This land is your land?

Howard Hawks’ “Red River” isn’t just any Western. It was the last movie playing in the small-town Texas theater in the Peter Bogdanovich/Cybill Shepherd film (from the Larry McMurtry novel) “The Last Picture Show.” It was Montgomery Clift’s first — and many say John Wayne’s best — film.

And how does novelist Borden Chase’s quintessential American tale of the first great post-Civil War cattle drive begin? Wayne’s Tom Dunson and Clift’s Matt Garth start one of the great Texas cattle herds with one bull and one cow and all the land between the Red River and the Rio Grande — land which they simply grab.

Two Mexican pistolleros show up, early in the film, to tell the man and boy they can camp on the land while they pass through, but they can’t stay, because the land belongs to a wealthy Mexican who lives far to the south.

“That’s too much land for one man,” Wayne declares. One of the men says it’s his job to deal with such attitudes. Wayne cements his claim by killing him.

But things have changed since 1851. You can’t grab a nice-looking piece of land in America today just because the owner has left it vacant.

Or can you?

In 1984, Don Kirlin, a commercial airline pilot, and his wife, Susie, a former teacher, bought two adjacent lots on the southern edge of Boulder, Colo. They live in a home a short distance away, but hoped to build their dream house on the land. They frequently walked their dogs past their property. They report they never saw any sign anyone was using it.

Nor did they think to worry about such a thing, Ms. Kirlin told the Los Angeles Times. After all, they paid their property taxes and homeowner fees. They sprayed for noxious weeds and repaired fences.

Unbeknownst to the Kirlins, however, for more than 20 years a retired judge named Richard McLean and his lawyer wife, Edith Stevens — occupants of the house next door to the vacant lots — systematically trespassed on the Kirlins’ land.

They planted a garden and stacked their firewood there, the Times reports. They held parties there.

In 2006, Richard McLean and Edith Stevens went to court, claiming the land they had never bought was actually theirs under Colorado’s adverse possession law, once known as “squatters’ rights.”

In October, Boulder District Judge James C. Klein ruled the couple had demonstrated that their attachment to the land was “stronger than the true owners’ attachment.” He awarded Mr. McLean one-third of the lot, worth about $1 million.

The wealthy squatters may have won in a court of law, but they have not fared so well in the court of public opinion, even in the famously left-leaning university town of Boulder.

Internet bloggers ridiculed Mr. McLean and Ms. Stevens as land-grabbers who used their knowledge of the law to steal from an unsuspecting neighbor. In November, more than 200 people flocked to the property, where they hoisted signs with slogans such as “Thou shall not steal” while shouting “shame” and “thief” at the McLean-Stevens home, according to the Rocky Mountain News.

The doctrine of adverse possession isn’t new or obscure. But it’s usually applied to rights of way. If your parents and grandparents allowed the neighbors to access their property or walk to a popular bathing beach across your property, you may have forfeited your right to fence off that path.

But to grab a chunk of land away from a taxpaying neighbor by the simple expedient of a woodpile and some tomato plants? And the court won’t even ask why they didn’t approach the owner with an offer to buy?

What should the Kirlins have done to protect their property rights — hunted out every squash vine, burned their lots down to black stubble every year?

There’s no longer a right to buy land, pay taxes on it, and hold it in hopes of seeing it increase in value?

The Kirlins vow to appeal. The courts should consider carefully. For if this ruling stands, property owners are in effect being advised that the courts won’t enforce their titles, leaving them only one solution: A couple guys with big hats, jangling spurs and Walker Colts, smiling and explaining, “You are welcome to camp on this land for a day or two as you’re passing through. But you cannot stay.”

Ah, the roar of .44s in the twilight. If the courts won’t protect our property rights, some just might resort to older ways.