Battle for the American West
A point is that which has no part. A line is breadthless length. The ends of a line are points. — Euclid Elk Mountain crests above a frozen moonscape, like a giant stone whale breaking through the snowy scrub plains of Carbon County, in southern Wyoming, in the great American West. It’s not an especially famous landmark, the eighth-most prominent peak in the country’s least populous state. But, being a mountain, it has seen its share of events. The outlaw Big Nose George and his gang killed two lawmen here in 1878; he was later hanged. A United Airlines flight crashed here in 1946, just below the summit. This is harsh and spare country, but laid atop it is an invisible and precise geometry. This is graph-paper wilderness. The mountain and the desolate flats around it, for great stretches in any direction, are divided into perfect imaginary squares, one mile on a side. On this vast chequerboard, the “dark” squares are public land and the “light” squares are private land. They meet at si
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