June 3, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, P.J. Hill, rancher and co-author of The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier, explains the misconceptions about the American West.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories, and up next
another story from our Rule of Law series. We examine
what happens when there is rule of law and also
when there's not. And remember that half the people of
this world don't have rule of law. There are no
property rights, there isn't an independent judiciary, and contract law
and the enforcement of contracts will good luck with that. PJ.
(00:32):
Hill is senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research
Center in Bozeman, Montana, and it was a long serving
professor at Wheaton College. Today he's going to share a
bit about his background in the American West and some
of its misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Here's Madison, bar fights, shootouts, bank robberies, and outlaws. These
are things we might envision when we think of the
wild West, not to mention the many films that portray
exactly that, But what if the West wasn't as wild
as we thought? Co author of The Not So Wild
Wild West, PJ. Hill is here to share that maybe
(01:11):
the West had a role of law, not one we're
used to, but role of law.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Nonetheless, my grandfather came up from Denver in eighteen ninety
two horseback worked on a ranch for a couple of years.
This is in southeastern Montana, part of the big open
hardly anybody around, and then started his own ranch, the
ranch that actually became the PJ Ranch, and that was
(01:35):
named after him, Peter Johnson. And then, of course, when
I was born, that was seemed natural to call me PJ. Hill.
I had gone on to graduate work at the University
of Chicago with the thought that I would probably go
back to our cattle ranch and run it. And that's
what I did. I got married in nineteen seventy, took
my wife back to our cattle ranch and operated it
(01:58):
for another forty years. And then I already became fascinated
by the history of the West and how do humans
solve the coordination cooperation problem, because that was my background.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Once he dove into this question, that's when PJ realized
the misunderstanding behind the American West.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
The West was not nearly as wild and wooly as
we oftentimes think. It was not a place of disorder,
it was not a place of rampant bank robberies. All
of those sorts of things. They did figure out ways
to cooperate, and property rights worked fairly well.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Then why do we so often refer to the West
as a place of anarchy and chaos.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Several things influenced that. Part of it was was almost
no presence of the federal government in any meaningful way
throughout the nineteenth century. It was pretty much whatever rules
they could come up with. Power was there for everybody,
so an equal power structure would be something that would
cause people to say, well, maybe we should get a law.
(03:03):
So the West became, if you will, a grand experiment,
but it was a place of rule of law, people
figuring out ways of cooperation overcoming difficulties. There really was
a culture of individual worth, and in fact, that's one
of the reasons why you end up with gunfights or
(03:23):
fistfights and bars was when people thought that they were
being disrespected. So the West was a place of mutual
respect and neutral rights. They came up with rules that
worked very well to solve a whole set of interesting
and complex problems.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
When were the times when their self enforced rule of
law had to come into play. First, they needed a
way to transport goods in the West, and traveling across
the plains alone was a dangerous thing to do, so
they formed groups called wagon trains.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
It would seem like this would be a real run
for disaster. You've got well armed people crossing a lot
of space, thinking a lot about how they want to
get someplace to get wealthy. And so these wagon trains
usually were forty to fifty wagons in size, and the
question is how are you going to organize it? Well,
(04:19):
interestingly enough, they thought about that beforehand. They wrote a
constitution or a contract that was unique for each wagon train,
and they specified all sorts of things. They specified who
the participants were, how much each participant was contributing to
the wagon train in terms of livestock oxen were oftentimes
(04:39):
pulling the wagons, the wagons themselves, how much food. They
set out the rules for travel. They appointed one person
as the wagon master, and that person had to be
obeyed in terms of the rate of speed, but they
rotated that every day you got to move up one
notch on the wagon train, so sooner or later you
got to the front and you didn't have to have
(05:01):
everybody else's dust at the end of that day, then
you went to the back. They had rules for solving
disputes that were all written down. There was actually a
murderer along one of the wagon trains a person captured
for the murderer said, well, there really isn't any law
out here. We think we should wait till we can
get everybody back east to have a trial. The wagon
head member said, oh no, no, it's not the case.
We've got this written contract that specifies how we will
(05:24):
go about it. Then paneled a jury. They heard the evidence,
found the guy guilty, and they hung him. But the
wagon trains were very well organized, bottom up people deciding
to come together to settle sorts of disputes to make
their way west. And I see wagon trains as one
of the many examples that we talked about in our
(05:44):
book The Not So while we in the West of
people figuring out ways to cooperate, figuring out ways to
come together.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Another reason they were traveling in the west was to
mine for gold. This is another situation where it could
be disastrous without rule of law.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, how much can you mind? Can you just move
up and down the stream at will and pan anywhere
you want to? They decided, No, that's going to create
lots of conflict. They're going to be lots of overlap.
So let's set up some clear rules about mining claims.
The person that found the gold first. Usually didn't get
to claim three miles of stream. He got a claim
(06:21):
that was larger, oftentimes twice what the other people could
get who came. But even that person's claim was limited,
so there were rules about what was necessary to establish
the claim. There were rules about how large the claim
could be. Now, once again, violence is expensive, violence is difficult.
Something that approaches the rule of law, that creates order
(06:45):
is a better sort of a system. So the mining
camps did a pretty good job of it. Again, though,
there's scarce resources in the process that you're not sure
you want to use up, so hiring like a full
time enforcer. Lan Sorser kept saying, I think I'd be
I'd rather be mining gold. So there were no There
were no sheriffs. What would simply happen was when somebody
(07:07):
thought that there'd been a violation, that would be a
crier run to the camp. All of the miners would
form a jury. The person that was being charged was
allowed to present their case, the person that they claimed
was being violated to present their case, and then they
made a decision. Now, once again, maintaining jails is pretty expensive,
so they didn't do that either. What they did was
(07:28):
they just simply banished the person. If you were found guilty,
you're turning out of the camp. So this is one
of the themes throughout my book with Terry Anderson on
the American West, is that violence is a pretty expensive
way to order your life, and if you can figure
out ways to avoid violence, they try to do that.
(07:48):
So there was all of these sorts of rules that
came about that were enforced would seem in a reasonable
sort of a way.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
What about property rights? How did they establish rights to
land in the West.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two established rights to
one hundred and sixty acres, but that oftentimes it was
difficult to find water that went with that, So that
made the Homestead Act unworkable because of lack of access
to water. But then it also was unworkable just in
terms of size.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
In the West, one hundred and sixty acres would not suffice,
so they expanded it to six hundred and forty acres
in nineteen sixteen, which still was entirely too small for
a workable cattle ranch.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
To give you a sense of that, my family cattle
ranch was twenty five thousand acres. That did not make
US cattle kings. We were not some of the largest
operators around, but you can imagine if it took twenty
five thousand acres to be a decent sized to an
economic unit, then the Homestead Act, even when it got
up to six hundred and forty acres, was just unworkable.
(08:56):
So we imposed a top down system. Where there had
been a bottom up system of rights that the ranchers
that established sheep producers that established that was for workable
sorts of ranches. We replaced that with his top down
sorts of rules. So we developed pretty good institutions from
the bottom up. But I would also say that what
(09:19):
happened in the West is evidence of the problem of
power and when power can violate what we think of
as standard rules of law. And one of the basic
features of rule of law would be what I would
call universal human dignity. People are all of equal worth.
As we think about lessons from the American West, one
(09:39):
would be be very careful about imposing too many top
down rules. Look at the community, think about what sorts
of things do they want, how do they go about
solving conflict? And I think many community based sorts of
solutions that then may evolve to become law can be
very useful. Whenever we start agglomerating power, then there is
(10:04):
the effort to try to capture it. Power can be
used well, but there's a real danger in it being
used badly. Keep in mind that we do want to
recognize universal human dignity or moral standing before the law.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And a great job on that piece by Madison and
his special thanks to PJ.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Hill.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
His book The Not So Wild Wild West Property Rights
on the Frontier is available at Amazon. And the usual
suspects that Western culture, the culture of individual worth, the
mutual respect and mutual rights of Western culture, I think
are still there. The story of the Not So Wild
Wild West our Rule of Law series here on our
(10:45):
American Stories
And we're back with our American stories, and up next
another story from our Rule of Law series. We examine
what happens when there is rule of law and also
when there's not. And remember that half the people of
this world don't have rule of law. There are no
property rights, there isn't an independent judiciary, and contract law
and the enforcement of contracts will good luck with that. PJ.
(00:32):
Hill is senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research
Center in Bozeman, Montana, and it was a long serving
professor at Wheaton College. Today he's going to share a
bit about his background in the American West and some
of its misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Here's Madison, bar fights, shootouts, bank robberies, and outlaws. These
are things we might envision when we think of the
wild West, not to mention the many films that portray
exactly that, But what if the West wasn't as wild
as we thought? Co author of The Not So Wild
Wild West, PJ. Hill is here to share that maybe
(01:11):
the West had a role of law, not one we're
used to, but role of law.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Nonetheless, my grandfather came up from Denver in eighteen ninety
two horseback worked on a ranch for a couple of years.
This is in southeastern Montana, part of the big open
hardly anybody around, and then started his own ranch, the
ranch that actually became the PJ Ranch, and that was
(01:35):
named after him, Peter Johnson. And then, of course, when
I was born, that was seemed natural to call me PJ. Hill.
I had gone on to graduate work at the University
of Chicago with the thought that I would probably go
back to our cattle ranch and run it. And that's
what I did. I got married in nineteen seventy, took
my wife back to our cattle ranch and operated it
(01:58):
for another forty years. And then I already became fascinated
by the history of the West and how do humans
solve the coordination cooperation problem, because that was my background.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Once he dove into this question, that's when PJ realized
the misunderstanding behind the American West.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
The West was not nearly as wild and wooly as
we oftentimes think. It was not a place of disorder,
it was not a place of rampant bank robberies. All
of those sorts of things. They did figure out ways
to cooperate, and property rights worked fairly well.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Then why do we so often refer to the West
as a place of anarchy and chaos.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Several things influenced that. Part of it was was almost
no presence of the federal government in any meaningful way
throughout the nineteenth century. It was pretty much whatever rules
they could come up with. Power was there for everybody,
so an equal power structure would be something that would
cause people to say, well, maybe we should get a law.
(03:03):
So the West became, if you will, a grand experiment,
but it was a place of rule of law, people
figuring out ways of cooperation overcoming difficulties. There really was
a culture of individual worth, and in fact, that's one
of the reasons why you end up with gunfights or
(03:23):
fistfights and bars was when people thought that they were
being disrespected. So the West was a place of mutual
respect and neutral rights. They came up with rules that
worked very well to solve a whole set of interesting
and complex problems.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
When were the times when their self enforced rule of
law had to come into play. First, they needed a
way to transport goods in the West, and traveling across
the plains alone was a dangerous thing to do, so
they formed groups called wagon trains.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
It would seem like this would be a real run
for disaster. You've got well armed people crossing a lot
of space, thinking a lot about how they want to
get someplace to get wealthy. And so these wagon trains
usually were forty to fifty wagons in size, and the
question is how are you going to organize it? Well,
(04:19):
interestingly enough, they thought about that beforehand. They wrote a
constitution or a contract that was unique for each wagon train,
and they specified all sorts of things. They specified who
the participants were, how much each participant was contributing to
the wagon train in terms of livestock oxen were oftentimes
(04:39):
pulling the wagons, the wagons themselves, how much food. They
set out the rules for travel. They appointed one person
as the wagon master, and that person had to be
obeyed in terms of the rate of speed, but they
rotated that every day you got to move up one
notch on the wagon train, so sooner or later you
got to the front and you didn't have to have
(05:01):
everybody else's dust at the end of that day, then
you went to the back. They had rules for solving
disputes that were all written down. There was actually a
murderer along one of the wagon trains a person captured
for the murderer said, well, there really isn't any law
out here. We think we should wait till we can
get everybody back east to have a trial. The wagon
head member said, oh no, no, it's not the case.
We've got this written contract that specifies how we will
(05:24):
go about it. Then paneled a jury. They heard the evidence,
found the guy guilty, and they hung him. But the
wagon trains were very well organized, bottom up people deciding
to come together to settle sorts of disputes to make
their way west. And I see wagon trains as one
of the many examples that we talked about in our
(05:44):
book The Not So while we in the West of
people figuring out ways to cooperate, figuring out ways to
come together.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Another reason they were traveling in the west was to
mine for gold. This is another situation where it could
be disastrous without rule of law.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, how much can you mind? Can you just move
up and down the stream at will and pan anywhere
you want to? They decided, No, that's going to create
lots of conflict. They're going to be lots of overlap.
So let's set up some clear rules about mining claims.
The person that found the gold first. Usually didn't get
to claim three miles of stream. He got a claim
(06:21):
that was larger, oftentimes twice what the other people could
get who came. But even that person's claim was limited,
so there were rules about what was necessary to establish
the claim. There were rules about how large the claim
could be. Now, once again, violence is expensive, violence is difficult.
Something that approaches the rule of law, that creates order
(06:45):
is a better sort of a system. So the mining
camps did a pretty good job of it. Again, though,
there's scarce resources in the process that you're not sure
you want to use up, so hiring like a full
time enforcer. Lan Sorser kept saying, I think I'd be
I'd rather be mining gold. So there were no There
were no sheriffs. What would simply happen was when somebody
(07:07):
thought that there'd been a violation, that would be a
crier run to the camp. All of the miners would
form a jury. The person that was being charged was
allowed to present their case, the person that they claimed
was being violated to present their case, and then they
made a decision. Now, once again, maintaining jails is pretty expensive,
so they didn't do that either. What they did was
(07:28):
they just simply banished the person. If you were found guilty,
you're turning out of the camp. So this is one
of the themes throughout my book with Terry Anderson on
the American West, is that violence is a pretty expensive
way to order your life, and if you can figure
out ways to avoid violence, they try to do that.
(07:48):
So there was all of these sorts of rules that
came about that were enforced would seem in a reasonable
sort of a way.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
What about property rights? How did they establish rights to
land in the West.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two established rights to
one hundred and sixty acres, but that oftentimes it was
difficult to find water that went with that, So that
made the Homestead Act unworkable because of lack of access
to water. But then it also was unworkable just in
terms of size.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
In the West, one hundred and sixty acres would not suffice,
so they expanded it to six hundred and forty acres
in nineteen sixteen, which still was entirely too small for
a workable cattle ranch.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
To give you a sense of that, my family cattle
ranch was twenty five thousand acres. That did not make
US cattle kings. We were not some of the largest
operators around, but you can imagine if it took twenty
five thousand acres to be a decent sized to an
economic unit, then the Homestead Act, even when it got
up to six hundred and forty acres, was just unworkable.
(08:56):
So we imposed a top down system. Where there had
been a bottom up system of rights that the ranchers
that established sheep producers that established that was for workable
sorts of ranches. We replaced that with his top down
sorts of rules. So we developed pretty good institutions from
the bottom up. But I would also say that what
(09:19):
happened in the West is evidence of the problem of
power and when power can violate what we think of
as standard rules of law. And one of the basic
features of rule of law would be what I would
call universal human dignity. People are all of equal worth.
As we think about lessons from the American West, one
(09:39):
would be be very careful about imposing too many top
down rules. Look at the community, think about what sorts
of things do they want, how do they go about
solving conflict? And I think many community based sorts of
solutions that then may evolve to become law can be
very useful. Whenever we start agglomerating power, then there is
(10:04):
the effort to try to capture it. Power can be
used well, but there's a real danger in it being
used badly. Keep in mind that we do want to
recognize universal human dignity or moral standing before the law.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And a great job on that piece by Madison and
his special thanks to PJ.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Hill.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
His book The Not So Wild Wild West Property Rights
on the Frontier is available at Amazon. And the usual
suspects that Western culture, the culture of individual worth, the
mutual respect and mutual rights of Western culture, I think
are still there. The story of the Not So Wild
Wild West our Rule of Law series here on our
(10:45):
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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