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.