Book Review

As John Phillip Reid explains in his entertaining study of informal legal procedures and assumptions among travelers on the Overland Trail, to "see the elephant" in antebellum America "meant undergoing hardships, to learn the realities of a situation firsthand, or to encounter the unbelievable" (1). Few experiences brought the elephant more to the fore than the challenges posed by transcontinental migration across plains, mountains, and deserts from Missouri to California and Oregon. Yet as Reid points out, for all the dangers and difficulties, the most striking characteristic of this migration was its prosaic quality. Nineteenth-century Americans on the Overland Trail behaved very much like, well, like nineteenth-century Americans east of the Mississippi River. This sensible conclusion would not be particularly striking if it were not for the images of the "wild west" constructed for mass popular consumption over the past century and a half.	1
Like previous students of the Overland Trail, Reid demonstrates that life on the long journey was not the stuff of Hollywood movies and television shows. There were few incidents of violence with Indians or strangers; people generally died from disease or starvation, not arrows or bullets. Theft and murder did happen. The enormous stress of a long and physically demanding journey made nearly everyone irritable and unpleasant. Few were on their best behavior. But, in general, criminal activity took place among people who knew each other; indeed, a good bit of it happened before the wagons had even left Missouri.	2
Reid is most insistent about emphasizing that migrants handled crimes with well-known legal procedures. They held trials, selected juries, gathered evidence, and meted out punishment (even executing people) with elaborate attention to the details and rituals of such solemn occasions. Their actions clearly show that ceremony—honoring procedures and rhetoric—was a critical source of legitimacy and community action.	3
Reid's extensive reading of diaries, journals, letters, and reminiscences has filled him with admiration for his subjects. He concludes that the Overland emigrants "were average citizens, bringing with them out onto the plains the society they did not want to leave behind. They went west to live by the rules, the controls, and the restraints by which they had lived before—law, order, and the morality of Christian civilization" (231). Reid urges us to think of the behavior of these migrants as a mirror on nineteenth-century Americans' attitudes toward "the nature of crime and the justification for punishment." He believes that they "were the one large group of ordinary citizens in our history who had to join theory to action when coping with antisocial behavior.... We simply have no comparable material from which we can learn the values, expectations, prejudices, and beliefs of anonymous individuals—the so-called 'inarticulate' ... " (26). (Other scholars might quarrel with that claim, even as they remind us that people who leave written records of their experiences are hardly inarticulate.)	4
Methodologically and historiographically, Policing the Elephant is self-consciously old-fashioned. Reid worries only intermittently about the reliability of his sources. He gives us no real statistics. He never explains what he means by ordinary citizens or middle-class people. He ignores recent scholarship on the trans-Mississippi West in general and the Overland Trail in particular, especially important books by John Mack Faragher and John Unruh. Even more troubling is Reid's failure to develop any kind of a context for what he argues. If we knew more about legal procedures and assumptions in the places from which the migrants originated, if we had some discussion of law and society in antebellum America that went beyond generalizations and platitudes, Reid's work would be far more persuasive and important. But Reid never gives us any context. Policing the Elephant, for all its precision and insight in dealing with the primary sources the author has examined, is extraordinarily vague when it strays away from the sources themselves. Did it matter where these people were from, what the specific legal procedures and structures were in the places in which they were born and grew up? Were there local, regional, or ethnic variations in their behavior?	5
It is fascinating to read about demonstrations of faith in the American legal procedures system on the Overland Trail when faith in the American political and legal system in general was breaking down so rapidly east of the Mississippi. If western immigrants honored the law, more and more Americans were not, whether the issue was labor, nativism, fugitive slaves, or the settlement of Kansas. Indeed, the entire country fell apart within a decade of the Overland Trail experience because of a massive loss of faith in the ways in which the United States functioned, politically and legally. In the era of Dred Scott and John Brown, perhaps the western immigrants were exceptional because they continued to believe so strongly in established procedures.	6
In any case, law and society were far more complex and contested than Reid asserts. That argument, of course, has been the burden of the last several decades of research on nineteenth-century America. Reid's failure is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with recent scholarship; it is, rather, a matter of willfully ignoring it. Indeed, his refusal to engage contemporary historiography combined with his reluctance to develop a larger historical context for the handling of crime and punishment on the Overland Trail fatally weakens his study. Policing the Elephant is an engaging essay by a very smart legal historian writing in a kind of intellectual vacuum.	7
On its own terms, the book is eminently readable. The stories Reid recounts are fun, even exciting. The questions he addresses, moreover, are important ones. We can only hope that other scholars will take his evidence and his challenges more seriously than he has taken those of others who write about law and society not only on the Overland Trail but in the antebellum United States as a whole.	8
Andrew R. L. Cayton Miami University

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