Mild, mild west.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

The 19th-century American West is usually remembered as a region of rootin'-tootin' desperados brawling in a lawless land. In The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford University Press), Terry Anderson, president of the Property and Environment Research Center, and Peter J. Hill, an economist at Wheaton College, use the insights of the New Institutional Economics to paint a different picture of frontier history, with businessmen developing sensible property institutions to meet the West's varied needs. Senior Editor Brian Doherty talked to Anderson in December.

Q: Why do we have such a skewed vision of the American West?

A: The truth behind the vision of the wild, wild West is found in a relatively few stories. It would be like going into a modern city and finding seven shootings on one day and concluding that the city must have been a chaotic place when mostly it's a place of social cooperation. If you went to a bar and got drunk [in the old West], you could get into a good fight. But when it came to developing institutions for how grazing lands are used or mining claims and water allocated, those were done peacefully. People recognized the zero-sum nature of constant conflict.

Early Western development outpaced the federal government, so there was a ground-up building of institutions. But when the feds caught up, much of that was reversed. The most dramatic example was that Indian wars replaced trading between settlers...