SUMNER, Tex. — When the TransCanada men first came, Julia Trigg Crawford said, they were polite. They offered money. Seven thousand dollars to let the Keystone XL pipeline cross her family’s 600-acre farm on its way from the Alberta tar sands to the refineries on the Gulf Coast.

This was nothing new. Her grandfather bought the land, in northeast Texas, about a two-hour drive from Dallas and a quarter mile from the Oklahoma border, in 1948 and started growing wheat, corn and soy. Since then, pipeline companies have tried to lease rights to cross it many times. The Crawfords always managed to persuade them to find a way around their property.

“When you allow a pipeline to cross your land, you give up certain rights to it,” Ms. Crawford said. “You can’t use your land the way you want anymore. We didn’t want to do that.”

But TransCanada did not go away. Their people kept coming back, offering more and more money.

Then on Aug. 26, 2011, Ms. Crawford received a letter from Keystone, TransCanada’s American subsidiary. The letter made a “final offer” of $21,626. Then, it said, “if Keystone is unable to successfully negotiate the voluntary acquisition of the necessary easements, it will have to resort to the exercise of its statutory right of eminent domain.”