Checkerboarding refers to the intermingling of land ownership between two or more owners resulting in a checkerboard pattern. Checkerboarding is prevalent in the Western United States and Western Canada because of extensive use in railroad grants for western expansion, although it had its beginnings in the canal land grant era. [1]
Checkerboarding in the West occurred as a result of railroad land grants where railroads would be granted every other section along a rail corridor. These grants, which typically extended 6 to 40 miles (10 to 64 km) from either side of the track, [2] were a subsidy to the railroads. Unlike per-mile subsidies which encouraged fast but shoddy track-laying, land grants encouraged higher quality work, since the railroads could increase the value of the land by building better track. The government also benefited from the increased value of the remaining public parcels. [2]
Railroad land grants split the land surrounding the area where train tracks were to be laid into a checkerboard pattern. The land was already divided into 640-acre numbered sections (260 ha) according to the Public Land Survey System; odd-numbered plots were given to private railroad companies, and the federal government kept even-numbered plots.
The federal government believed that because the value of land surrounding railroads would increase as much as twofold, [3] granting land to private railroad companies would theoretically pay for itself and also increase the transportation infrastructure throughout the nation. The U.S. government was not able to sell much of the land that it retained because settlers willing to move West were not wealthy. [3] The wealthiest United States citizens of the 19th century remained in the East. The federal government eventually gave away much of this land through the Homestead Acts. [3]
The first grants were given to the Mobile and Ohio and Illinois Central Railroads in 1850. [2] Additional grants were made under the Pacific Railway Acts between 1862 and 1871, when they were stopped because of public opposition. In total, 79 grants were made, totaling 200,000,000 acres (810,000 km2), later reduced to 131,000,000 acres (530,000 km2). [2]
Checkerboarding also occurred with Native American land grants, where native land was intermingled with non-native land. Many Native American tribes opposed checkerboarding, because it broke up traditionally communal native settlements into many individual plots and allowed non-natives to claim land within those settlements.
The Dawes Act of 1887 created the most Native American checkerboarding. The act was intended to bolster self-sufficiency and systematically fracture native cultures, giving each individual between 40 and 160 acres (16 and 65 ha).
Native Americans were also negatively affected by federal government checkerboarding policies because railroad land grants were not prevented from running through land previously occupied by Native American tribes. This act of unrightful land transfer from the hands of Native Americans to private railroad companies and homestead grantees resulted in conflicts on more than one occasion.[ citation needed ] One notable location of conflict is the Chambers Checkerboard – a region occupied by Navajo people before railroad companies were granted the land to construct the transcontinental railroad. Tension grew between the Navajo tribe and the settlers of the region because of unexplained deaths, which each party blamed on the other. These tensions led to further violence after a white settler was suspected for murdering a Navajo youth without rightful punishment. [4]
Checkerboarding can create problems for access and ecological management. It is one of the major causes of inholdings within the boundaries of national forests. As is the case in northwestern California, checkerboarding has resulted in issues with managing national forest land. [5] Checkerboarding was previously applied to these areas during the period of western expansion, and they are now commercial forest land. Conflicting policies establishing the rights of the private owners of this land have caused some difficulties in the local hardwood timber production economy.
While relieving this land from its checkerboard ownership structure could benefit the timber production economy of the region, checkerboards can allow government to extend good forestry practices over intermingled private lands, by demonstration or applying pressure via economy of scale or the right of access. [6]
Corner crossing is not explicitly legal or illegal in any state, but legal opinions and enforcement differ by state. [7] Checkerboarding may make public land inaccessible when it is surrounded by privately owned land. [8] In 2021, hunters in Wyoming were charged with trespassing on private land they never actually set foot on when they crossed between two parcels of public land at the corner where they touched. [9] Landowners allege their airspace was violated. A jury found the hunters not guilty, but a civil lawsuit was also filed by the landowners. [10]
The Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights on tribal territories within the United States. Named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, it authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal communal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals. This would convert traditional systems of land tenure into a government-imposed system of private property by forcing Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship with property" that did not previously exist in their cultures. The act allowed tribes the option to sell the lands that remained after allotment to the federal government. Before private property could be dispensed, the government had to determine which Indians were eligible for allotments, which propelled an official search for a federal definition of "Indian-ness."
The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of June 18, 1934, or the Wheeler–Howard Act, was U.S. federal legislation that dealt with the status of American Indians in the United States. It was the centerpiece of what has been often called the "Indian New Deal". The major goal was to reverse the traditional goal of cultural assimilation of Native Americans into American society and to strengthen, encourage and perpetuate the tribes and their historic Native American cultures in the United States.
The Hopi are Native Americans who primarily live in northeastern Arizona. The majority are enrolled in the Hopi Tribe of Arizona and live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona; however, some Hopi people are enrolled in the Colorado River Indian Tribes of the Colorado River Indian Reservation at the border of Arizona and California.
Holbrook is a city in Navajo County, Arizona, United States. According to the 2010 census, the population of the city was 5,053. The city is the county seat of Navajo County.
The Navajo Nation, also known as Navajoland, is a Native American reservation of Navajo people in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in Window Rock, Arizona.
The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) is the surveying method developed and used in the United States to plat, or divide, real property for sale and settling. Also known as the Rectangular Survey System, it was created by the Land Ordinance of 1785 to survey land ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, following the end of the American Revolution. Beginning with the Seven Ranges in present-day Ohio, the PLSS has been used as the primary survey method in the United States. Following the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the Surveyor General of the Northwest Territory platted lands in the Northwest Territory. The Surveyor General was later merged with the United States General Land Office, which later became a part of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Today, the BLM controls the survey, sale, and settling of lands acquired by the United States.
The San Juan River is a major tributary of the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States, providing the chief drainage for the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Originating as snowmelt in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, it flows 383 miles (616 km) through the deserts of northern New Mexico and southeastern Utah to join the Colorado River at Glen Canyon.
The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, was the 1864 deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the United States federal government. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in western New Mexico Territory to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. Some anthropologists claim that the "collective trauma of the Long Walk...is critical to contemporary Navajos' sense of identity as a people".
An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is sovereign, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
A land patent is a form of letters patent assigning official ownership of a particular tract of land that has gone through various legally-prescribed processes like surveying and documentation, followed by the letter's signing, sealing, and publishing in public records, made by a sovereign entity.
The Wind River Indian Reservation, in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Wyoming, is shared by two Native American tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. Roughly 60 mi (97 km) east to west by 50 mi (80 km) north to south, the Indian reservation is located in the Wind River Basin, and includes portions of the Wind River Range, Owl Creek Mountains, and Absaroka Range.
Ute are the Indigenous people of the Ute tribe and culture among the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin. They had lived in sovereignty in the regions of present-day Utah and Colorado.
The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is located in northeastern Utah, United States. It is the homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe, and is the largest of three Indian reservations inhabited by members of the Ute Tribe of Native Americans.
The Sinister Pig is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the sixteenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first published in 2003. It was a New York Times best-seller.
Elk Mountain is a peak at the northern end of the Medicine Bow Mountains. It is 7 miles (11 km) southwest of the town of Elk Mountain, Wyoming and roughly 38 miles (61 km) from Rawlins, Wyoming. The mountain is the area's most visible feature. It is located south of Interstate 80 in Carbon County. Elk Mountain is the 8th most prominent summit in the state of Wyoming.
Williams v. Lee, 358 U.S. 217 (1959), was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the State of Arizona does not have jurisdiction to try a civil case between a non-Indian doing business on a reservation with tribal members who reside on the reservation, the proper forum for such cases being the tribal court.
The Padre Canyon incident was a skirmish in November 1899 between a group of Navajo hunters and a posse of Arizona lawmen. Among other things, it was significant in that it nearly started a large-scale Indian war in Coconino County and it led to the expansion of the Navajo Reservation. It was also the final armed conflict during a land dispute between the Navajo and American settlers, as well as one of the bloodiest.
The Treaty of Bosque Redondo also the Navajo Treaty of 1868 or Treaty of Fort Sumner, Navajo Naal Tsoos Sani or Naaltsoos Sání) was an agreement between the Navajo and the US Federal Government signed on June 1, 1868. It ended the Navajo Wars and allowed for the return of those held in internment camps at Fort Sumner following the Long Walk of 1864. The treaty effectively established the Navajo as a sovereign nation.
Indigenous peoples have lived in the area now known as the state of Utah for thousands of years. Today they are divided into five main groups: Utes, Goshutes, Paiutes, Shoshone, and Navajo. Each occupies a different region within the state, many of which regions extend across borders into other states. In the 2010 census, there were a total of 32,927 American Indian and Alaska Natives living within the state, which totaled to 1.19% of the total population of Utah.
Phillip Kay Lyman is an American politician from Utah. A resident of Blanding, he currently represents the 69th district in the Utah House of Representatives.