| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Law and Order in Buffalo Bill's Country: Legal Culture and Community on the Great Plains, 1867–1910. By Mark R. Ellis. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxii, 262 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-1830-7.)
The popular imagination visualizes the American frontier as a place of disorder and violence, lacking any remembrance of a legal culture. Control flowed from the end of a six- gun or lay in the hands of the powerful who were able to manipulate what rules there were to their advantage. That image has been contested in many serious histories, such as John Phillip Reid's work on wagon trains (Law for the Elephant, 1980, and Policing the Elephant, 1997), John Umbeck's book on mining camps (A Theory of Property Rights, 1981), and William Tate's volume on emigrant encounters with Native American hostility (Indians and Emigrants, 2006).	1
Mark R. Ellis has added another piece of evidence that should cause his readers to doubt the typical characterization of the West as lawless. He has written an in-depth study of Lincoln County and North Platte, Nebraska, from its founding, shortly before the Union Pacific Railroad reached the area in 1867, through 1910. His research spans the period when the area would have been considered part of the "wild West," a region with supposedly little order and certainly only a shambles of a legal structure.	. . .

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