And as one of the comments pointed out, many of the rural states are completely at the mercy of the Federal government. When the Federal government controls 48% of a state's land (Wyoming), yet doesn't allow logging, mining or agricultural activities on most of it, what exactly is the local population supposed to generate revenue from?

Logging, mining, and agricultural activities is hardly an exhaustive list of economic activity. It is also strange to think about what people should do with land they don't control. Or even to assume that natural resources are the only resource of importance.

Connecticut has 3.6 million people, Wyoming has roughly 0.6 million people. 6.2% of Connecticut's 5543^2 miles of land is public 56% of Wyoming's 97818^2 miles of land is public.

So Wyoming has about 8 times as much private land as Connecticut and about 1/6th the number of people.

I realize that there is a lot more involved than just land, but it looks like in the aggregate, there is about 50 times as much private land in Wyoming per person than in Connecticut.

It is easy to poke holes in my analysis, but I'd be surprised if scarcity of land is the roadblock to a healthy economy in Wyoming.

I'm also not trying to take an opinion on whether the federal government should hold all that land, just pointing out that there is a lot of land in Wyoming on a per-capita basis.

Are the least dependent states that way because of logging, mining or agricultural activities? No. 52% of the Wyoming's land, ~50,000 sq. miles, is still more land than 18 other states have in the Union.