In the spring of 1852, with the scars of the Mexican-American War still fresh, a steamboat captain, one Richard King, rode into the Wild Horse Desert of South Texas with a plan to buy as much land as he could get his hands on. Over the course of the next two years, King would acquire roughly sixty-eight thousand acres between two Spanish and Mexican land grants. Then, in 1854, with drought on the brink of hollowing out the nearby village of Cruillas, he would cross the border, acquire the village’s entire cattle herd, and offer the villagers homes and wages in exchange for their labor. Those villagers who accepted came north and became los kineños, King’s men. Over the years, the ranch he assembled in this manner would peak at 1.2 million acres, larger than Rhode Island: the largest working ranch in America. To King—and his home state, Texas—land was a thing you owned: something a man stocked and worked and made profitable.
Half a century later and half a continent away, a man with a very different conception of land, the Scottish-born wanderer John Muir, lay still on one of the grand granite domes of Yosemite, staring up at the sky. Seated next to him on the rock was the sleeping body of the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt. The night was the result of months of planning, an attempt by Muir to lure the President into the backcountry of California to have him agree to protect the wilderness that Muir so loved. The next morning, Roosevelt, waking through five inches of fresh snow, was delighted. He would later write that a night among the sequoias was “like lying in a great solemn cathedral.” Muir’s gambit had worked. Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove would be returned to the federal government. To Muir, and the state he called home, land was a cathedral, a sacred trust that demanded preservation.
