| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. By Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. xiv, 263 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8047-48543.)

In the 1980s, historians reacted against the view first espoused by Frederick Jackson Turner (1894) that the U.S. West was wilderness civilized by white males; they instead focused more attention on the violently conquered previous settlers. Those historians began the exploration of societies existing before statehood and replaced Turner's pressure valve wilderness with the horrors of murdered tribes and environments. While Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill also explore institutional arrangements in the unregulated West, they have lost the violence. In their new work, rough-and-ready western stereotypes are completely absent, replaced by an almost ludicrous civility:

When conflicts arose among miners in a camp, a meeting was called and a contract drawn up that specified the boundaries of the district, the size of the allowed claims, and the methods by which claims would be enforced. (p. 110)

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