Published April 07, 2025
By Emily Wangen
In March, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right to corner cross to access federal public lands as long as a private landowner’s land is not physically touched.1
The case, Iron Bar Holdings, LLC v. Cape, involved a group of Missouri hunters who crossed from one section of public land
managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to another parcel at a spot where the
corners meet in an act known as corner crossing.2 The case took place in Carbon County, Wyoming, which the Tenth Circuit described
as “the epicenter of a 150-year conflict touching on the core of property law and,
simultaneously, defining the American West.”3 Specifically, the actions precipitating this case occurred on Iron Bar’s 50-square-mile
ranch with 11,000 acres of federal and state public lands enclosed within its bounds.4 Iron Bar claimed the hunters trespassed when they passed its airspace while corner
crossing.5
I. History of the Checkerboard & Origins of the UIA
The checkerboarded pattern of land ownership at issue stems from the mid-19th century when Congress granted public lands to railroad companies via the Union Pacific Act of 1862.6 For each mile of track laid by a railroad company, the federal government granted the company the odd-numbered lots surrounding the railway right-of-way.7 These, along with homesteading acts enacted during this time, resulted in every other parcel of land in the area having different ownership, with the remaining public lands only being connected at the corners.8
This led to “range wars” between landowners and homesteaders in the latter half of the 19th century in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota territories.9 In these conflicts, cattlemen who gained title to land under homesteading laws fenced the borders of their lands near public lands, which essentially fenced in public lands.10
To stop this “evil,” Representative Lewis E. Payson—an Illinois Republican—introduced the Unlawful Inclosures Act (UIA) in 1884.11 Enacted in 1885, the UIA12 prohibits “[a]ll inclosures of any public lands in any State or Territory of the United States” and preventing or obstructing “any person from peaceably entering upon … or … [a person’s] free passage or transit over or through the public lands.”13
According to a House report accompanying the legislation, “millions of acres of public lands [were] held and fenced in by people who have no shadow of a claim to an acre of them … [and] between five and six [million acres] were held by foreign corporations.14
The UIA was supported by members of Congress from Western states, like Representative
James Belford from Colorado. During a floor debate of the bill, Representative Belford
expressed his ire with cattlemen fencing in thousands of acres of public lands for
grazing their cattle, while the homesteading laws of the time only permitted settlers
to take up to 320 acres.15
II. Tenth Circuit’s Application of the UIA
In this decision, the Tenth Circuit noted that Wyoming law would consider the act of corner crossing a civil trespass, but because the federal UIA superseded state laws that are inconsistent with this congressional act, the hunters’ actions were otherwise lawful.16
In holding that because Iron Bar cannot “implement a program which has the effect of ‘deny[ing] access to [federal] public lands for lawful purposes,’”17 the hunters’ actions were lawful, the Tenth Circuit mainly relied on two Supreme Court cases.
In Camfield v. United States (1897), the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the UIA for the first time, determining the UIA was a constitutional exercise of Congress’s authority to protect “public lands from nuisances erected upon adjoining property.”18 In its decision, the Court reasoned that if the United States was not permitted to exercise its police power over public lands, the lands would be placed “completely at the mercy of state legislation”19
The Tenth Circuit applied Camfield nearly a century later in Bergen v. Lawrence when it considered whether the federal government could order a Wyoming landowner to remove a fence on his property on the grounds that it enclosed public lands.20
In applying these cases, the Tenth Circuit stated that the UIA “contemplates a limited physical intrusion necessary to abate a nuisance—inclosure of the public lands.”21
Another case interpreting the UIA is Leo Sheep, a U.S. Supreme Court case also arising out of Carbon County, Wyoming.22 In this case, the Court held that the federal government did not have an implied easement to build a road over the Leo Sheep Co.’s land to access public lands in the checkerboard pattern.23 Iron Bar asked the Tenth Circuit to apply this case rather than Camfield and Bergen. The court declined to apply Leo Sheep, reading its holding as narrowly focused on whether the government has an implied easement to construct a road across private property.24 The court further explained that Leo Sheep was inapplicable because “corner-crossing does not rise to the level of ‘an implied easement to build a road across land that was originally granted to the Union Pacific Railroad.’”25
The Tenth Circuit’s decision in Iron Bar Holdings marks a decisive moment in property law and public land access in the West. By upholding the right to corner cross without physically touching private land, the court has affirmed that corner crossing is lawful under the UIA—even in jurisdictions where the state would consider it trespassing. This decision furthers Representative Payson’s goal to ensure that private landowners cannot obstruct access to federal public lands when introducing the legislation nearly a century and a half ago.
Footnotes
