![]() ![]() ![]() Mathieu Couttenier, a political economist at the University of Lyon in France, delved into the crime statistics of the frontier in the 1800s in a 2017 study in the Journal of the European Economic Association. Meanwhile, the Wild West wasn't some sort of small government utopia for the white settlers - and there's data to prove it. Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act in 1851, which enabled the creation of the first reservations where American Indians were forcibly relocated and prevented from leaving without permission. Throughout this time, the land under American Indian control progressively shrank and their freedoms with it. The system worked pretty well, unless you were from an Indian tribe, of course," Anderson said. "Property rights were secure enough, and there was a market for it. For example, cattle owners often divided up extensive plots of land and formed associations to document and assign range rights. "The Hollywood version shows anyone and everyone fighting over water rights and land, but what we discovered is that, in reality, people understood the negative consequences of fighting and instead found civil ways to resolve their disputes," Anderson said. Corral in Arizona Territory), there were also periods of peace that lasted long enough for the settlers to figure out society's rules in a makeshift kind of a way. While battles worthy of John Wayne's portrayals did happen (for instance, three people died in the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. "It's depicted almost as a state of anarchy where there was fighting amongst the Indian tribes, then along came the Europeans to join in," he said. This lack of a centralized government is partly responsible for our collective imagining of the Wild West as a rowdy and fierce place to live, Anderson explained. Importantly, much of this vast expanse of terrain was pre-statehood at the time, which meant there wasn't much federal oversight. ![]()
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