Fuck that. 4 point barb wire, 5 strand fence.
Not only do the locals NOT have a right to his land. Western states have laws that say you have to maintain fencing to keep grazing animals OUT of your land. So, if you do not fence in your land, your neighbor is allowed to let their animals graze it.
Not only that, he apparently has a bison herd that he wishes to keep from leaving the land. I get that these people are pissed off because they have been able to access the land before but it is NOT public or BLM land. It is private property. If you are caught on a ranch out west, a lot of the time you are yelled at. If you come back you are shot at.
Archive: https://archive.today/YQjVE
From the post:
>A Texas oil baron's billionaire son is clashing with the descendants of original settlers after he built 20 miles of barbed wire fence to keep them off his $105 million ranch. William Harrison, 37, bought the 88,000-acre expanse of land, named the Cielo Vista Ranch, stretching through the San Luis Valley in Colorado in 2017. Hundreds of locals, who are descended from original Mexican and Spanish settlers, claim to have the right to legal access to the property under a 1844 agreement which allows them to graze their livestock, hunt and harvest timber.
Oh, I think most of the northern states hate Texans. They are not well liked in Wyoming either. For a lot of reasons. One of them is very old but it was called the Johnson County War. The US government stepped in to save a bunch of Texan mercenaries that were hired to go after locals... Yeah, Wyoming has a long history of vigilante justice. They would have killed all of them if the government didn't step in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_County_War
At the same time. I'm big on property rights and I understand their argument but it also comes down to them wanting to treat private property that they have no claim to as public property for profit and entertainment.
Some sort of middle ground should be reached but in most states the guy would not only be within his rights but would be required to maintain the fencing to maintain his own grazing rights for his livestock.
I will include though, I think the law that allowed them to use the land was wrong in the first place. I don't care if you were "original settlers" or related to them. Your land was conquered and you no longer hold any rights to it. This is not part of a reservation or something either (from my understanding).
(post is archived)