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Reviews
The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier
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By Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill
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Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, Calif., 2004. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 271 pages. $24.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Thomas Michael Power
University of Montana, Missoula
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| As the title makes clear, The Not SoWild, Wild West seeks to refute the popular, almost iconic, story of the "wild" American West, told and retold in novels and movies since William Cody's Wild West Show. The focus of the critique is the traditional story of a lawless frontier on which unrooted individuals turned to violence to pursue and protect their interests and only a federal or state police or military force ultimately brought a productive peace to the region. |
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In contrast, this book marshals the historical research of a variety of scholars to argue that, in fact, the frontier was a productive and largely peaceful place from the start. The first European-Americans who ventured onto the western frontier recognized that violence was a zero-sum game and that cooperation and mutually beneficial trade was in both their and their potential opponents' interests. Rather than individuals pursuing their interests in isolation, those venturing onto the frontier — far removed from the active agency of established government — voluntarily entered into cooperative agreements that established productive rules that specified rights and responsibilities, provided a reliable set of incentives, and created enforcement mechanisms that protected property, wealth, and productivity. The spontaneous institutional arrangements that pioneers created to deal with their particular circumstances were rational and productive enough to ultimately be incorporated into territorial and state law. |
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The book is quite readable, moving along at an interesting and brisk pace. The first two chapters lay out the conceptual framework and summarize the evidence to be presented. The ultimate conclusions are also laid out at the start, which makes the empirical arguments and evidence easy to follow. |
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As the subtitle of the book makes clear, Anderson and Hill emphasize the role of innovative property rights in the productive settlement of disputes over resource use on the western frontier. Where such property rights were voluntarily created, folks on the frontier engaged in productive trade rather than using force to raid other people's resources and wealth. The book discusses the conditions that facilitated the development of such property rights and the conditions that obstructed such cooperative agreement and led instead to the use of force. |
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Many historians and other social scientists were not very impressed by the reductionist and sometimes arrogant forays of economists into history during the last half-century. Since economists usually had no training in or respect for the other social sciences, economists brought little more than the skeleton of homo economicus to these "cross-disciplinary" efforts. Anderson and Hill, however, are focused on what they label a "new institutional economics" (p. 4). The focus is on the arrangements that groups of isolated economic actors made to govern their use of common resources on which they all depended. This focus on institutional and contractual arrangements would appear to share some common ground with historians and other social scientists, although the economists' emphasis on a rather narrowly defined self-interest and on market exchanges is still there. |
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The American West may, however, provide a somewhat special set of circumstances because the European-American settlers, after all, moved into a land largely emptied by diseases their predecessors carried, the elimination of the indigenous population's food supply, and the settlers' and the army's firepower. As a result, there was a treasure trove of resources available for the taking, and the settlers' problem was how to organize themselves in a way that allowed them to share in the taking of that bounty rather than fight over it. That may be easier to do than developing the rules by which scarcity is to be shared or developing the rules that are to govern how newcomers are to be allowed to share in the economic opportunity of existing established communities that are worried about their own economic security. Both of these may be more prevalent modern problems than the ones addressed by Anderson and Hill. |
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Finally, Anderson and Hill, in their enthusiastic embrace of free-market economics sometimes appear to go a bit overboard in their endorsement of whatever outcomes happen to flow from market activities no matter how catastrophic. They explain the drastic declines in beaver populations and the slaughter to near extinction of the buffalo in the following terms: "Rapid depletion of beaver was a rational response to the expectation that high market values would be short-lived. Decimation of buffalo occurred because cattle could be more easily controlled and transported to market, so that it made sense to substitute cattle for buffalo as the main consumers of grass resources" (p. 79). They also are bothered by the fact that "because the homestead acts created artificially high transaction costs, the railroad could not obtain title to Yellowstone [National Park]" (p. 207). |
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This analysis is hardly likely to put skeptics of the long-term rationality of market-based decisions at ease. |
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