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MEN LIKE ED SWARTZ are the heroes of the modern Republican Party’s creation mythology. He is the man Ronald Reagan pretended to be when he rode his horse around Rancho del Cielo at Santa Barbara. Swartz is a Western rancher who pays his own way. He believes in property rights, an individual’s constitutional right to own a gun, and a work ethic that can turn twenty sections of semiarid range land into a productive cattle ranch. He brands his own cattle, mends his own fences, and waters his own pastures. He was chairman of the Campbell County Republican Party and is a member of the National Rifle Association. He even smokes Marlboros—with an evident pleasure that seems almost sinful.

Swartz has lived for years with the open-pit coal mines that were regulated by the agency Griles tore to hell back in 1982. He uses the mines as points of reference—Eagle Butte Mine, Caballo Mine, Buckskin Mine—when he gives directions to his five-thousand-acre ranch north of Gillette, Wyoming. The state he lives in produces one fourth of the nation’s coal, and the county he lives in produces 97 percent of the state’s coal. The Swartz ranch sits in the middle of Campbell County, so Swartz understands full well what fuels the economy on the northern border of Dick Cheney’s home state. He doesn’t have a problem with exploitation of the region’s mineral wealth.

Like other ranchers in northern Wyoming and southern Montana, Swartz is caught up in the biggest minerals-extraction boom ever to hit a state that lives by the boom-and-bust cycle. There’s nothing like a minerals-extraction boom to bring out the worst in the people doing the extracting.

It’s not coal that has Swartz suing his own government and returning to a regional environmental group he helped found thirty years ago. It’s coal-bed methane, locally called CBM. Methane is a clean-burning natural gas that can be found in most coal formations. In the 1980s a simple technology was developed to release the gas. Wells are drilled into coal seams, and sections of casing pipe are strung together and inserted into the coal formation. When the water is pulled out of the formation by a submersible pump, the gas flows up the pipe. CBM wells cost only about $50,000 to drill and can be completed in two or three days.

There is an estimated 12.5 trillion cubic feet of methane trapped in coal “cleats” or seams in northern Wyoming—enough to supply the nation with natural gas for about a year. Cheap, quick access to it started a CBM gold rush in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Landmen show up unannounced, lay contracts on kitchen tables, and tell ranchers “I’m going to make you a rich man.” One northern Wyoming landman drove a huge SUV with a plastic dorsal fin attached to the top and signs on the doors that read LAND SHARK. Others persuaded owners of private mineral rights to sign $4-an-acre leases, then flipped the contract within days for $6, $8, $10, or $20 an acre. (For a point of reference, some federal leases sold for $400 an acre.) Millions of dollars were made before anyone even drilled a well. “Their standard line was, ‘This deal won’t be here tomorrow,’ ” said a rancher who had yet to sign away her mineral rights. Small drilling companies cut roads, drill wells, and lay pipelines, only to be gobbled up by big players like Marathon Oil, now the number-one CBM producer in northern Wyoming. Eighteen thousand wells were drilled. Five thousand miles of new roads were carved out of Wyoming ranch land, and a web of pipelines was buried in the ground to move the gas to high-pressure arterial lines that carry it out of the region. Production goals in the National Energy Policy, released by Vice President Cheney in May 2001, are fueling a second boom. Its size and scope make the first one look like a small increase in production.

Sitting at the kitchen table of his modest frame house, Swartz slowly drew on a Marlboro and used the index finger of his free hand to trace the Wildcat Creek drainage