A glance at a Butte County road map shows there are a lot of roads and population south of U.S. Highway 212 between Belle Fourche and Newell.

A closer look reveals that one of the more sparse areas in the county is in the southeast corner: east of Vale and north of Meade County, almost north of Bear Butte and east of the Belle Fourche River.

That roadless region had an appeal to Neal Wanless, the young Mission rancher who won the $232.1 million Powerball jackpot about four months ago.

His new corporation's purchase of land in that area amounts to a bit more than 23 square miles.

It's not all in one parcel, and not all the parcels are connected. The new corporation is NW Ranches LLC.

The purchase was from three landowners: Virgil and Karen Stacy, Halbmaier Farms Inc., and the Preston L. and Mabel K. Hill Trust. Trustees for the late Hill couple are Brent Hill and Karen Kerr.

A bit of math can figure transfer fees of $9,872 in Butte County at 50 cents for each $500 in sale price, which brings an estimate that the land was purchased for nearly $9.9 million.

The purchase brought a smile to Butte County Register of Deeds Paula Walker.

"I was thrilled someone from South Dakota won - period," she said. "Finally somebody from South Dakota gets some prosperity."

Walker's office holds the deeds recorded in the county as a public notice.

Wanless claimed his lottery winnings on June 5 and told lottery officials he dreamed of having a little larger ranch than his family's 320-acre spread 11 miles east of Mission.

In the written statement, the 23-year-old rancher said he was on a ride with his horse, Eleanor, and told her "It'd be nice if we could go for a longer ride than usual on a bigger ranch of our own."