I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location. It wasn't until earlier this fall that I realized that it's all on Federal Land.
I walked in, as you have to do, while hunting doves. I only saw one.
It's a full homestead. Barns, outbuildings, and a substantial house. This is very unusual as a lot of work went into this, but for some reason, it wasn't proved up. I'll have to see if I can figure out the history of it. So far I've had no luck.
It was well thought out, and sheltered. A substantial hay field, on Federal Land, worked by the current leaseholder remains. What's really surprising, however, is the house. It was very well built. So much so, that for a time I debated it if was a school, but it was better built than rural schools by quite some margin, and frankly larger. It's a house.
Usually, although not always, when you walk up on an abandoned homestead, they're on private, not Federal, land. And that makes sense. It only took five years to prove up a homestead, and proving it up was one of the first things the people eligible to do so did. It protected their investment, which was substantial, both in terms of time and labor, but moreover in actual cash outlays, which were actually quite a bit more extensive than people imagine.
The peak year for homesteading was 1913, during which 11,000,000 acres were claimed. I"m a bit surprised by that, as I thought it was 1914. World War One caused a massive boom in homesteading which was aided by the weather. A lot of people took up dry land farming in that period, following the naive popular assertion of the time that "rain follows the plow.
Abandoned wagon.
It doesn't.
A large part of what inspired homesteading entries at the time was the Great War. With Imperial Russia off of the farming export market, which was a huge portion of its GNP at the time, and with European farming massively impacted by the war, grain production, beef production, and horse production turned to the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Trouble began to set in after the war, although interestingly not immediately so. 1919 was the last year that American farmers had economic parity with those who lived in municipalities. That started changing soon thereafter, however, and its never reversed. The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s set in early in the 1920s, and basically carried on until the Great Depression hit in 1929. Having said that, people continued to attempt to file homestead entries, some people naively believing that if they couldn't make it in town, they could as a farmer or rancher.
The buildings on this spread, however, are too nice to be a late homestead entry. I've seen a few comparable ones that were abandoned, but they were all earlier homesteads in which the owners became over extended and couldn't make their bank payments during the Great Depression. A lot of money went into some houses and whatnot while things were going well. That must have been the case here. So what happened?
That is, at least right now, impossible for me to say. But what seems clear is that a lot of money went into this spread during good times, and the owners pulled out when hard times hit. That, and the fact that the abandoned equipment is horse, not vehicle, drawn would suggest that the homesteaders were doing okay during World War One but didn't weather the change in the economic climate of the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s. If I had my guess, this was probably a World War One vintage homestead which collapsed, after a huge investment of time, effort and money, soon after the war.
They didn't last long enough in order to prove up.
Their dreams must have been crushed. I hope, and pray, that the rest of their lives went well.
I'd also note that, more than ever before, when I see places like this I have a maudlin tinge of regret. My dream was something like this too. At age 62, I won't make it.
I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution. I'm not. Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events. I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either. I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something. The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was. At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.
The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth. To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.
We've been losing that for some time. Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century. It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.
Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.
Aristotle, Politics.
Corporations were largely illegal in early American history. They existed, but were highly restricted. The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs. It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.
Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist. It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition. Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.
Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it. The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.
I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.
This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken. Broken down, broken up, and ended.
The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret. Only wealth and power can explain that. The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class. Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.
It is really time for a third part in this country.
In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party. Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy. Or perhaps local parties might do it. In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally. The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties. New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party. Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties. There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.
Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day. And such candidates will meet howls of derision. Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors. And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.
The reason for that is simple. Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist.
The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets. Ban it. That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit. A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.
The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well. No absentee landlords. People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.
That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land. Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted. The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.
On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity. Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership. You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.
While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level. People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock. It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair. It
Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem. People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.
And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong. Much of what we've addressed would solve this. You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example. And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented. But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing. Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be. The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.
These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day. We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract. Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls. Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist. J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.
And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.
This includes the excellent essay The Idiocy of Urban Life, which I've occasionally cited here under its original The New Republic name, The Cows Revenge.
Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem.: Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception. I've never seen the East Wing of the White ...
One of my old friends, whose become a hardcore right wing populist, while also interestingly being a hardcore corner crossing advocate (the two are in fact mutually exclusive), posted this on his Facebook feed:
The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?” Some of your hypocrisy cancels your outrage. I’m so sick of this crap. It’s just another reminder that the other side has nothing to offer Americans other that staged outrage over bull. TDS much??
Some on the far right have completely swallowed that this is "staged outrage". The irony is that the exact same people were outraged about everything that Joe Biden did, and Barack Obama did. Some of that outrage was because they were told to be.
And here's the next thing. The ballroom is probably not going to be completed before Trump leaves office. Frankly, as the matter is now in litigation, there's going to be some delay. If a judge is really upset, which is unlikely due to the way courts work, there's precedent for returning the structure ot the status quo ante before anything goes forward, which would in and of itself likely take years.
That's unlikely of course, but there's going to be a district court ruling and then an appeals court ruling. All that will take six months on a project that would normally take several years to complete.
But that's not the point.
The next President, unless its J. D. Vance, is going to take this down, it it gets built If its a Republican like Thomas Massie it'll gleefully be torn down. If its a Democrat, it's also coming down.
Let's make it clear.
The ballroom, if its built, or however much of it that's built, will be taken down and erased from the public memory.
At that point in time, will those who support Trump in whatever he does state: The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?”
Not hardly, even if no public funds are then used. They'll be outraged about how its "destroying" the legacy of a "great" president.
So why does this bother me?
Well in part because I'm an agrarian and this entire project is an insult to agrarians.
Ballrooms are the high school basketball courts of the super wealthy A place where the extremely wealthy can meet and mingle and do those things Trump noted, have drinks in the foyer, etc. The kind of place where you can talk shop and meet with the rich and powerful, and heads of state. Maybe have the Saudi king over, or rub elbows with guests like Prince William. . . or maybe Harry and Jeff Epstein. It's a public building, no matter whose tribute is used to pay for it, but you can't book your wedding reception of bar mitzvah reception there.
Because you are a peasant.
The entire concept of a massive ornate public building like this is that you peons will love it because you love to bask in the glory of your benighted leaders. And those benighted leaders, having been born into wealth, really believe that. You love them as they love themselves, and you are happy to serve the glorious benighted.
That's the antithesis of the American concept.
Here's what the White House grounds should return to, and I'm not joking.
Sometime last week I was somehow the recipient of a real estate brochure entitled "Land".
I didn't get around to looking at it until today, even though I knew what it was going to be. Agricultural land turned into the playgrounds of the rich.
That should end. People who hold agricultural ground, or even large blocks of ground, should have to make their livings from it and nothing else. The wealthy holding such ground hurts those who would make a living in this simple manner.
We live in a new Gilded Age. That age gave rise to the Progressive movement and swept into office people like Theodore Roosevelt. Something like that needs to happen again.
Yes, I'm outraged over the East Wing coming down for a ballroom, and the very concept of a ballroom outrages me. I'm outraged that common people have fallen for outright lies and believe everything Donald Trump tells them. I'm outraged that the extremely wealthy are running the show on everything while, at the same time, our Gilded masters tell us to hate the poorest of the poor. I'm outraged that Congress will not do its job. I'm outraged that our military is being ordered to murder people in the Caribbean. And I"m outraged that our local politicians tell us to support this crap when they do so, in at least 2/3s of the instances, as it keeps them in their elected jobs.
Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem.: Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception. I've never seen the East Wing of the White ...
Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception.
I've never seen the East Wing of the White House, and of course, now, I never will. I have very little, as in no, interest in touring Washington D.C. and have even less interest than that now that the illegitimate Trump gang of insurrectionist is occupying the nation's capital.
This has been a very revealing series of events however, and we can take some things away from it.
The first thing we have learned is how utterly desperate Donald Trump is to amount to something. He started too late in life and his character is too fixed in order to achieve that, absent late in life inspiration of an existential type which would require him to make a profound change in his behavior. Born into wealth and a playboy by character, he's desperately trying to buy and build himself into seriousness and relevance. In the back of his mind, or frankly maybe in the forefront, he knows that he's a fart in a windstorm. After he's out of office, and no amount of far right fantasizing is going to keep him there, his successor, right or left, will begin the process of trying to repair the damage Trump has done. If its a right wing leader, like wannabe NatCon J. D. Vance, it'll be National Conservative far right, but less insane than Trump. It probably won't be Vance however, but somebody from the political center, particularly if the Democrats get their act together and dump their own wackadoodle far left, which there are signs they will, or from the actual libertarian populist right.
My prediction, early though it is, is that the next President will be Tammy Duckworth, maybe on a Duckworth Klobuchar ticket. I can see, however, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul taking a run at Vance's dreams and keeping them from happening.
Vance would keep the Trump monument to himself up and pretend to like it, as he only is where he is now due to Trump, but as soon as somebody who wasn't a Trump sycophant is in the Oval Office, it's coming down. That will be symbolic of the entire Trump legacy, destruction that will ultimately come down, and have to be rebuilt.
Trump want to see himself as a great man, a sort of Napoleon being crowned, but knows that he's more like Napoleon on Elba. He's not going to get there. He's really extremely pathetic.
Also sad is the degree to which it has been demonstrated that a life of extreme wealth is corrosive. Trump's entire life of largess already showed this, but he really does believe that the White House needs a huge overblown rushed ballroom as he's seen those of failed monarchies in Europe. The republics, or in one case dictatorship, that inherited that stuff still uses it as it's a human instinct not to rip things down. That's why the Brandenburg Gate, which should have been blown to rubble in 1945, is still standing. Yes, it's a monument to German militarism, but it's big and already there so we keep it around. That's the reason the Eiffel Tower is there, even though its a giant ugly radio tower, or why the "egg beater" thing in Casper Wyoming is still there. We just can't bring ourselves to rip things down, no matter hideos they are, or how symbolically problematic.
It'll come down in part as it just won't work with an 18th Century large house built on a budget. It wasn't constructed to be a palace, but just a big house.
Which brings me to my next point.
Perhaps the West Wing, after actually going through the proper process, ought to be taken out as well.
No attachments to the structure are really consistent with its original concept. It isn't supposed to have a lot of offices and the entire concept of the First Lady needing room for anything is absurd. The First Lady is simply the President's wife, or Trump's case in regard to the monarchical role to which he aspires, the current concubine, or in the American Civil Religion context, his current wife.
Maybe it ought to be just scaled back to its original footprint.
Some would object that that would mean that it wouldn't have enough room for its purpose Well, No. 10 Downing Street has less room than the White House. And if more space is really needed, they can find it somewhere else in Washington D.C. Nixon actually did that with the nearby Eisenhower Building.
The White House in 1846, when it was first photographed.
Restoring the White House back to scale would also be symbolic. The entire office of the Presidency needs to be restored to scale. Right now, Trump is in fact ruling as a dictator, with the complicitly of the Dixiecrat Party that has taken over the GOP. That needs to end, and end to an enormous degree.
The drift towards an imperial presidency started with Theodore Roosevelt, who is a person I admire, but whom I admire more than I once did. TR, like Trump, tended to act unilaterally, the difference being that Roosevelt was a profoundly intelligent and moral man, where as the opposite is true of Trump. The East Wing started off in his administration as the fairly modest East Terrace, which looked nice and wasn't an overblown Sun King structure like the proposed ballroom will be, but it nonetheless got the modification trend rolling.
It would be TR's cousin Franklin that really got the modern Presidency established, however, and that due to the emergency of the Great Depression and World War Two. Franklin Roosevelt did not rule as a dictator, although people liked to accuse him of that at the time. Ironically, a President that the Republicans hate to this very day is the one, in some ways, that Trump has tried to emulate, even to the extent of wishing for a third term, which he cannot legally occupy. Franklin, of course, redid the East Wing, which was done in part due to the bomb shelter that was constructed underneath it.
The West Wing also dates back to TR's time in the White House with the construction of what was supposed to be a temporary structure. That structure was expanded in 1909 and ultimately came to be the White House office space. I don't doubt that they need office space, but as noted, maybe it can just be somewhere else.
And in fact, for the most part, it should be.
Taft family milk cow Pauline Wayne, one of two milk cows the Tafts kept and allowed to freely roam the White House grounds. What is now known as the Eisenhower building is in the background. This is as things should be.
Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place: For some time, I’ve thought a great deal about how long someone needs to really know a place. To know its geography, for sure, but also to k...
I've split both worlds, of course, for decades, although more by fate than choice. Anyhow, one thing that's always amazed me is, to some degree, agriculturalist don't make full use of their own land.
I'm much more familiar with ranching than farming, so I'll start there. Almost every rancher I know eats their own beef. We eat our own beef. For this reason, beef prices at the grocery store are always a bit of a mystery to me.
If you know somebody who raises pigs, and occasionally we do, we get one from them. Again, that means we're paying below grocery store prices.
Okay, all this is common.
But what absolutely amazes me is that lots of farmers and ranchers don't take advantage of what's right before them.
I used to put in a huge garden every year. I don't anymore, as my town job took control of my life and I lost the time to do it. I hope to take it back up if I ever get to retire. I can't see a good reason that almost every farm and ranch doesn't have a garden. Yes, it takes time, but not that much time if you are right there. It'd cut food bills, as they're mostly getting their produce from the grocery store, and fresh produce is always better.
I also don't understand why farmers and ranchers don't hunt, and fish, more. I know that "time" will be the argument, but I've been around agriculture my whole life and farmers and ranchers have more time than city people do. They simply do. Their time commitments tend to be seasonal, and intense, but they have the time.
At various times in my pre married life, I used to live on wild game. And I know for a fact that prior to the 1980s, a lot of ranchers either did the same, or supplemented their meat supply that way. One student I knew when I was in US as an undergrad was an older (in his 30s) student, and had grown up on a ranch were they lived on wild game. Frankly, they poached it. I don't advocate poaching, but I also know more than one ranch family that poached pretty routinely into the 1970s.
Here, farmers and ranchers can get landowners licenses and I just don't see why they don't. And even if they don't, they usually have time after the fall to hunt and could on a regular license.. Indeed, as noted, they have more time than people in town do. Outdoors writer John Barsness once noted in one of his columns that when he was a boy, he had a ranching uncle that became a full time elk hunter after shipping.
As noted, I just don't get it.
Shoot, it was my dream, which I will not succeed at.
If I'd had my way, I would have lived full time in the sticks as a rancher, I'd have gardened in the war months, and hunted in the fall. If I'd broke even, that would have been fine with me.
Some really interesting things are going on that are definitely Wyoming centric that we haven't noted, or haven't noted much, and should.
The first might be that a proposal to put in a nuclear generator construction facility in Natrona County north of the town of Bar Nunn has really turned out to be controversial. This comes on the heels of a nuclear power plant in Kemmerer that is also controversial.
The ins and outs of the controversy are a little difficult to really discern, but at some level, quite a few people just don't like the idea of something nuclear. It's not coal, and its not oil. Chuck Gray, for example, has come out against this and wind energy. Chuck hasn't worked a day in his life in a blue collar job and he's just tapping into the "no sir, we don't like it" sort of thought here.
What's going to happen? We'll have to see.
Another local controversy is the approval of a 30 lot subdivision on Casper Mountain. This has drawn the ire of a lot people who live on Casper Mountain, and most of it is posed in conservation or even environmental terms.
The irony there, of course, is that people who have already built a house on the mountain are somewhat compromised in these arguments. I get it, however, as I really don't think we need more rural subdivisions in the county, at all.
On the mountain, I'd note that one of the really aggravating things that has happened recently is that last year a joint Federal/State project paved the dirt road on the backside of the mountain to the top of Muddy Mountain. It didn't need to be done and it just encourages land rapist to built houses on the backside of Casper Mountain.
I understand the opposition here, but in context, things seem to lack consistency.
Which gets back to this, I suppose. If a person just doesn't want development, they can say that.
What you can't do, however, is pretend that some major pillars of the state's economy are going to be here forever. The extractive industries are basically on their way out right now.
One of the amusing things about all of this is that the MAGA hat wearers locally who are opposed to nuclear energy are facing it in part due to the current administration.
Cpt. Charles Boycott was an agent for remote land owners in Ireland who was regarded as particularly severe. During the Irish Land War the Land League introduced the boycott, directing it first at Cpt. Boycott. They refused him everything, even conversations. The concept was introduced by Irish politician Charles Parnell, noting:
When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him at the shop-counter, you must shun him in the fair and at the marketplace, and even in the house of worship... you must shun him your detestation of the crime he has committed... if the population of a county in Ireland carry out this doctrine, that there will be no man ... [who would dare] to transgress your unwritten code of laws.
Charles Stewart Parnell, at Ennis meeting, 19 September 1880.
Maybe it's time to take a page from the Land League.
This comes up in the context of a Reddit post on Fred Eshelman's Iron Bar Ranch, his toy ranch in Carbon County about which he's zealously pursuing litigation in trying to keep people form corner crossing. So far, he's losing, having had the local Federal District Court first, and then the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals endorse corner crossing as legal. As we've noted here:
The Reddit post, which was linked into an out of state news article, provoked a series of responses on how locals shouldn't accommodate Iron Bar economically, the posters apparently being unaware that he's a wealthy out of state landowner that doesn't, for example, hit the feed store in Rawlins.
But I wonder if they were on to something?
Iron Bar is employing locals, and those locals are serving to oppress Wyomingites. There's no real reason to accommodate them. They probably do go to the feed store in Rawlins, probably stop by Bi-Rite in that city, and probably go into town there, or maybe Saratoga, from time to time.
Why accommodate them?
They're serving the interest of a carpetbagger and have chosen their lot. There's no reason to sell them fishing tackle or gasoline, or take their order at the restaurant.
Beyond that, as I've noted before, in his lawsuit Eshelman is making use of local lawyers. His big guns are, of course, out of staters, but he still needs some local ones. Originally that person was Greg Weisz, who now works for the AG's office in the state. Megan Overmann Goetz took over when Weisz left. Maybe she had to, as when a lawyer goes into the state's service, he leaves the work behind. Both of them are of the firm Pence and MacMillan in Laramie.
I don't know anything about Weisz, but a state website disturbingly places him in the Water and Natural Resources branch of the AG's office, noting:
Gregory Weisz
Greg joined the Water and Natural Resources Division in January 2024 after almost thirty years in private practice. While in private practice, he focused on real estate transactions and litigation, easement law, water law, general civil litigation, agricultural law, and natural resources. At the Attorney General's office, he represents many Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality agencies including the Land Quality Division, Industrial Siting Division, Solid and Hazardous Waste Division, Storage Tank department, Abandoned Mine Lands Division, and DEQ itself with general legal issues. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in Natural Resources Management and a law degree from the University of Wyoming. His prior work experience included private forestry consulting, oil & gas exploration, water treatment, ranch labor, and forest products manufacturing.
Lawyers very strongly believe that the justice system is great, and that by serving client's, they're serving truth, justice, apple pie, and motherhood. That allows them to stand themselves. And to some extent, it's true, particularly in the criminal justice system. The entire system depends on the accused getting representation, which is in everyone's best interest.
But that's not true of Plaintiff's cases. Plaintiff's lawyers make a big deal of how they serve the little man, but much of it is a crock. And in something like this, Weisz was serving the interest of a wealthy carpetbagger. Maybe he believes in the cause, but that doesn't mean that people have to accommodate him, then or now. Now there are questions that Wyomingites in particular and public lands users in general have a right to demand of Weisz, most particularly does he believe in Eshelman's cause. If he does, do we want him in the state's law firm, the AG's office?
Beyond that, for the Wyoming lawyers actively representing Eshelman, why accommodate them. They can be comforted by chocking down their service to a bad cause by liberal doses of cash. Locals don't have to accommodate them, however. Laramie and Cheyenne are not far from Colorado, they can buy their groceries there.
I know that if I was shopping for somebody to provide legal services, I'd shop elsewhere if I found my law firm was representing somebody trying to screw public land access for locals.
But it doesn't stop there. All three of Wyoming's "representatives" in Congress voted against what Wyomingites overwhelmingly believe. That ought to be enough to vote them out of office. But people don't need to wait until then. All three are still showing up, I bet, at Boy Scout, sportsmen's and other events. Quit inviting them. And if they do show up, do what Hageman did at the State Bar Convention last year, walk out on her if she speaks as she did to a speaker.
Is this extreme? It is. But these efforts never cease.
When being an employee of Fred Eshelman means you have to drive to Ft. Collins in order to buy a loaf of bread, it won't be worth it. When Escheman can't get a plumber or electrician to come to his house, or anyone to doctor his cattle, or give him a ride from the airport, it won't be worth it for him. When lawyers have decide if that one case is worth not getting anymore, I know what decision they'll make. When John Barrasso quits getting invitations to speak, he'll know what to do.
There are limits, of course, to all of this. You can't hurt people or property. If somebody needs medical service, they should get it. If somebody is stuck in a blizzard and you come upon the, they should get the ride. But you don't have to serve them at the restaurant or agree to fix their pickup truck.
Or, so it seems to me. It would at least seem worth debating.
Boycott.
The comment.
Hobby ownership of substantial amounts of property like this ought to be banned. If you own agricultural land, your primary income should be derived from it.
This could very easily come to be the case if states, including my home state of Wyoming, adopted agricultural corporation laws providing that only bonafide agriculturalist could own agricultural property, which I'd set at any amount of real property not used for industrial use which exceeded five acres in size. That'd help preserve farm and ranch land from being busted up, and it would mean that the people who owned agricultural land were actual agriculturalist. In order, let's way, to hold stock in such a corporation, no less than 65% of your income would have to be derived from agricultural pursuits.
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