It is fitting to recall W. H. Auden’s terrifying poem “O What Is That Sound,” when he speaks of the posse of soldiers down in the valley, unexpectedly turning to come up to your very house, massing at the gate outside your croft and then

  O it’s broken the lock and splintered the door

  O it’s the gate where they’re turning, turning;

  Their boots are heavy on the floor

  And their eyes are burning.

  The former village of Kildonan is the place most keenly remembered today for the perceived outrages of Patrick Sellar and William Young. A series of violent evictions took place there in the summer of 1813 in the valley just a few miles inland from Helmsdale. They were violent because for the first time since the removals program had begun in earnest across in nearby Assynt six years earlier, the enforcers were met with resistance. Though news travels slowly in the Highlands, it is certain that by this time—six years!—the crofters of Kildonan had heard of the forty-eight entire villages that had been ravaged in Assynt alone, had heard of the manner in which the factors had set fire to the crofters’ roofs, how they had driven away their cattle, had set the pastures ablaze, had forced whole families—pregnant women among them—out onto the moors at the end of blackthorn sticks and brandished broadswords.

  They well knew by then that Sellar’s modernization strategy was to leave the sacked villages entirely uninhabitable, such that only sheep could henceforward live on the land and that the huge envisioned sheep farms—many of them run by Englishmen, to add insult to local injury—could be firmly and swiftly established, providing even greater rental revenue for the Sutherland estate. So by the time Sellar arrived on his first scouting mission to Kildonan, the men of the settlement were waiting for him. They were all too well aware of the imminent danger that was facing them, were wanting to have nothing to do with the niggardly three-acre coastal plots that were being offered in recompense, were having no truck with what most saw as the madcap idea of having to learn how to fish—when most could not even swim. They were, to a man, bent on open revolt.

  At first, Sellar and the agents from Dunrobin Castle proved no match for the angry Highlanders, crowds of them blocking the newly built road that ran alongside the languid reaches of the salmon-rich Helmsdale River. Barricades were erected. Stones were thrown. Sellar was unimpressed, though puzzled. He was a no-nonsense man, a zealot of implacable determination, a lawyer-farmer who had already himself embraced modernization on his own property. He believed that so far as the stewardship of the barren lands here was concerned, there simply was no economic future for tiny tenanted farms. He was not merely acting to inflate the riches of his employers; he was striving to improve the overall lot of those whom he was trying to persuade to leave. What he was attempting to do was, he felt, for the crofters’ own good. Moreover, Sellar’s own grandfather had been cleared from his smallholdings in central Scotland many years before and he, the grandson, had prospered nonetheless. No doubt these crofters of Sutherland, after the initial shock, would set about improving their own lives, would one day come to accept that Patrick Sellar had done much good for them and for Scotland.

  But the men of Kildonan were having none of that. The barricades stayed put, the stones continued to fly, the ponies on which the eviction squad were traveling were harassed and frightened and repeatedly tumbled their riders into the heather. Each time the team returned to Dunrobin without having budged the villagers, a perplexed Lady Sutherland told them to try again the following day. She was shocked, shocked, at such hurtful rejection of plans that she believed were wise and benevolent.

  Her patience finally snapped in August. Sellar and Young, she declared, needed brute force augmentation. Using her influence with the local colonelcy, she was able to dragoon a local unit of the army into standing alongside her eviction squad. With bayonets at the ready, the platoons of infantrymen, terrifying to behold and impossible to resist, eventually forced the villagers to stand aside.

  Once the houses had been cleared, Sellar did what he always did: he briefly allowed the villagers time to harness their livestock and drive them onto the Helmsdale road, and then set the heather ablaze to spoil the pasture, and he had his men break the roof timbers and set fire to any thatch, thus ensuring the entire village of Kildonan was wrecked and useless. It was My Lai, Scotland-style. Kildonan’s ruins are visible today, just low walls of tumbled stone poking vaguely up through the grasses, outlines of lives that were moved elsewhere, like it or not. There is a small Church of Scotland, most of it built in the 1780s, now almost abandoned, but with plaques memorializing the fate of the evicted highlanders.

  And for the evacuees, lives changed greatly. They realized as they had suspected that the small and pinched crofts in and around the harbor at Helmsdale were unsuitable and unacceptable. After a lengthy conclave it was decided that a number of the evacuees would abandon not just Sutherland, but Scotland too—and would flee instead to Canada, and to the widely advertised Red River of Manitoba. They had heard, and rightly so, that the lands around this faraway river were owned by a Scotsman, who would look kindly on them settling there.

  Accordingly they boarded the SS Prince of Wales, a Hudson’s Bay Company freighter that was already on migrant passage from Stromness in Orkney clear across the North Atlantic to York Factory, a company fur-trading settlement on the western shore of Hudson Bay. The vessel’s surviving passenger list shows a total of ninety-six passengers. While a few of them were collected from a brief stop in Ireland, most—names like John Sutherland and family, Jean and Angus Mackay, Betty Gray, the widow Barbra McBeath—were names from the old parish rolls of the Strath of Kildonan. They left Helmsdale in August; they had two terrible months on the little vessel—typhoid killed many; seasickness carried off others—and the much diminished party finally arrived at the tiny factory in October, just as the winter snows were settling and the rivers were icing over.

  A small number of more intrepid evacuees,* all kitted out with company-supplied snowshoes, then made their way southwest toward what was called the Red River Settlement—trekking across the tundra, eventually camping on some 116,000 acres of land that the Hudson’s Bay Company just months before had sold, and just as the migrants had heard back home, to a fellow Scotsman, the Earl of Selkirk, who entertained the hope of establishing a homeland for dispossessed Scots like these. Their weeks-long expedition was fraught with difficulty—not least because they walked unwittingly into all manner of disputes between trappers and traders and rival claimants to the lands and the trading opportunities on the flatlands around the river junctions ahead. But settled they eventually did, and in time their settlement became the core of the city of Winnipeg, capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba. From time to time citizens of Scots ancestry make their way back to Kildonan, to pay homage to their melancholy beginnings.

  There is an inescapable irony to the crofters’ settlement in Canada. The land on which they would build the foundations of the city of Winnipeg, and of which history all too casually records the ownership of Lord Selkirk, did not of course “belong”—again, the concept of land “belonging” is not universally recognized—to any white man. The acreage had for years been the homeland of métis people—descendants of unions between French fur trappers and local Indians—who had squatted there, admittedly without title, and who were understandably hostile to the newcomers. There were fights and killings and on occasion soldiers had to be brought in to separate the warring parties. And other Northern Plains Indians—such as the birchbark-canoe builders, the Ojibwe, who are still so prominent in the headwaters of the Mississippi River, some short distance to the south over the American frontier—also declared an interest in the land. Though all is peaceful now for the Scots in Manitoba, there must have been times when the Strath of Kildonan seemed a relatively serene place, in spite of the menace of Patrick Sellar and his gangs.

  Sellar himself lived on for more than three further decades after the height of his clearance activities, dying in 1851, unloved and widely cursed (such that flowers never grew on his grave, it was said) but with a professional reputation as an intelligent farmer and prescient reformer somewhat enhanced. Had he not existed, then maybe nor would Winnipeg.*

  Meanwhile, Scots of the more radical nature are content to continue their assault on the memory of Sellar’s employers, the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. And to do all they can to hasten the removal of the hated “Mannie” from on top of the summit ridge of Ben Bhraggie, in which ambition it has to be assumed that one day they will succeed.

  2

  The Accumulators of Space

  Boone Pickens’ Mesa Vista Ranch: Roberts County, Texas.

  64,809± Acres

  An Oasis in the Texas Panhandle—the World’s Best Quail Hunting.

  Price Reduced to $220,000,000.

  Chas. S. Middleton and Son, Lubbock, Texas.

  —ADVERTISEMENT IN The Land Report (WINTER 2019)

  The biggest personal landowners in the world are nearly all monarchs or absolute rulers of one kind or another: the kings of Swaziland, Bhutan, Jordan, Nepal, Thailand, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Lesotho, the Emir of Kuwait, the Sultan of Oman, the Pope, and the Sheikh of Qatar. The list necessarily also includes Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who is technical owner of last resort of the entire acreage of the United Kingdom, from Shetland to the Scilly Isles, together with portions of—in most cases, all of—some fifty-four now independent nations that once made up the British empire, with her still being the titular queen of thirty-two of them. A quarter of the world’s population lives on land in which, though the individual citizens may not know it, they exist in a notionally feudal relationship with the British Crown.

  In strict technical and legal terms this British monarch exercises stewardship over the virtual entirety of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realms that together make up a sizable portion of the Crown’s 6600 million acres. In many other democratic countries—Germany, France, and the United States, most obviously—an individual may own land subject only to a few restrictions. Where the relict British writ still runs, the arrangement is more akin to vassalage, if much diluted and with any slight historic obligation seldom if ever enforced. The somewhat-past-its-sell-by-date theory holds that if the true and ultimate owner of all the Earth is God, and if the current holder of the British Crown is God’s representative on Earth, then it surely follows that the monarch holds the land in trust on God’s behalf, and for the Deity’s convenience and pleasure. Few but the most worshipfully doctrinaire seem not to chafe at the absurdity of this arrangement.

  Of course, when considering how owners steward their lands it is hardly possible to judge those who own entire countries. Queen Elizabeth can hardly be expected to know how well or ill a wheat field in Saskatchewan is being looked after; nor can the King of Saudi Arabia, a man with a myriad pressing concerns, be too bothered about the condition of every dune in the Rub’ al Khali. The granularity of stewardship can really be considered only by looking at the landholdings of those lesser individuals, men and women who own great tracts yet are by no means sovereign in doing so.

  Such landholdings by private individuals in Britain—difficult to ascertain in detail, so notoriously secretive in such matters is the still class-bound and suspicious country—are sizable, though they are understandably modest in comparison with the vast tracts owned privately across the huge fastnesses of the United States and Australia. The largest personal landholding in Britain is probably that of the Duke of Buccleuch, who is listed as presiding over some 270,000 acres, though at the time of this writing he’s reported to be selling off fields and farms at a dizzying rate. All told, the British dukes own a little more than a million acres of British land, which, though plenty, is as nothing when compared with the world’s major possessors of territory.

  By most accounts, the world’s very largest private landowners are all Australian—which is hardly surprising, given the size of even quite ordinary cattle or sheep stations. The largest single property in the country, the Anna Creek sheep station in South Australia, is almost 6 million acres in extent—which, when one considers that all of England is just 32 million acres, puts English landowners very much in their place. Indeed, when they are combined, the ten largest stations in Australia constitute rather more in land area than exists in all of what was formerly the mother country.

  One Australian owner looms large over all others, however. Gina Rinehart, heir to one of the country’s largest iron-ore-mining fortunes and no mean businesswoman herself, appears currently to be the largest private landowner in the world, with 29 million acres under her various companies’ ownership and control. Others were jockeying for the title, one of whom, the Kidman family—the actress Nicole is a relation—was a close enough rival that Ms. Rinehart, brooking no competition, bought them out to assure her primacy. Unlike the only marginally larger England, much of her land is underpinned by deposits of iron, and with China a ready customer just a few days bulk-carrier-sailing-time to the north, her companies make enough money to keep her at the top of the Australia’s Richest Person and World’s Richest Person and World’s Richest Woman lists, hovering in the single digits in most of them. She enjoys a flotilla of large houses, engages in keenly fought legal disputes (most especially with her much younger Filipina stepmother in a money-related case that lasted for fourteen years and kept the readership of Australia’s colorful tabloid press highly enthralled). She is also one of the rare individuals to own an upper-deck three-bedroom apartment on the perpetually-globe-circling ultra-luxury vessel MS The World, a ship rather cattily described as having been built for those who are wealthy, but not quite wealthy enough to have their own cruising yachts.*

  The gigantic inherited landholdings of the wealthy mining heiress Gina Rinehart have inspired more awe than affection among her native Australians, although colorful court battles involving family members have done much to humanize her image.

  With Ms. Rinehart’s properties being so extensive, she might as well be head of a small sovereign nation. Much the same difficulty exists in trying to assess how her lands are run as in trying to assess the environmental impact of the King of Bhutan’s ownership of Bhutan or the Pope’s effect on the Vatican’s extensive holdings in Argentina or Portugal. All that can reasonably be ascertained derives from her publicly expressed attitudes. It is known, for example, that Ms. Rinehart contributes significant sums to organizations that promote climate science skepticism. She has written widely on the subject, declaring in 2011 that “I have never met a geologist or leading scientist who believes adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate change, especially not from a relatively small country like Australia.”

  She also seems rather less than amiably disposed to the broad spectrum of working-class Australians, suggesting that they should stop “whingeing” and should “do something to make more money yourselves—spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing, and more time working.” Warming to this theme in one of her rare interviews, she went on to suggest that if Australians “competed in the Olympic Games as sluggishly as we compete economically, there would be an outcry. Africans want to work and its workers are willing to work for less than two dollars a day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future.”

  Gina Rinehart’s precise views on Australia’s 800,000 aboriginal people, and on the land to which they would seem quite as morally entitled to live and regard as their own as are the Native Americans in the United States, are little known, though doubtless her companies employ large numbers. If her views are uncertain, those of her notoriously bluntly spoken father, Lang Hancock, are often quoted in Australia. He had little time for the indigenous people, it would seem, nor for their claims to their land which he saw as rich with iron ore, and needing to be mined, not preserved.

  “Mining in Australia,” he once said, “occupies less than one-fifth of one percent of the total surface of our continent and yet it supports 14 million people. Nothing should be sacred from mining, whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist.”

  He was still more forthright in expressing his views in 1984, when he went on television to suggest forcing unemployed indigenous Australians—specifically, “the ones that are no good to themselves and who can’t accept things, the half-castes”—to collect their welfare checks from a central location. The reason for this became clear when he further explained that “when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem.”

  The notion that the sins of the father might well have been visited on his similarly blunt and forthright only daughter is perhaps not wholly unimaginable. Meanwhile, her attitude to the land she possesses is defined entirely by the profit she can wring out of its mineral wealth underground. Money, most Australians say of her, remains her greatest obsession, and with China, Japan, and Korea to her north eager for every scrap of hematite they can get their hands on, and with her companies owning 29 million acres of invariably iron-rich Australian landscape, the ultimate fate of her lands has to be predictable: for a while at least, they will be quarried and the ore gouged out of them, and then they will be returned to something like their original state in the way that so many mining companies around the world are legally obliged to do.

  And as for what Australian mineral magnates like to call the T.O.s, the Traditional Owners? Lang Hancock had no time for them, and for a while paid such aboriginal workers as worked for him in food and tobacco, rather than money, which he believed they would only spend on drink. He thought—as did most early Australian settlers—that most of the Australian interior was terra nullius, land that belonged to no one and so ripe for such exploitation as he thought fit.