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"We were going to build a boutique hotel here," Gordy said, leaning hard on the first syllable in boutique. But then he found out that the owner of a small ranch south of his boundary line had leased his land for a wind farm. Gordy grimaced at the prospect of towering windmills next door. He had made the rancher an offer, tried to buy him out. But the man was set on doing that wind farm. "It's going to kill all the birds," Gordy said grimly.

In the years that followed, I thought about Gordy and the nameless rancher across his border—his neighbor. "We have no neighbors," Gordy had said during my visit, by way of describing the ranch's expansiveness, its absolute privacy. And yet, somehow, this one had made an impression. I wondered who that rancher was.

I didn't know that an epic story was unfolding in the Crazy Mountains, a story centuries in the making, with millionaires and billionaires, cattle barons and Crow warriors, prospectors and politicians, meat-packers and medicine men. It reached from the muck of Montana calving barns to the gleaming C-suites of Manhattan skyscrapers. It was a modern-day range war in a warming West—a fight for power in its most elemental form. It was a ghost story haunted by generations of dreamers and strivers, those drawn to the land and those who lost it, the dispossessed, the exiles. At its heart was an old cowboy in suspenders, and the all-American spectacle of neighbors suing each other.

Then I found out that my profile of Mr. Gordy had surfaced in the discovery for a lawsuit—the lawsuit to stop that cowboy from building Crazy Mountain Wind.

PROLOGUE

FEBRUARY 19, 2019 

LIVINGSTON, MONTANA

Montana's Sixth Judicial District Court sits on a quiet street in Livingston, some thirty miles west of Big Timber. The court, which has jurisdiction over cases in Sweet Grass and Park counties, occupies the footprint of the city's first courthouse, an imposing brick pile erected in 1896 as the last prairie schooners trundled through Yellowstone country. Livingston's fortress of justice was razed in the 1970s and replaced by a low-slung Ford-era box of pebbly gray concrete with smoked glass windows. Its best architectural feature is the free street parking. It's hard to imagine a less picturesque setting for the three-day showdown that was about to begin at high noon one gray winter day.

It had been brutally cold, the coldest February on record, with sub-zero temperatures in the double digits and gusting snow. But the first day of the hearing dawned clear, and it was a balmy eight degrees Fahrenheit as the plaintiffs and the defendants in the case of Diana's Great Idea et al. v. Crazy Mountain Wind et al. parked their battered pickup trucks, gleaming Escalades, and F-450 Super Duty Lariats on East Callender Street. They picked their way across the ice and frozen snowdrifts, stepped inside the county building's skylit lobby, and filed up the stairs to a courtroom painted the bright blue of a child's drawing of the sky.

Like guests at a wedding, they arranged themselves on opposite sides of the aisle; defendants to the right, plaintiffs to the left. Every time the heavy wooden doors to the courtroom swung open, people twisted in their seats to see who had arrived. Sometimes a newcomer would sit down, look around, realize they had picked the wrong side, and quickly scoot across the aisle.

Rick Jarrett removed his wool hat as he entered the courtroom, patting down his hair. His belly was round, his beard unruly. Rick had taken care with his appearance that morning. He wore a Western shirt with all its buttons, a leather vest, and clean, pressed jeans, secured with his good suspenders. There was a hitch to his step as he made his way to a royal blue bench a few rows from the front. Rick, sixty-eight, had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The cows were calving. Rick was out at all hours in the biting wind at this time of year, pulling calves and hustling the slick newborns into the warmth of the calving shed to dry off and suck before they froze to death. But lately, he had turned over more of this work to his daughter, Jami, and her companion, Harv. He was getting old too quickly, it seemed. He hoped the kids would be able to take over the ranch someday, buy him out so he could retire.

His land was worth millions, but Rick Jarrett was not a wealthy man. No IRA, no savings account. He drove a thirty-year-old Cadillac with a broken headlight, kicked out by one of his cows. Land rich, cash poor, that's how it was. The cows couldn't pay the bills anymore, which was why Rick had been fighting for fifteen years to get some wind development on his ground. A few years back, he mortgaged the ranch's two thousand acres for close to a million dollars. If Crazy Mountain Wind didn't get built, there might not be a goddamn ranch to pass on.