Teton County, Wyoming, proved to be an exemplary case study site because, as noted earlier, not only is it the richest county in the United States, and the county with highest levels of income inequality, but it is also a place where these patterns developed rapidly over the last thirty years or so, providing me a unique window into the unfolding of these dynamics over a relatively short period of time. Further, this community exists within the larger social context of Wyoming, a state in which, as a new report from Stanford University has documented, 1 percent of the population owns the largest share of the wealth (50 percent). Thus, it is representative of national inequality and at the same time offers the opportunity to examine a distinctly rural locale, the type of place too often ignored in mainstream research.