The law has changed in recent times, and with it the recognition that much of what was thought terra nullius has in fact been occupied and owned, as it were, by what is generally now accepted to be the oldest continuous civilization on the planet, some sixty thousand years old—far older than the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks. The Australian government recognized such a reality too, and now requires all dealings in what once was called the gaba, the Great Australian Bugger-All, to take exceptional care of the traditional owners’ history, needs, and people, with compensatory payments and respect offered in equal measure. And to be fair to Gina Rinehart, she seems to be following these rules, and there is no evidence that she is reluctant in doing so. She wants her iron, she wants her money—and if there are rules that inhibit her riding as roughshod over the Australian landscape as once her father did, she is complying and not complaining.

  There are a fair number of mightily wealthy landowners in the United States, of course. The twenty biggest own well over half a million acres apiece, and together the top hundred own as much land as the entire state of Florida. And the rate of expansion of private ownership is phenomenal: since 2007 the amount of American land owned by these wealthy one hundred has increased by 50 percent and is showing no signs of slowing down. Many of them are ranchers, and invariably own tracts in Texas and in the cattle-friendly western states. A great number of their holdings go back to forefathers who ran cattle in the nineteenth century, and these landowners attach some reverence to their territories, seeing responsible ranching of the western emptiness as something of a public trust. Other large holdings have been acquired by those who believe that lumber—for home building or papermaking—is the more sustainable and perhaps easier way to make a fortune; their lands tend to be in the wetter, hillier territories, either in the Pacific northwest or the forested expanses of the northeast.

  The names of these men and women who have dominated the North American corps de propriétaires for decades are not as nationally familiar as some—there are the Stimsons with their forests in Oregon; the Martins’ lumber operations in Louisiana; the O’Connors’s Texas ranches near San Antonio; the Hamers in West Virginia; the Lykes family (owners also of the famed Lykes Brothers Steamship Company), with their once lucrative trade of lumber between Florida and Cuba; the coequally gigantic Briscoe and King cattle ranches, both in south Texas; the Pingrees, who were nineteenth-century slave-traders, now with their massive holdings in New England; the Irvings in Maine and New Brunswick; the Reeds and their timber operations in Oregon; and the Emmerson family, with their reputedly well-managed forests in the high inland mountain ranges of California. None of these clans is so famous as their wealth suggests, and they are little known beyond their immediate neighborhoods.

  Each of these families has a historic claim to notoriety. The descendants of the onetime Canadian sawmill operator K. C. Irving, for example, now have a near total hold over the small New Brunswick city of St. John, running the power generation, the fuel supply, the newspapers, the docks, and many of the stores; in addition, despite a colorful series of internecine squabbles of epic proportions, the principal family company, J. D. Irving Limited, also runs a range of businesses that includes paper and pulp, railroads, trucking, shipbuilding, chandleries, frozen potatoes, packaging, crane rentals, plastics, an ice hockey team, twelve newspapers, a shipping line, a bus company, and a tire distributorship. All of this, together with 1,247,880 acres of forest land in New England and eastern Canada—on which the family claims it plants 20 million new trees each year, demonstrating their reputed commitment to the sustainable management of their immense territorial resource.

  These are the old, somewhat conventional, traditional landowners. The very largest of all nowadays, however, seem to be newcomers—men in the main, vastly successful in their various fields, which have little to do with land itself, but are usually but not invariably associated with either the electronic arts or with fast food, and who decided in later life to invest in the one immutable and incorruptible investment that will seldom be much affected by any turmoil in the market. They seemingly felt a compulsion to own very large tracts of American land, and to employ it in a variety of ways.

  Ted Turner, for example. He founded the Cable News Network, CNN, in 1978, pledging his then already considerable fortune to keep gathering and broadcasting television news “until the world ends.” He started many other ventures—wrestling, old movies, Russian TV, gift giving—managed to get himself embroiled in any number of vicious spats with rivals in an increasingly competitive business, and then began buying land, in immense amounts. He was by birth an Ohioan, by persuasion a southerner, but in terms of environmental activism became, like so many romantics, a devotee of the American west. So the land he bought was largely in Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and New Mexico—1.9 million acres in all, with the largest single parcel being a ranch in far northern New Mexico, on the Colorado state line, with almost 600,000 acres of semi-arid desert land, half of it in the Great Plains, the western half in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  The history of this single parcel is probably unique in the history of the American west—a former tribal home to the Apache Indians, it was the centerpiece of a huge land grant* once made by the Mexican government in the 1840s to a French fur trapper, whose son-in-law, a celebrated Irish French mountain man named Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, then found gold in its mountains, expanded his holdings, sold them en masse to a British company. After this (and after the killing of Billy the Kid on one of the ranches in 1881) the grant was eventually broken up into a raft of smaller—but still enormous—properties, one of them owned today by the National Rifle Association, another by the Boy Scouts of America,* and the largest parcel of all, known now as the Vermejo Park Ranch, by Robert Edward Turner III, of CNN.

  The founder of CNN, Ted Turner, was until recently the owner of the greatest acreage of private land in the United States until a rival TV executive, John Malone, outdid him. Turner has done much to encourage the restoration of the bison population in the West.

  Ted Turner, whose trenchantly expressed political opinions are unconventional among the American elite—he believes, for example, that Iran should be allowed to have nuclear weapons, that the Palestinians are no more inclined to terrorism than is the state of Israel, that there is little brutality within North Korea, that women have an absolute right to abortion and that organized religion is generally to be deplored—is a committed environmentalist and a true believer in the perils of man-made global warming. He spends millions to protect endangered species—most recently the reintroduction of the Bolson tortoise, Gopherus flavomarginatus, on one of his New Mexico properties a couple of hundred miles south of Vermejo Park. This act of biological munificence won him accolades from the Turtle Conservancy, who now declare this giant and once endangered species to be flourishing happily again. And enlightened self-interest plays a part too: Turner owns a chain of forty-odd restaurants, Ted’s Montana Grill, and is doing his best to persuade the American dining public to consume cuts of that most emblematic of American ungulates, the Plains bison. He has made considerable efforts in recent years to reintroduce bison to his High Plains holdings, harvesting them responsibly, he claims, and managing their populations in a common-sense manner.

  Reintroducing the bison to the American west has become something of a mission for Turner, an otherwise agnostic figure whose current motto is Save Everything. He claims to be only too well aware that the appalling behavior of nineteenth-century settlers brought these magnificent mammals to the brink of extinction. The argument at the time was more anti-Indian than anti-buffalo: those promoting western settlement held that by denying the hunting parties of Plains Indians their own communities’ main source of meat, the number of Indians themselves would be reduced by starvation, making the land easier to claim by the incomers. It was not long before this ideologically justified reason turned into an unstoppable orgy of bloodlust, and in their thousands gangs of huntsmen were soon thronging the prairies. Most came armed with large .50 caliber weapons, which aficionados considered the best means of bringing down the gentle, placid, lumbering, multiton grazing creatures.

  Hunters would come to hunt them by train, for example, as Harper’s magazine once reported:

  Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

  Fifty million bison were slaughtered by such fish-in-a-barrel methods during the mid-nineteenth century. Indians would sit on their horses and watch, openmouthed with horror at the mob behavior, as trains would pass by with hundreds of gun barrels firing endless cannonades, as if battleship broadsides. And once the train had passed over the horizon, and the wind-soothed silence returned to the prairie, so these same Indians would gaze uncomprehending at the sight of hundreds of bison carcasses lying beside the tracks, soon to be bloating and rotting in the scorching sun. The hunters never even bothered to collect their kill, being interested only in the act of killing itself. Some entrained visitors claimed to be bagging six thousand animals a season, and popular images were published showing Matterhorns of discarded bison skulls waiting to be mulched into fertilizer.

  It was briefly considered sporting fun to board a train in Nebraska and head west over the prairies, blazing away with rifles at any passing bison—in the aftermath, millions died, and skulls were piled fifty feet high. Indians, who thought the beasts sacred, wept, incredulous.

  Turner remains appalled by what happened. His efforts to breathe life back into the bison population have been rewarded: he now raises some fifty thousand animals himself, and with other breeders joining the buffalo bandwagon, the animal is no longer on the verge of vanishing. And while bison meat remains a niche product for the still beef-obsessed legions of American carnivores—the restaurant chain is just a moderate success—it can fairly be said that Turner’s nearly two million acres have helped restore some corners of the Great Plains to something approaching their original, natural state, before the depredations of nineteenth-century settlement brought ruin elsewhere.

  Ted Turner is not the largest American landowner anymore, however. That distinction goes to another practitioner of the electronic arts, John Malone, an engineering billionaire born in Connecticut of Irish Catholic stock who also made his fortune in the early days of cable television. He currently runs Liberty Media and he owns the Atlanta Braves baseball team, a large chunk of Expedia travel agency, the QVC shopping channel, and the Sirius satellite radio operation. He is, in other words, a major player in the twenty-first-century American economy. He also owns an impressive 2.2 million acres of the land surface of the United States—and 3200 more acres in Ireland, where he has a large fairyland castle in County Wicklow as well as one of the finest Georgian mansions in the country, Castlemartin, on the banks of the Liffey in County Kildare.

  In 2011, after years of chest-bumping competition with Ted Turner, Malone won the race to become the owner of the most land in America. He began his acquisitions in the West, with a million or so acres gathered up in and around the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana,* and Nebraska. On portions of these tracts he raises and trains quarter horses and he breeds beef cattle—in huge numbers in Nebraska particularly, where his Silver Spur Ranches run feedlots on the banks of the North Platte River. More recently, he developed an interest in the American Northeast, buying tracts in New Hampshire and, in the effort that finally pushed him over the line in the Turner race, purchasing fully 980,000 acres of the far northern forests of Maine.

  Once Malone had made the pole position he spoke, as he seldom does, of the ownership-addiction “virus,” as he put it, that he supposedly caught from Turner. He repeats the well-worn dictum about one “never really owning land” and that “you are a kind of steward of it, so you really want to be a good steward. But it sure is enjoyable while you are on the planet to be able to go walk around or get on a horse and drive a truck around and be out in the open.”

  So far as is known, no particular animal or plant lays claim to John Malone as either its savior or guardian—no tortoise, no bison. He is an eager horse breeder and owner of thoroughbreds, both in Florida and at studs dotted around southern Ireland—and his cattle ranches in the west are said to offer “sustainable grazing practices to ensure the health and balance of native grasses and prairie, while keeping the carbon sequestered in undisturbed soils. Only horses’ hooves and cow tracks impact grasslands and soils, storing carbon, reducing erosion and ensuring food security.”

  Of his expanses in Hancock County, Maine, the public relations agency that writes such material as this could say only that Mr. Malone “uses photosynthesis” to offset carbon emissions—omitting to tell the less sophisticated reader, perhaps, that trees, with which Mr. Malone’s lands in Maine are entirely draped, perform photosynthesis without any urging from their owner. This, put simply, is what trees do. And the Hancock County land is all fir and spruce, maple and birch; there are moose, bears, lynx; there are streams choked with salmon, lakes with trout and bass. Basically, all of inland Maine is very much as an airline passenger might see upper New England unspooling below, all the way from the St. Lawrence River to the New Hampshire border: endless stretches of dark green forest, pristine and unused, wild and forgotten.

  Within the state, though, there remains a stubbornly perceptible degree of concern as to what Mr. Malone might do with his immense acreage. Nationally, the Nature Conservancy has praised his efforts at improving his lands and preserving wildlife. But locally, they are not so sure. The Natural Resources Council of Maine well understands that there are logging operations in their forests generally—it would be idle to suppose otherwise: 95 percent of Maine’s land is privately owned, and such inland industry as exists consists of lumber and paper and little else. But the council nonetheless presses new owners to put at least some of their holdings into conservation easements, so there can never be any environmentally ruinous developments—no nuclear power stations, no airfields, no getaway resorts. And it bothers them that thus far Mr. Malone has not signaled his intentions to do that—though he will continue the informal tradition in Maine of allowing public access, so that snowmobilers and skiers and those other harder breeds of men and women who like the cold wilderness of the far northeast may indulge in their pursuits, or gentler types may experiment with the forest bathing that is currently said to be so soothing for the soul.

  America’s two biggest owners do seem, in short, to feel a fair degree of responsibility for their immense holdings of the national landscape. They are seen as having little in common with the robber barons of old, men who in all too many instances scourged their territories and took from the land what they wanted, at will and with little regard for the future. One hopes and supposes the lands of such new masters as these will flourish, as will the animals and plants together, under their supervision.

  Not that the robber barons have entirely gone away. Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of Amazon, uses his 400,000 acres in far western Texas as a launch site for his Blue Origin space rockets. And the press-shy “Silent Stan” Kroenke, who owns sports teams—Britain’s Arsenal football club among them—and stadiums, and who married into the immense Walmart fortune, recently bought the half-million-acre Waggoner Ranch in far northern Texas—said to be the largest ranch in the country that is surrounded by a single continuous fence. Soon after buying it, he sent eviction letters to a group of elderly and impoverished people who had lived for decades around one of his many lakes. The eventual cavalcade of ragged and impoverished old-timers—whose families before them had lived on the shores of Lake Diversion for decades under a carelessly informal arrangement with the previous ranch owners—presented a sorry sight; their loathing for Mr. Kroenke knew no limits, and they cursed him loudly as they passed the lake for the final time.

  And then there are the Wilks brothers.

  The Land Report, the Dallas-based quarterly bible for America’s landed set, takes a decidedly sniffy tone in noting that the conservative evangelicals Farris and Dan Wilks, with their 705,475 acres and climbing—they acquired a further 3108 acres in 2019, and show no signs of halting their shopping spree—are currently the twelfth largest owners in the country. “They love land” is the only comment within the brief entry for the journal’s annual top-100 list; one has the distinct feeling that the magazine’s editors, who make fulsome remarks about almost everyone else on the list, do not much care for the Wilks brothers, for whom they have not a single kind word.

  Popular disdain for the brothers seems to extend to those states—the mountains of southwest Idaho, principally—where they own most of their land. There and in Montana and down the Rockies all the way south to west Texas, the pair have in recent years created and expanded an enormous forest-and rangeland empire. In doing so, they have been busily forbidding all uninvited others from having access to their acres, no matter how lenient and permissive the previous owners might have been. They have hired armed security guards, thrown up gates, dug antivehicle ditches, strung barbed-wire fences across public roads, all intended to stop people from entering or crossing or even passing unacceptably close to the lands they now own.