavaria we have the problem, people like the country side, so idylic and romantic. Then they move, and all of a sudden the cows and church bells become a nuissance, not to speak of all the actual farm work going on.
To be fair, attaching a bell to a cow is animal cruelty and quite unnecessary nowadays. For the outrageous price of one cow bell you can also get RFID trackers for the whole herd. Or at least a handful of GPS trackers. And that also easily fixes the annoyance of cow bells.
Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.
That's also a problem in cities: people love the idea of living downtown in the old city center, close to cafes and stuff, and once they live there, they complain about the noise from those cafes.
To the extent it wasn't intentional to allow it, you would think it would have been easily rectified as soon as it started being exploited, if not for corruption. Imagine if you went to the gas station and said you wanted to buy specifically the second, fourth, and sixth gallons out of the pump, and the first, third, and fifth would "coincidentally" need to go into your tank too, but you shouldn't have to pay for them. They would tell you to F off out of there because that's stupid. Yet apparently the federal government was happy to sell the land in this pattern. This is a problem even Ticketmaster solved trivially simply by not allowing you to orphan one seat in the middle.
I just re-read your post after initially replying having missed the important detail that the now-private parts are the plots originally granted to the railroads. My last reply here was made without grasping that. Are these "rail line" situations the only (or at least vast majority of) places where these public/private checkerboards exist? Or did the government actually sell other land in such a pattern at the request of the buyer?
A checkerboard pattern is a horrifically inefficient way to claim territory in go.
It might be useful to consider why checkerboards are good shape in legal systems, but bad shape in go. Also why the legal system rejected checkerboards after some thought, at least provisionally.
(historical rant: You might as well resign if your opponent is not also 30k. Who comes up with these analogies? People who have barely heard of the game, like 10ks or sth?)
Go would be a halway analogy for two parties claiming checker-board plots aiming to deny access, if corner crossing isn't allowed.
The analogy breaks down because 'being allive' would require access to the edge, rather than having two liberties. Playing with such a different definition of life and death does seem like an interesting 'variation' of go.
Go is in so far a good analogy in that two stones that are only connected diagonally, aren't really connected. You can cut through them. And you should. Just like there hunters.
Let me extend my rant, please, around bad analogies and go.
A diagonal connection is a very thick connection. The major complaint about this connection is that it is not efficient; hearing someone say that the stones are not really connected is, once again, just hearing that you are 30-20k. I am being generous about 20k.
Our backyard backs onto a green space. The only way someone can get to the green space is to walk through our backyard or parachute in. Effectively our yard goes from 1/2 acre to 1 acre when including the green space. Basically we have taken ownership of it since only we can access it. It is definitely a selling point for the house.
There is a creek on one side. On the other side of the creek is more green space and another house. On either side of our house are other houses that back up to their own slices of the green space. Everyone has an agreement that we won’t go into anyone else’s part of the green space. Other people don’t have a way to access the green space without going through someone yard. Technically at either end they could get into the green space, but there is a forest without any paths and lots of blackberry plants and poison Ivy blocking the way. In all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anyone attempt it.
Based on this ruling and the cited prior case law I would not want to take that to court. It's fairly clear that the govt will uphold public access to public land, with a fallback of eminent domain (seizure for fair compensation) of private land in order to facilitate public access.
A prior case has a situation where the govt seized land to build a road to allow public access. The ruling was that the govt could not do such a thing without fair compensation.
Came about from the Land Ordinance of 1785 introduction of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) used by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).
Office types gridded up manifest destiny using squares within squares and created a pre GPS coordinate system for coding up space (within central north america).
While I'm not from that part of the world I spent a few years writing interop transformations betwixt all manner of "coord systems" across the globe that predate WGS84 et al.
The PLSS grid explains the locations of many midwest US roads and townships, and "checkerboard ownership" (families | businesses buying land to surround other land and then deny access to land not paid for) was one form of early system gaming.
The checkerboard pattern was explicitly the form of land grants to railroad companies to compensate them for laying track across the country. Early national equity compensation :)
Sure .. after the land parcels and ennumeration scheme had already been laid down .. and not limited to rail grants - there was a general US pattern of checkerboarding all land grants to disperse development.
The foundational aspect to the question posed is that land was gridded in abstract from afar before any aportions were made, a secondary aspect was that in some regions large tracts of those squares were initially granted to various railroads on an "every second large chunk" basis, another aspect was that in the days of open cattle grazing early land cattle barons realised they didn't have to own land to graze on it and they could control access to unowned land by only paying for surrounding land or for "chokepoint" land in rough terrain.
A 'final' aspect to the story is the creation of the US National Parks movement which started a wave of "freezing" as yet unsold land as permanently held as not for private use.
A key point is that the Land Grant Act of 1850 granted checkerbordered land to railroad companies within at most 50 miles of planned rail routes .. however that practice wasn't limited to rail grants - Tribal lands were also checkerboarded by the Dawes Act and public land was released on a checkerboard basis.
You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants - the large squares were the unit of sale and typically the early sales were for homesteads in the midst of unclaimed land with the next sale not being "right next door" but for another homestead block in the midst of unclaimed land.
It's the appeal of owning your house, shed, assets, yards, etc. while not having to pay to own the land your cattle are moved through for seasonal pastures.
Eventally all land would presumably have been purchased .. but the National Parks started freeing things up.
There's more on this (but not the complete picture) in:
> You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants
That’s interesting, there are places where public/private checkerboards emerged naturally? The wiki link only tells the land-grant and reservation part of the story.
There were also "released for public sale" checkerboards practices and tribal reservations that were checkerboarded.
I had a better grasp and notes on this in the late 1990s, if you read the wikipedia page closely I seem to recall they make brief passing reference to both Homestead and Dawes Acts (~ 31st congress (?) era IIRC).
The railroad grants were the largest best known example by a long shot I believe, however not the first or only example and all based on an ealier gridding abstraction and a practice of encouraging development to spread out.
There's an intertwining of rich private interests and public policy .. people with entire full PLSS squares were able to influence land release patterns and the idea of vast endless "untouched" lands where you weren't forced to have neighbours had appeal.
Railroad grants. The theory was that by granting land to railroads instead of money it incentivizes them to build the railroad well. By keeping half the land for the government the government profits from the increased value too. They just didn't think this far ahead.
That explains why it was split up, but not why in a square grid. It sounds like the "corner" issue could have been avoided by using a hexagon pattern, right? That way corners are only shared by sections that also share a side. Then again, I haven't been able to convince my friends that using a hexagon grid for our tabletop RPG games is worth it despite the advantages seeming obvious to me (no need for weird rules about moving diagonally), so I suppose this would have been a hard sell to the late 19th century government as well.
In the 19th century no one would so daft as to think ownership of a random plot of land would give you the right to keep people from traversing it. Someone cutting down your trees, hunting, grazing their cattle or sheep, mining, farming it, yes. Just walking across it? They'd think you were a loon.
And having grown up in Norway, I feel Americans talking of "land of the free" while allowing landowners to block off even their own land is offensive on the face of it.
The ridiculous lengths these hunters had to go to in order to avoid straying onto private land is antithetical to freedom (you still need hunting licenses in Norway; and permission to hunt on private land so there are still potential issues, but worrying about a few meters and the accuracy of GPS to avoid even crossing a tiny little portion of private land is not one of them).
I think it was a sound policy. The problem is that the government never decided to sell the land. If they fold it to individuals, those people can put in easements to access their land but that never happened
The land on which the railroad was built was handled separately. This was land in the vicinity of the proposed railroad, which would increase significantly in value if and only if a functional railroad was completed.
The land wasn't granted to build railroads on, it was granted in payment for the railroads. Towns would naturally spring up near the railroads, and both the government and the railroad companies could then sell the land to people who would live on it, farm it, ranch it, etc.
It is a bit easier with parcels that touch at corners, but that isn’t unique to using a checkerboard. With almost any way you cut land into parcels, people can surround a plot with land they own.
Also, this doesn’t require a single owner to own those black squares. It could also be four individual owners, each building a (virtual or physical) wall on the border of their land.
Because of that, I expect that any civilized country has laws that give land owners and their visitors the right to reach their land, so that they can benefit from owning it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_way)
There is some kind of hilarious circularity to this. It's almost comparable to founding a publicly-traded company which asserts that its principal source of profits will be shaking down doubters through the legal system, and then suing anyone who indeed expresses doubts for damages based on the expected loss in stock value if the company were to fail to bring or lose that very lawsuit.
(Is this an appropriate model for certain "reputation economy" actions that exist in many human societies, like duels over perceived slights to one party's physical prowess?)
This ranch apparently consists of quite a few squares in a complicated pattern, but even if it were just the four it wouldn't end up being exactly 20% because you would have to factor in the partial ownership of every adjacent public square, not just the one you surround completely.
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)
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...
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?
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.
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.
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].
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.
Not all land is of equal value. Having exclusive access to your own public area that is not going to be developed, could be that ammenity is worth a lot; further it makes the area effectively more contiguous. All is to say the sum can be worth more than the parts.
With that logic it doesn't seem like the hunters are liable for the damages? The hunters aren't the ones deciding if corner-crossing is allowed.
Even the court seems faultless here. It's not re-zoning their land, it's clarifying a law that already existed. The owner had an incorrect pre-ruling valuation.
This case is especially crazy cause the landowners sued the hunters: if they hadn't sued there wouldn't have been any damages, maybe they should sue themselves!
Near as I can tell, they’re trying to get the court to agree to a specific corrupt interpretation that essentially denies the federal laws power. Which is why it has gotten this far.
It's gotten this far because it would render a large amount of public land unreachable, and outdoor-related organizations not surprisingly care quite strongly about that.
That seems incredibly weird as an argument. Either corner crossing is illegal, in which case the loss would be the actual value, or corner crossing is legal, in which case no damage was done and the private land was just overvalued. I’m not a lawyer, but I cannot fathom any situation in which the individual actions would be liable for having “caused” the decrease in value.
What if it were determined that people crossing would increase it's value? The argument based on cities with higher density generally commanding higher price per sq. ft. If 10 million people cross it a year, then they would have billions of dollars worth of land.
Apparently he was right about money being important:
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
Meanwhile we are being told, even on this forum, that income inequality is no big thing and one shouldn't be envious, it's unseemly. Where is the revolution?
Did you miss the part where having all of that land and money didn’t let him get his way?
> In the video, Bakken and Miller tell Grende, who had called to report the four hunters were trespassing by “corner crossing,” they would not cite the men for either trespassing to hunt or criminal trespass
They also lost in court. It was a ranch manager trying to intimidate people with wealth, and it didn’t work.
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
Given that this forum skews toward the winning side of the income inequality game, its not really surprising to find that sentiment overrepresented here.
> That’s why this article about money not winning is on the front page.
No, its not. Its also not inconsistent with it being on the front page. Even if one assumes that the reason that it is on the front page is class sympathy with the party who prevailed on most of the issues, and not any other reason…”disproportionate” is not “exclusive”.
I’ve never accused HN of being a unitary hive mind (in fact, if you go through my posting history, you’ll see that’s an idea that I frequently mock.)
That doesn’t mean, though, that it is a representative – demographically or ideologically – slice of the population, either, and the ways it isn’t ideologically reflect, largely, the ways it isn’t demographically.
That’s a lot of word diarrhea to say that it being on the front page is not representative of anything and that you have the secret actual guide to HN ideologies.
Pray tell, what is your source for the boogeyman you are attacking since it’s not what is popular?
You know of any revolutions that solve inequality? All the ones in known history simply change who the winners and losers are and maintain inequality.
Inequality absolutely exists and "revolutions" that claim to fix it in fact... don't. Socialism/Communism/etc all fail spectacularly to solve the "issue" of inequality.
>You know of any revolutions that solve inequality? All the ones in known history simply change who the winners and losers are and maintain inequality.
right, well obviously the revolutions solves the inequality for the previous losers.
Have you been paying attention to French politics lately?
And incidentally, are you familiar with the atrocities committed during the revolution? The “vertical deportations” of the Vendée region might add some much-needed nuance to what I can only surmise to be your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution.
People excitedly waiting for revolution often have no idea what a revolution actually is. If they did, they’d be aware that the most fervent revolutionaries are among the first to be executed when the establishment is overthrown. They’d also have some awareness of how the old power structures are often replaced with equivalent ones.
A revolution is a failure mode, not an end to be pursued. Read more history.
> Have you been paying attention to French politics lately?
To be fair, the last revolution in France was 150 years ago, things change quite a bit in 150 years.
> your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution
You seem to be equally biased, if on the other side. Events as large as a revolution are complex enough that it is hard to fit them into a manichean assessment.
There is no missing half in pointing out that the French revolution solved some inequalities. For all the blood and failure it had, some changes it introduced proved to be irreversible, such as the introduction of a constitution, and the people becoming a significant political player that has to be acknowledged when ruling.
And I would say that reading someone talk about some positive outcomes of an event and immediately feel compelled to call their views simplistic and whitewashed shows some bias.
Which ended when Napoleon declared himself a hereditary monarch.
The American Revolution barely averted a military dictatorship, because Washington turned down the offer from his officers. How many times has that happened in history? Only once that I know of, which makes Washington the greatest American President.
I place Kennedy at #2, for avoiding nuclear war with the Soviets.
> Attorneys for Elk Mountain Ranch owner Fred Eshelman last week designated real estate agent James Rinehart of Laramie as an expert witness in Eshelman’s civil suit against the hunters
Nothing more credible than a local real estate agent being paid to serve as an expert witness by the prosecution team of a guy that owns a 22,045-acre ranch! He probably had a sniper dot on his forehead during the testimony.
I was wondering exactly that, thank you for elucidating.
Reading into it more than I should, it seems to me like what the plaintiff actually believed is that if people thought they could corner cross, it would reduce the value of the property, because it would mean that more people would be emboldened to do it. One group of ladder-bearing hunterrs wouldn't do it themselves, and without the right to cross his property being set in precedent, many groups probably avoided doing it for fear of being sued. The legal gray area dissuaded them. No more! This is one of those times when opening the box killed the cat.
It's worse than that. The ranch owner was essentially trying to lay claim to BLM property. If he is the only one with access, he has effectively stolen it from everyone else
Ironically by bringing the case and losing it he has lost that (entirely theoretical) $7.75M value as corner crossing, particularly his specific corners is now codified in law.
Would be even funnier if the state brings eminent domain to seize a few square feet of land in each corner and build a little bridge that welcomes you across each corner. And pays market value for a few square feet of ranch land.
There is an element of self-referentiality here: the basis for the plaintiff's valuation only makes sense if, only if and after the plaintiff prevails.
I was very much wondering where that valuation came from, and this was the only rational explanation I could come up with. What causes me to scratch my head here is that the trespasser isn't the one causing that drop in valuation. It's the market perception that such trespassing is possible.
For example, if there was never a trespass on this property, but someone, somewhere else brought a similar case before the court and got the same ruling from a judge, I would expect the impact on the valuation of the property would be impacted in the same way.
It also seems a bit troublesome that the perceived valuation is driven by the owner's efforts to misrepresent the property. I could argue they should be charged with theft of $7.75 million, and are effectively suing people for reclaiming the stolen goods.
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
Edit: the number came from a real estate agent acting as an expert witness, who said he would drop the value by 25% or 30%; it's not a mathematical/geometrical argument.