One need not be much of a historian to marvel at United States history, and the history of our frontier provides many of its most exciting tidbits. Nearly everyone knows that brigands waylaid stagecoaches, trains, even riverboats, posing a threat to anything that moved. Raiders, both white and red, assaulted towns, farms, and ranches, taking anything that was not securely tied down. Gold dust was seized from miners as they brought it to town. Upon returning dejectedly home, the miner might find his claim had been jumped. Rustlers stole cattle and horses, though if vigilantes pursued them promptly the rustlers—or those suspected of being the rustlers—were likely to be lynched from the nearest tree. Cattlemen fought virtual wars among themselves, and with sheepherders and farmers, three groups struggling to make mutually inconsistent uses of the land. People fought over water in arid regions. Wild animals were pursued to the verge of extinction. The cavalry hounded Indians relentlessly, ultimately driving tribes from their traditional haunts. Occasionally, of course, the harried warriors managed to ambush the troopers and the wayfarers they tried to defend, resulting in horrific, bloody, mutilations. Upon moving west, and thus deprived of the civilizing influence of formal law, even people who had been the most upstanding citizens back east might settle disputes with a six-shooter.

Together, individually, and with several other coauthors, Terry Anderson and P. J. Hill have devoted more than three decades providing much needed texture to that informal cultural memory. The high points of all their books and articles dealing with the moving frontier are now encapsulated in The Not So Wild, Wild West. This newest offering is no mere recapitulation of their earlier work, however, but is at once a synthesis and an extension. Old ideas and findings have been condensed and consolidated, but at the same time revised in light of Anderson and Hill's evolving understanding of property rights economics. New ideas and findings have been added to the mix. Similarities and differences among all that material, both new and old, have been meticulously elucidated.

Anderson and Hill do not argue that our nation's casual cultural memories have been fabricated. Those memories persist because in large measure they recount events that actually happened. Instead, Anderson and Hill insist that a preponderance of casually remembered events is drawn from a statistical distribution's tails. On reflection, every sports fan will understand the claim—teams are remembered in later years because they performed magnificently (right-hand tail), or occasionally because they were comically inept (left-hand tail). The vast majority of teams, those that finished the season mired in mid-league, might as well never have taken the field to judge by what the next generation will remember of them. The same is true for more substantive matters. All the unremarkable occurrences that form the vast bulk of life's events are, well, unremarkable and thus in serious danger of being soon forgotten, or at best relegated to dusty volumes moldering in obscure archives.

Anderson and Hill have avidly sought out those moldering, obscure archives, finding a much less frenetic world than our off-centered cultural memories have preserved. The lynchpin of the Anderson and Hill argument is that violence and similar efforts aimed merely to transfer entitlements comprise negative sum games. Any resources that are devoted to extracting transfers cannot be used for production, and people trying to eke an existence from the harsh and unyielding environment they found on the frontier could ill afford to squander potentially productive resources so lavishly. Even when a society is well removed from the precipice of survival, entrepreneurs eagerly seek improved ways to govern any process that generates waste, providing the entrepreneur expects to capture a part of what might be saved. With or without formal law, entrepreneurs have strong incentives to design and profit from mechanisms that conserve resources. Indeed, before an effective innovation has been discovered, the search may be aided by the flexibility that is provided by the absence of formal law. As the burgeoning literature of public choice informs us, on occasion formal law does not further entrepreneurial effort at all, but becomes still another route by which entitlements can be transferred. The target is often exactly those returns entrepreneurs expected from their effort to find a way to reduce waste.

Having constructed their theoretical scaffolding through the book's early chapters, Anderson and Hill then employ it in later chapters to hang the empirical findings they have ferreted from the archives. Among other matters, their well-targeted variant of property rights economics elucidates trade and warfare between European immigrants and the tribes they found in America. It elucidates the evolution, successes, and failures of bottom-up institutions for the governance of mineral extraction and the harvesting of wild animals. The advent of formal law, commonly assumed to provide the very foundation of real property, often destroyed economically effective property rights in land that had formed spontaneously much earlier. As a rule, wagon trains were models of decorum despite being leagues and months removed from the nearest courthouse. Ranchers, drovers, and cowboys gradually evolved intricate interrelationships that can be understood only in light of the peculiar features of their industry. People innovated revolutionary new techniques to economize on water use in an environment where that resource was much more valuable than it had been back east (the Army Corps of Engineers can only dream of similar successes).

In brief, while facing a multitude of potentially deadly threats, frontier entrepreneurs did mighty well on average, both for themselves and for the society in which they lived. The result was a time and place that, though undeniably wilder than the one back along the seaboard, was not nearly as chaotic as our cultural memory would have it. The Not So Wild, Wild West concludes with a chapter speculating about the next frontiers mankind will face, frontiers that (if we play our cards right) will be much tamer than we now fear.

As Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse remarked during a televised interview, science is not a storehouse of truths but a compilation of logical but tentatively held hypotheses. The positions taken by Anderson and Hill will certainly be modified and elaborated by subsequent scholars. Indeed, the law of averages implies that with time a few of their claims may well be found wanting altogether. But whether one adopts or resists the conclusions that Anderson and Hill have drawn from the information they have so laboriously collected, no serious scholar can claim expertise in the economic history of the United States frontier without being thoroughly familiar with this book. The Not So Wild, Wild West is the Anderson and Hill capstone, the essential Anderson and Hill. If you are unfamiliar with their work, start here.