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Conflict and collaboration in the checkerboard of Montana’s Crazy Mountains
The Crazy Mountains rise sharply from the plains of south-central Montana, forming an island of rock and forest in a sea of prairie. Long a place of cultural and spiritual meaning for the Crow Tribe, the mountain range has also drawn hunters, hikers, and settlers for generations. But today, the Crazies are better known for something else: the legal and logistical knots created by their checkerboard landownership patterns.
The checkerboard in the Crazies is an accident of history—a legacy of 19th-century railroad land grants that awarded alternating square-mile sections of land to companies like the Northern Pacific in exchange for building rail infrastructure. Unlike other ranges, where homesteaders or the government later consolidated these parcels, the Crazies’ rugged terrain made their sections less attractive for settlement or buybacks. The result is a tight grid of private and public land parcels that largely remains today, forming one of the most heavily fragmented landscapes in the northern Rockies.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Western Confluence
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Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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