Issue 15: The Checkerboard
By Birch Dietz Malotky
Like many folks, I first learned about the checkerboard fairly recently. Paddling down a stretch of the Platte River through an old burn zone bursting with fireweed, a friend described the strange pattern of every-other-square ownership and how difficult it can make getting to public land. I didn’t think much about it, until a few years later when the corner-crossing story of the “Missouri Four” began to unfold in the news and the courts, sparking off what Kelly Dunning calls one of the past decade’s most significant developments regarding conservation.
Those hunters—who passed through the airspace above private land on their way from one public parcel to another—may have drawn the national spotlight to both Wyoming and the checkerboard, but this unique pattern of landownership is nothing new. Recreationists, landowners, and the US Forest Service have been sparring over access in Montana’s Crazy Mountains for years and horse advocates, ranchers, and the Bureau of Land Management have been gridlocked in the Red Desert for even longer. The checkerboard itself goes back nearly two centuries, to a grant made to Indiana for canal construction that was part of a much larger campaign of nation building.
Set on an expansionist path driven by belief in Manifest Destiny, the federal government claimed, gridded, and handed out land for all kinds of purposes—to incentivize railroads and settlement, to support public education, and to further displace and attempt to assimilate Native Americans. This practice created the foundation for an unseen superstructure of policies, legislation, and case law that governs much of life in the West—but doesn’t neatly overlay the living landscape. That mismatch has implications for everything from energy development, to wildfire management, to the recovery of grizzly bear populations.
In answer to the challenges of checkerboard management, the stories in this issue make a strong case for the power of coming together across the invisible lines that separate us. Across the West, collaboration is driving many of the solutions and workarounds we have, including localized access pathways, collective action and management among stock growers, and landscape-scale, multi-decadal coordination between federal and state agencies, local governments, private landowners, and other organizations. As the West continues to grapple with the challenges of transboundary management in complex landscapes, we hope this issue of Western Confluence helps illuminate a part of how we got here and some ways we might move forward.
Header image: Analysis of satellite images can reveal on-the-ground differences in management, as seen in the checkerboard around Eugene, Oregon, that resulted from grants made to the Oregon and Pacific Railroad in the mid-1800s. The public parcels are mostly forested, while the private parcels have been largely harvested for timber. (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory using data courtesy of N. Lang)
