lots of land with few people.
From Wikipedia:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 6,929 square miles (17,946 km²), of which, 6,928 square miles (17,943 km²) of it is land and 1 square miles (3 km²) of it (0.02%) is water.
Catron County is the largest county, by area, in New Mexico. At almost 7,000 square miles (18,000 km2), Catron County is larger than a few Eastern states. With a population of only 3,400 people, the county is as sparsely populated as many an old West frontier area.
Some locals spoke of seeing unmarked helicopters performing secret maneuvers, of "government Rambo squads" that were out to rob ranchers of their livelihood. One man said federal forces were, at that very moment, marching on the county from the north. As tempers smoldered, Nancy Brown, a neighbor of the Crabills, stood and recounted a recent dream in which the demons of gun control kicked in her front door. "I pulled a double-barrel shotgun," she said, "and asked, 'Which one of you sons of Satan wishes to die first?
In the end, Catron County did not create a formal militia that night, mainly because the county commission, the previous August, had passed a resolution "encouraging" heads of households to own and carry guns at all times and to keep sufficient ammunition on hand. Before the meeting wound down, the point became abundantly clear: Plenty of people in the county already were armed and prepared to do battle with the federal government or other alien invaders. The citizens of Catron County didn't need to form a militia. They were a militia.
Seditious talk is nothing new in this defiant corner of southwestern New Mexico. From the deeply canyoned Mimbres, Mangas, Tularosa, and Mogollon Mountains--watersheds of the mighty Gila and San Francisco Rivers--and across the arroyo-scarred desert that spreads in all directions, the area has housed fugitives from every conceivable oppressor. Confederate veterans and copperheads, as northerners who sympathized with the South were known, emigrated here during Reconstruction to escape the wrath of carpetbaggers. Apache chieftains Mangas Colorado and Geronimo came in the late 1800s to elude the U.S. Cavalry. In the 1930s, socialists trickled in seeking refuge from incessant red-baiting. Hippies came in the sixties to flee the city. And in 1980, Dave Foreman, who had run away from the bureaucratic bore of Washington environmentalism, cofounded Earth First! in the town of Glenwood. Mix it all with the feisty spirit imported by nineteenth-century waves of English, Scottish, and Irish settlers--whose memories of enclosures and royal high-handedness made them wary of both fences and authority--and Catron County's undercurrent of anarchy, detectable in the briefest of conversations, begins to make sense. Here, in one of the most desolate patches of the Southwest, is a culture that prides itself on refusing to take any crap from outsiders.
Starting in 1989, Catron County codified that sentiment, passing county ordinances that essentially told the U.S. government to shove it. Through a series of laws and an accompanying land-use plan that have made the county famous--even though, to this day, they remain paper threats that have never been enforced--the ordinances granted the commissioners unilateral power to veto federal endangered-species and wilderness regulations and to pass judgment on all timber and mining decisions. They also defined public grazing permits as "private property rights" and authorized the county sheriff to arrest any federal or state official who attempted to enforce the despised federal statutes. This in a county where more than 65 percent of the land is owned by the U.S. government.
http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/1195/11f_lib.html