A prevailing view among economic historians is that after 1850 inhabitants of the frontier enjoyed significant opportunity to accumulate wealth. For instance, in his path-breaking study of the Wisconsin frontier, Merle Curti found low levels of initial wealth but also high rates of wealth accumulation among the early settlers of Trempealeau County.²

More recently, a younger generation of economic historians has identified similar patterns of wealth holding and wealth accumulation in frontier areas of Utah, Arkansas, Texas, Iowa, and Missouri between 1850 and 1870, contributing further to the perception of the frontier as a place of economic opportunity.³

While our understanding of wealth on the frontier is now considerable, less is known about who moved to the frontier. That is due in part to the effort required to trace households over time in the census manuscript schedules. The contributions of Donald Schaefer, Richard Steckel, and Joseph Ferrie notwithstanding, historians know less about the backgrounds of migrants, including their wealth, occupations, and places of residency before migration.⁴

We do not know how many of the poorest Americans moved to the frontier, nor whether, as Frederick Jackson Turner surmised, households in urban and rural areas in the East availed themselves of the “free lands” of the West.⁵ In short, the forces impelling households to the frontier are still unclear. Hence, our understanding of economic opportunity remains incomplete.

The first chapter adds to our understanding of economic and geographic mobility in U.S. history by studying the migration of households to Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota (then a part of the Dakota Territory) between 1860 and 1870. The chapter restricts attention to households that migrated to the frontier and established farms. Historians have dwelled extensively on the experiences of such households, debating the ability of poor households to farm on the frontier, the effects of population growth, and the dwindling supply of agricultural land in the East on the incentives to migrate to the frontier, and the barriers to the migration of unskilled workers in urban areas.

I consider these questions using two longitudinal data sets constructed from the manuscript schedules of the federal censuses of population. I constructed the first data set, a sample of 1571 household heads from the 1870 U.S. Census of Population of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota Territory linked to the 1860 U.S. Census of Population. The second data set is a sample of household heads from the 1870 U.S. Census Public Use Micro-sample linked to the 1860 U.S. Census of Population. The second data set comprises the group of nonmigrants to which the group of migrants in the first data set is compared. As part of the analysis, I estimate a model of migration and wealth accumulation that accounts for the wealth maximizing behavior of households and the endogeneity of the migration decision and wealth accumulation in frontier and nonfrontier areas.

The analysis of wealth indicates migrants to the frontier between 1860 and 1870 accumulated wealth at high rates. Rates of wealth accumulation in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota Territory in 1870 were approximately equal to those in Iowa and slightly higher than those in several counties in Utah in 1870. The rates of wealth accumulation in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota in 1870 were significantly above those in agricultural areas of the rest of the northern United States in 1860.⁶

Who migrated to the frontier to take advantage of the opportunity to accumulate wealth? I find that many of the poorest households—those reporting less than $100 in total estate in 1860—moved to the frontier. Almost 30 percent of frontier migrants reported 1860 wealth below this threshold, while 30 percent of nonmigrants did the same. Overall, migrants were half as wealthy as nonmigrants.

Also, a majority of migrants, 60 percent, had been farmers in 1860. But they tended to originate in densely settled areas, where the opportunity to acquire land and to accumulate wealth was limited. For instance, a farmer in a county with 50 percent more prospective farmers than farms sites was 33 percent more likely to move to the frontier than an otherwise identical farmer in a county with a 50 percent excess supply of farm sites.

Finally, a large fraction of frontier migrants had been unskilled workers: 22 percent of migrants and nonmigrants alike had been in such positions. Nonetheless, only 18 percent of unskilled workers who migrated to the frontier originated in urban areas of 2500 or more inhabitants, and just 3.5 percent came from cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants. The regression analysis suggests, however, that the distance of most urban areas in the East from the frontier and not barriers specific to the movement of unskilled workers in urban areas was the reason for the small number of urban unskilled workers who migrated to the frontier.

The second chapter studies a phenomenon that has confounded historians of the frontier: the growth of farm unrest after the Civil War. Frontier farmers joined anti-monopoly granges, alliances, and independent political parties in greater numbers than farmers elsewhere. Economic historians, however, have scrutinized farmers' claims about monopoly and found them to be inconsistent with the prices of credit, transportation, and agricultural goods. To explain farm unrest, economic historians have instead pointed to the risks and uncertainties of frontier agriculture.⁷

In this chapter, I expand upon the theme of risk and uncertainty in frontier agriculture. I argue that farm unrest is best understood from the perspective of information. It is well established that the availability of information can constrain optimal decision-making. In the late nineteenth century, imperfect information about frontier growing conditions led many Americans to migrate to the frontier under false beliefs about their prospects for gain. The result was that farmers were ill prepared for the decade-long drought that struck the region in the 1880s. I use qualitative evidence and data on land entries, rainfall, and agricultural output and prices to show that migrants were poorly informed about growing conditions at the time of their migration. I argue that drought not only radicalized farmers by spreading hardship and despair, but also strained farmers' relationships with creditors, who also had been misinformed about the region's potential for drought. In the wake of the drought, creditors restricted access to credit, prompting accusations of monopoly on the part of farmers.

The third chapter of my dissertation studies the rule of law in the mining camps of the West. After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, miners settled remote regions of the western United States far beyond the reach of established centers of authority. Miners were without customary laws and institutions, but their need for social and economic controls was great. Moreover, mining itself raised legal conundrums that existing law was ill-equipped to handle. The result was that miners everywhere established rules of their own.

A comparison of the mining camps shows, however, that some were much more successful than others at securing property rights and preserving order. Many mining camps were, for the most part, lawful and orderly, while others experienced long periods of anarchy and violence.

In this chapter, I explain why the rule of law prevailed in some camps but not others. By the rule of law or, alternatively, law and order, I mean an environment in which individuals abide by and enforce agreed-upon rights and individuals expect those rights to be enforced in the future.

Just how societies elicit cooperative behavior is increasingly the preoccupation of institutional scholars.⁸

The establishment of property rights in the gold fields follows directly from the postulates of rational choice theory, but how do societies enforce those rights? It is not enough, as Avner Greif has pointed out, to say that individuals obey the rules because otherwise they will be punished. Who does the punishing? If it is the officers of the mining camp, why do they bother to enforce the rules? Alternatively, if it is the whole population of miners responsible for enforcing the laws, we are back at the starting point. In other words, the creation of property rights and governing institutions, while solving one problem, produces another, more formidable one.

I take an evolutionary and equilibrium approach to the rule of law, using ideas about the evolution of institutions, conventions, and norms developed in the last two decades by economic theorists. The rule of law was a self-enforcing behavioral rule, because the rule of law occurred only when sufficiently many individuals decided to obey and uphold the law; and when most others behaved one way, it was optimal for other individuals to do the same. The rule of law was uncertain, however, because the power to uphold the law was dispersed among many individuals for whom exercising this power was costly, and miners who did not contribute to the public good could nonetheless enjoy its benefits. Thus, I model the rule of law as a collective action problem, in which players must divide their labor between mining and supporting institutions that promote law and order.

The evolutionary model shows that the cooperative outcome in which individuals make socially efficient contributions to the rule of law is but one of two asymptotically stable behavioral rules. But the rule of law, although a stable equilibrium, is not, by any means, guaranteed. Whether it emerges depends upon the ideology or cultural beliefs of miners, factors affecting the opportunity cost of upholding the rule of law, and the ability of miners to sanction one another.

To test the predictions of the model, I constructed a data set of the characteristics of 25 mining camps in California, Colorado, and Montana between 1848 and 1865 from published histories of the camps as well as primary sources from the Montana Historical Society. The data set indicates whether a camp experienced the rule of law, the population of the camp, whether foreign miners inhabited the camp, and the mining technologies employed. A camp is said to have experienced the rule of law if there existed evidence of miners working through the camp's collective institutions to enforce the laws.

The evidence largely affirms the predictions about the rule of law, providing support for the evolutionary approach to institutions and evidence about the sources of cooperative behavior. Statistical tests show that small mining camps and those with culturally homogenous populations were more likely to enjoy the rule of law. In addition, I discuss qualitative evidence that illuminates the roles of community size and cultural factors in cooperation.