The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (review)

In this brief and overreaching book, the authors maintain that the absence of government in the nineteenth-century American West permitted the quick, efficient development of natural-resource economies. Their underlying goal is to instruct the future by illuminating the past of the American West, which holds clear lessons for those attempting to organize and develop the values of nascent resource-rich environments.

With some fanfare, the discussion begins with the long-standing controversy between the Old and New Western History. The Old Western History holds to the smug triumphalism of Manifest Destiny in the expansion of the United States across the continent in the nineteenth century. The westward movement in Turner's terms is a part of an American creation myth filled with nostalgia and romanticism that portrays the triumph of right and might over wrong and progress and democracy over the backwardness of wilderness, Indians, and foreign governments. ¹ The New Western History eschews with embarrassment these triumphant notes of American "conquest," highlighting instead violence, injustice, racism, and environmental exploitation. Forever marred, the history of the West stands akin to the history of the South with its stigma of slavery. As unbridgeable and irreconcilable as the gulf between these two camps appears, the authors step to the fore and brashly promise, "We fill the gap." Let the reconciliation begin (4).

They fill the gap by employing what they call "the new institutional economics" to analyze, and evaluate, the outcome of western settlement in the distribution of resources—land, water, minerals, wild life, and even scenic places. The result is not necessarily a bridge over a deep chasm but an explanation of why Americans should generally take pride in the efficient and rapid production of wealth from the rich treasure house of the American West. The bridge quickly becomes an affirmation of the Old Western History minus the romanticism of Hollywood and the dime novel. The "new institutional economics" celebrates the Old West because it presumably permitted the free market to work. Where barriers occurred that stifled the willing buyer/willing seller relationship, in the form of cultural traditions or governmental rules, violence inevitably ensued. But these were the exceptions, not the rule.

The Wild West was not so wild after all. Resource ownership fell peaceably into private hands, where true "rents" could be realized. The authors' implication that rational individuals made rational choices according to market needs inevitably creates a West in the Panglossian image of the best of all possible worlds. From this standpoint, the conclusions that may be drawn about the continued bureaucratic presence of the federal government on the public lands of the West into the twenty-first century should be obvious.

That the history written in The Not So Wild, Wild West is not always correct seems clear. Individuals influenced by different convictions in the light of contemporary issues can come to far different conclusions about "what history teaches" than do the authors of this book.