Oil has put bread on Eleanor Fairchild's table in Wood County, Tex., for more than 50 years. Her late husband was a geologist who worked on exploration for different energy companies, and was part of a team that discovered oil in Yemen in the 1980s. That doesn't mean she welcomed a TransCanada worker who appeared on her doorstep in March 2009. The company wanted to run nearly a mile of its 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline across Fairchild's 350-acre farm 90 miles east of Dallas, the representative explained, and was willing to pay her $43,000 for an easement on five acres. Fairchild pondered the offer for several weeks. She says the company upped it to $60,000, but "they were really pushy, and that doesn't go over well with me," Fairchild says.
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