The checkerboard came about in the 1880s, when the federal government—which had claimed California as its own by dispossessing Indigenous peoples—gifted every other square-mile section along the region’s transcontinental corridors to railroad companies. Congress saw the checkerboard as a novel solution to a practical problem: how to help finance transcontinental railroads without paying for them in gold. By checkerboarding the land, the government ensured that the railroad companies couldn’t sell it to rich landholders in large parcels. The people behind these deals likely imagined that the checkerboard would quickly disappear into a landscape of small homesteads, keeping Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream alive while settling the West.
Things didn’t go according to plan. In high-value timber areas in Oregon, railroads worked with so-called “dummy entrymen” to file for the alternating public lands sections, consolidate landownership for the railroad, and sell the lands at high prices to large lumber interests. In low-value areas like the Mojave Desert, meanwhile, no settlers wanted to buy the land. Railroad historian David F. Myrick estimated that in San Bernardino County alone, 853,265 acres remained in railroad hands in the early 20th century.
By the 1970s, the federal government—like the railroad—had largely given up on the project of selling lands to homesteaders. With the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, it moved to permanently retain public lands rather than trying to sell them off. But that didn’t get rid of the checkerboard—the private squares remained in the hands of landowners, posing a problem for federal land management agencies. When Congress created the Bureau of Land Management’s East Mojave National Scenic Area in 1976, for instance, parts of its boundaries surrounded a dense swath of checkerboard, which prevented the agency from building access roads or making improvements to those areas.
This came to a head in 1994, when the California Desert Protection Act changed the East Mojave National Scenic Area into the Mojave National Preserve and handed it over to the National Park Service.
After decades of ignoring its desert lands, the Catellus Development Corporation, the company that had taken over the Southern Pacific Land Company’s holdings, sent teams to survey its lands for minerals and development opportunities, and put up large “For Sale” signs. Conservationists feared that this would result in widespread development across the desert, negating the work that they had done to pass the Desert Protection Act.
The federal government tried to strike a deal with Catellus, and failed. Then, a land trust called the Wildlands Conservancy stepped in to broker a deal. But nothing like it had ever been done before: How would a non-profit go about purchasing a half-million acres of land in a checkerboard?