In 1829, a fur trapper named David Jackson was making his way through the American West,

one of thousands of working men who fanned out across the frontier to hunt and trap and survive off the land.

Jackson kept returning to one particular valley in what is now Wyoming. It was a deep, wide valley, completely ringed by mountains,

so enclosed and so dramatic that you didn't just enter it, you descended into it. His trapping

partners, Jedediah Smith and William Sublette, noticed how much time Jackson spent there, so they named it after him.

They had a specific word for valleys like this, valleys that are so deep and so completely swallowed by the mountains around them that it felt like falling into the earth itself.

A valley like that was called a hole, and it became Jackson's Hole, a working man's

valley named by men who went there to work.

For the next 150 years or so, that's more or less where it remained, a rugged, remote,

spectacular corner of Wyoming.

Ranchers and outfitters populated it, and a ski town grew out of it.

Jackson Hole continued

to be a place where people came to experience something wild and something real. But over the last

few decades, things began to change. Slowly at first, working ranchers sold two out-of-state buyers.

Luxury lodges replaced the old outfitter camps, the wealthy discovered it, and then the

ultra-wealthy, and then the ultra wealthy, and then the

private jet set. Now, remember, Wyoming had never had a state income tax, and word got around.

By the time the 20th century arrived, Jackson Hole had already become one of the most exclusive

addresses in America, but then came 2017, and what had been a slow transformation

became something else entirely. When Donald Trump

signed his tax cuts into law that December, Wyoming became one of the most attractive wealth

destinations in the entire country. The new federal rules made it dramatically easier for the

...