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Transcript
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00:00:40 Hey everybody, this is the Van Wallen from Freedom,
00:00:55 and this is the truth about the Wild West.
00:00:58 So of course, you know, cowboys and Indians,
00:01:00 all of the games that were fun and exciting
00:01:03 and obviously kind of goofy that I played as a kid.
00:01:05 I'm sure we all played, at least those of us
00:01:07 north of a couple of decades.
00:01:10 We played and it was a Wild West.
00:01:12 There was the typical scenario.
00:01:14 There was the town.
00:01:16 There were the innocent sheep-like townspeople.
00:01:19 There was Black Bart, the guy constantly stroking his mustache
00:01:22 and grabbing the butts of women at the bar.
00:01:24 And then there were the helpless men who just didn't know how to shoot straight.
00:01:29 And then there was the guy, often with a bit of a facial scrub
00:01:33 and a toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth
00:01:36 and spoke low and he spoke in tough guy voice.
00:01:40 And he would take on the bad guy and free the town
00:01:43 from the malevolent influence of the bad guys
00:01:45 who were terrorizing everyone and so on.
00:01:47 And this was the myth.
00:01:50 I guess we all know this kind of story, this kind of myth.
00:01:53 And what does the myth tell you?
00:01:55 Well, the myth tells you that in a lawless area, the Wild West,
00:02:00 in a place where the government has not yet rounded up and cornered and taxed the population,
00:02:06 well, you're just under the chaos of crazy violent people
00:02:10 and it takes the sheriff, it takes the government to bring order to chaos.
00:02:13 And, you know, as I sort of got older, and I did work, of course,
00:02:16 in small towns in northern Ontario after high school as a gold panner and prospector.
00:02:21 And while they were kind of wild places, they were not criminal places.
00:02:26 They were not lawless at all.
00:02:28 And I began to suspect over the years that all of this was just kind of like propaganda.
00:02:34 It's just kind of like a psyop, which says,
00:02:38 "Without the government, it's just lawless, violent, crazy, Hobbesian,
00:02:42 nature red in tooth and claw, and you take the government to come in and bring order."
00:02:46 And it just struck me as a kind of a propaganda,
00:02:51 just to tell you how unnecessary the government is,
00:02:53 and to make people frightened about the absence of government,
00:02:55 that it's just awful and this kind of stuff, right?
00:02:59 So I wanted to look things up.
00:03:01 I wanted to find out, as I generally do, the facts.
00:03:04 Is it true? Was it the Wild West?
00:03:07 And again, you see all of this is a dramatic thing,
00:03:09 you know, to have these bad guys and these good guys and these, you know,
00:03:13 the bad guys, the good guys, and the helpless middle that needs to be protected.
00:03:17 So that's really the, it's like a bell curve, right?
00:03:21 There's bad guys on the left, good guys on the right.
00:03:23 There's very few, but the bad guys without the good guys overrun the giant middle,
00:03:28 who doesn't know, is unable to protect themselves, doesn't know how.
00:03:32 So I was just really curious. Is this what actually happened in the West?
00:03:37 So, well, I'm gonna tell you, pilgrim.
00:03:41 All right, so here we go. What definitions, right?
00:03:44 I always start with the definitions.
00:03:45 The Wild West was a term that came into popular use for the western regions of the United States of America.
00:03:52 Now, of course, as you know, when the US was born in 1776,
00:03:55 it was only 13 states all along the eastern coast of the country.
00:03:59 Of course, the country side or the ocean side that faces the Atlantic,
00:04:04 which is how you come from Europe.
00:04:06 Now in 1804, America purchased the Louisiana territory from France.
00:04:11 Massive, massive piece of land located towards the west of the 13 states.
00:04:15 The size of America, boing, boing, immediately doubled.
00:04:18 And it was this land, and of course, as they went further west, further west,
00:04:22 which were later called the Wild West.
00:04:25 So some more details in 1804, President Thomas Jefferson and the US government
00:04:29 purchased the Louisiana territory.
00:04:31 President Jefferson then sent Lewis and Clark in a sort of famous expedition to get to know the land better.
00:04:38 When the expedition returned in 1806, Americans in the 13 states were pretty excited.
00:04:45 This is the new land, many opportunities, anyone who dared to travel into what was called the Wild West,
00:04:52 or what became known as the Wild West, could own a large portion of land, farm it,
00:04:55 they could mine the land for precious metals like gold, and you could do many other,
00:04:59 your livestock, and you could do many other great things with this land.
00:05:05 So, I mean, this is kind of a clue, right?
00:05:09 The voyage from Europe to America was brutal.
00:05:13 Weeks and death and piracy and disease, it was just brutal.
00:05:19 But this is what people were willing to do to get away from excessive governments, right?
00:05:24 People were willing to travel across a very hazardous, long voyage just to get to America.
00:05:31 Now, governments are then set up in the 13 colonies on the east coast of America,
00:05:35 and then where do people want to go?
00:05:36 "Oh, I'm willing to go out into the wilderness among the bears and cougars and mountain lions
00:05:41 and the indigenous population of doubtful friendliness and all of that just to get away from government."
00:05:48 So it's kind of funny when you think about it, that the Wild West is, you know, boy, without the government,
00:05:52 people, it's just chaos and violence and so on.
00:05:55 But look at how much work people wanted to put in just to get away from government.
00:05:59 They'll take a massive sea voyage, they'll head out into the unknown just to get away from government.
00:06:04 So this was kind of important and something that governments were aware of,
00:06:08 and I think this is one of the reasons why the myth was created, "The war without the government."
00:06:12 It's just a war of all against all.
00:06:15 So the 13 initial states had an established government, of course, and a constitution.
00:06:23 The Louisiana Territory, right, to the west, there was just the Native American tribes.
00:06:28 They lived in small groups and villages scattered all over.
00:06:31 Of course, no proper roads, no easy way to travel into this land from the eastern states.
00:06:36 And a steady stream of American settlers and farmers and miners started pouring into the Wild West, moving westward.
00:06:44 This is wild when you think about it.
00:06:46 I mean, would you head out literally into the middle of nowhere, no phones, no support, no roads, just head out into the bush?
00:06:53 I mean, just stand any place, any place in America, right, stand any place,
00:06:57 look at some forest, I guess in the southern states of Florida, some jungle,
00:07:02 and would you just head in there with an axe and a backpack and try and make your way?
00:07:08 Like, what were you thirsty for?
00:07:11 Liberation. Liberation.
00:07:14 So when the American settlers headed west, of course, they established towns and cities,
00:07:19 they farmed and mined, they started businesses, and carved out many new states from this Wild West, right?
00:07:27 Now, of course, one of the things that they did was hunt the bison.
00:07:30 They were like, it's hard to know exactly, like somewhere between 10 and 30 million in the early 1800s.
00:07:37 By the early 1900s, there were less than a thousand.
00:07:40 And the American buffalo, like when you look at this kind of stuff, right,
00:07:46 the same thing I did a show many years ago called "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish"
00:07:49 about the cod industry off the coast of Newfoundland, which had existed for 400 years,
00:07:54 but then when the government came in with perverse incentives, it got strip-mined and destroyed.
00:07:59 So the American buffalo were slaughtered. Why were they slaughtered so much?
00:08:02 Well, most of them were shot by people commissioned by the U.S. Army, or the Army itself, Army soldiers shot them.
00:08:09 And so the United States wanted to wipe out the indigenous population of the Americas,
00:08:17 and the American buffalo were the primary source of food, and of course hide of clothing.
00:08:22 And so starting in 1830, the government paid to have them wiped out, the bison,
00:08:29 and I guess consequently control the indigenous population.
00:08:32 And so it was not some free market thing, it was a government thing.
00:08:36 And in fact, we'll touch on this, right, so the cowboys and Indians that I played when I was a kid.
00:08:41 Indians, of course, was a term that was incorrect because I think one of the early, was it Columbus or someone,
00:08:46 had thought he'd landed in India, but he had landed in America.
00:08:49 So it was always like, "What was it portrayed? Oh, these, when I was younger."
00:08:54 I mean, it's really swung between these two poles.
00:08:56 When I was younger, it was like, "Oh, the crazy indigenous population was just attacking and scalping and so on."
00:09:00 And then it became, you know, the Marxist interpretation that you had these wonderful,
00:09:04 that one with nature people, kumbayaing around a campfire, and then the evil Americans came and slaughtered them all and so on.
00:09:11 And the truth, of course, is more interesting and more complicated than these cliches.
00:09:15 So we'll get into that a little bit later, but it was nothing like you've heard on either side.
00:09:20 So we got all these new cities, these new towns, all established without formal governments.
00:09:30 So let's start looking at the violence.
00:09:38 What was the violence out in the Wild West?
00:09:41 Now, one of the things that I remember thinking about when I was younger was, if you're like a thief,
00:09:46 do you want to go to the frontier or do you want to stay in the cities?
00:09:50 It seems to me like, certainly if you're a pickpocket or whatever, you want to be in the big cities where there's,
00:09:55 you know, thousands or tens of thousands of people and you can blend, you can move.
00:10:00 There's crowds and everybody doesn't know each other.
00:10:03 Do you want to head out to the middle of nowhere?
00:10:06 So remember, how do you find a town?
00:10:08 I mean, maps are pretty uncertain and hard to come by.
00:10:12 And when you get there, everybody knows each other.
00:10:14 They're suspicious of outsiders.
00:10:15 How easy is it for you to be a thief?
00:10:18 And let's say, like in a city, if you steal stuff, you need to sell it, right?
00:10:22 It's called fencing, right?
00:10:23 So you need to sell it.
00:10:24 So in a city, if you steal something, then you have an underground network of other thieves you can sell to
00:10:31 and you can monetize your theft.
00:10:33 If you go and steal in a place where there's not a whole lot of money, I guess you can steal money and all of that,
00:10:38 but in a place where there's a lot of trade, a lot of barter and so on, it's really tough to steal stuff.
00:10:44 And if you steal it and you want to sell it, you can't sell it in the town because everyone knows everything.
00:10:49 So you, like in the frontier town, so then you have to head back to the main city to sell it,
00:10:53 which is going to take you days or weeks.
00:10:55 It just doesn't seem to me that certainly thieves and all of that, serial killers, right?
00:11:03 I'm sure there were serial killers in the Wild West.
00:11:05 Did they want to be in big cities or small towns?
00:11:08 Now, you could say, of course, that if you're like a violent guy who just wants to terrorize people,
00:11:15 maybe you'd go on the frontier.
00:11:17 But again, it takes a long time to get out of the frontier.
00:11:20 You've got to find it. And they're all very well armed.
00:11:23 Remember, out in the frontier, not only are they very well armed,
00:11:26 but if you shoot someone on the frontier, like in self-defense, some guy comes at you with a gun, you shoot him.
00:11:32 Well, you can just basically feed him to the hogs and nobody knows anything and nobody knows what happened to you.
00:11:38 So it's a pretty uncertain business going out there.
00:11:41 So I was curious. One of the things I want to start with, let's look at how violent were these frontier towns, right?
00:11:49 So this is a little bit later on.
00:11:53 There's a historian named Robert Dykstra.
00:11:57 He found how many murders from 1870 to 1885 in Kansas's five largest cattle towns.
00:12:06 This is according to the 1880 census.
00:12:08 You've got Wichita, so 4900 people, 4911.
00:12:12 Abilene, 2360, call 12,005. Ellsworth, 929. And Dodge City, 996.
00:12:20 So you've got a 15-year period and, what is that, 8000, 9000 people.
00:12:27 15-year period and it's 45 murders.
00:12:33 So there were an average 0.6 murders per town per year.
00:12:39 Now is that the kind of crazy, wild, violent situation that we're talking about?
00:12:45 Well, not really, I think.
00:12:48 Some of these would, of course, be localized.
00:12:51 They'd be drunken brawls. You cheated at cards, pilgrim, you know, that kind of swing and saloon, Wild West stuff.
00:12:56 Some of that would be family disputes, husband and wife murders, and so on.
00:13:01 How many of those would be outside criminals coming in?
00:13:05 So frontier towns, it's funny because gun control is interesting, right?
00:13:09 I have no problem with gun control when it comes to private people on their own property.
00:13:14 That's fine. That's voluntary, right?
00:13:17 So frontier towns often prohibited, here's a quote,
00:13:21 "the carrying of dangerous weapons of any type concealed otherwise by persons other than law enforcement officers."
00:13:28 So most established towns, and of course a lot of them restricted weapons, had few if any killings in any given year.
00:13:38 So this is not an argument for or against gun control.
00:13:42 I'm just saying that, of course, the towns had to be perceived as pretty safe.
00:13:46 Because remember, towns are all competing for people, right?
00:13:48 They've got reputations and they want to draw people.
00:13:50 Towns had to be pretty safe if people were willing to give up their guns.
00:13:55 Now remember, of course, the American West, very little government if any.
00:13:59 A lot of places there wasn't, right?
00:14:01 American West, no gun controls, no gun laws of any kind.
00:14:04 Again, some towns prohibited guns. They were exceptions, right?
00:14:07 These were the exceptions, right?
00:14:08 In most places you could just carry, take whatever you wanted, guns, rifles, you name it.
00:14:14 And again, let's look at this.
00:14:17 Again, the data is obviously spotty and not there at all for some of the more Wild West stuff.
00:14:23 But between 1870 and 1885, the murder rate was roughly one murder per 100,000 residents each year in a whole bunch of towns.
00:14:33 One murder per 100,000 residents.
00:14:36 Oregon maintained a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 adults.
00:14:41 Some cow towns did not even experience a single killing in 1869 or 1870.
00:14:46 This is like Abilene or Wichita.
00:14:48 And again, many places we got, as mentioned before, 45 murders in a 15-year period.
00:14:54 Now if crime did spike, the local population would obviously take matters into their own hands.
00:14:59 So here's an example.
00:15:00 In San Francisco, there were more than 100 murders in six months.
00:15:06 So the citizens got together and they formed a vigilante committee.
00:15:13 So that's interesting.
00:15:14 Did they run to the government?
00:15:15 Did they try and appoint a sheriff?
00:15:16 Nope, they took matters into their own hands.
00:15:19 This is kind of funny, right?
00:15:21 I mean, it's not a huge population in San Fran back in the day.
00:15:27 So a vigilante committee was formed.
00:15:29 This attracted more than 8,000 members during a three-month period.
00:15:34 I think that's just wild.
00:15:36 We got a problem with crime and you literally can't get into the meetings.
00:15:39 There are so many men who want to help deal with the crime.
00:15:43 So you got 100 murders in six months, vigilante committee is formed voluntarily.
00:15:49 8,000 dudes sign up to deal with it and the city had only two murders after that.
00:15:55 So 100 murders in six months, vigilante committee, 8,000 dudes.
00:15:58 Can you imagine those meetings?
00:16:00 The city had only two murders thereafter.
00:16:02 So this is a private solution to crime, which is pretty wild.
00:16:08 So remember, we're talking about rates per 100,000 of homicides, right?
00:16:16 So on the West, in the Wild West, you've got one per 100,000 in a lawless area
00:16:23 where people are self-organized and there's private solutions to the problems of crime.
00:16:27 One per 100,000 in many places.
00:16:30 Let's look at Baltimore 2020.
00:16:33 Is it one? Is it two? Is it five? Is it ten?
00:16:36 No, 57.1. 57.1.
00:16:41 It looks like they just gave up collecting data after 2020.
00:16:45 In 2019, it was 58.6.
00:16:48 2018, 50.5.
00:16:50 And that is just for homicides.
00:16:54 The rate in the US as a whole is a 7.8 per 100,000.
00:16:59 Now, Baltimore, of course, is not like they're short of government in any way, shape or form.
00:17:02 They've got massive layers.
00:17:04 You've got the welfare state. You've got government schools.
00:17:06 You've got government police and courts and all of that.
00:17:09 And it's 57 times what it was in most places in the "Wild, Wild West."
00:17:17 Isn't that wild? Isn't that wild?
00:17:22 In his book, "Frontier Violence, Another Look," W. Eugene Holland stated that he believed
00:17:29 that the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society is today.
00:17:39 Remember, in Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870.
00:17:47 In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law employed to prevent killings.
00:17:54 Only two towns, Elsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had five killings in any one year.
00:18:01 Frank Prassel states in his book, "A Legacy of Law and Order," that, and I quote,
00:18:06 "If any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier
00:18:12 left no significant heritage of offenses against the person relative to other sections of the country."
00:18:21 I mean, and even if the crime rates were higher, remember, a preference for order can change
00:18:29 or be different across times and peoples.
00:18:33 To show that the West was more "lawless" than our present-day society tells us not a huge amount,
00:18:39 unless some measure of the demand for law and order is available.
00:18:45 I mean, if you look at how complicated, expensive, and slow, and uncertain the court system is,
00:18:52 some people might prefer a shootout.
00:18:54 I mean, if you think sort of back in the day, duels in Europe kept society pretty civilized.
00:19:01 So even if you say, "Well, you know, people turned to duels more and it was sort of chaotic."
00:19:06 Well, compare it to what?
00:19:07 Is that a more or less efficient, I mean, outside of morality, right?
00:19:11 Is that a more or less efficient way of preventing a crime?
00:19:16 To have that kind of blowback.
00:19:17 Remember, in San Francisco, you got 8,000 guys signing up to deal with a murder.
00:19:26 That's how eager people are to police and organize their own community.
00:19:29 So that's interesting, right? You've got to remember that.
00:19:36 So here's some quotes.
00:19:40 "While the frontier society may appear to have functioned with many violations of formal law,
00:19:44 it's sometimes more truly reflected community standards in conflict with superficial and at times alien standards."
00:19:52 And we'll get to, remember, okay, so you're out there in the frontier as a dude, right?
00:19:58 What is it that you want?
00:20:00 Well, you probably want your drink, you probably want your land,
00:20:04 you probably want some good hard work with some good community.
00:20:08 What do you want? You want the ladies to come.
00:20:11 You want the women to come, right?
00:20:13 Was it Wisconsin basically offered women the right to vote in return to come to live in Wisconsin?
00:20:18 Because, you know, the men were lonely.
00:20:19 There is a young cowboy, he lives on the range, his horse and his cattle are his only companion.
00:20:24 So you want the ladies to come.
00:20:26 Now, do the ladies come if it's violent?
00:20:27 They do not.
00:20:29 The ladies want a peaceful place, a peaceful area to raise their children.
00:20:33 So one of the first things that men do when they get out there,
00:20:35 they carve out the land, build the cities, build the towns,
00:20:38 is they then make sure that it's peaceful so that the women will come,
00:20:40 they can get married, raise their kids, have families.
00:20:43 So it's a huge basic drive to pacify the environment.
00:20:46 It's a basic mating ritual of the men.
00:20:50 Sausage fest, breed peace, that's perhaps the title of the presentation, something like that.
00:20:57 So community standards, you want to keep things peaceful
00:21:00 and a private sort of free market solution, a voluntary solution,
00:21:04 is much more effective and efficient to governments.
00:21:07 Of course, there's no duty to protect.
00:21:09 This has been sort of really established in American law in particular,
00:21:12 that the police, they don't have any duty to protect you at all.
00:21:14 They can just watch you get robbed and there's nothing you can do.
00:21:17 No duty to protect and so on.
00:21:19 So, yeah, it's not ideal.
00:21:22 So we've got vigilante committees, right?
00:21:25 So vigilante committees would spring up in some of the mining towns of the West.
00:21:29 This is a perfect example of this.
00:21:32 So these committees would arise after some civil government would be imposed.
00:21:37 These vigilante committees would arise and they competed with the government,
00:21:43 whether the government was ineffective or slow.
00:21:45 And remember, so let's say you've got a vigilante committee of 8,000 people.
00:21:49 Well, you're not going to be able to bribe 8,000 people.
00:21:52 But if you've got two sheriffs and a judge,
00:21:55 that's a concentrated area where you can apply pressure.
00:21:58 You can't go and threaten 8,000 people, but you can threaten two sheriffs and a judge.
00:22:02 So when you concentrate the enforcement of community standards on a very small number of people,
00:22:08 that's a single point of pressure where corruption can focus.
00:22:11 So it's not, I mean, just from a sort of game theory, it's not ideal at all.
00:22:21 So San Francisco in the 1850s, you got the ineffective, as we saw,
00:22:26 in controlling crime, 100 murders in six months.
00:22:29 And government also, I mean, this is the basic problem, right, is that you say,
00:22:35 well, we need a government because people don't respect rules,
00:22:38 they just will use violence to achieve their own end.
00:22:41 Well, those people will then go into the government, right?
00:22:44 I mean, there's not angels and devils, right?
00:22:47 There's not the government. It's always going to be populated by angels.
00:22:50 So if you've got bad people, they'll go into the government, right?
00:22:55 So you needed these vigilante communities.
00:22:59 Sometimes the criminals would move into the government.
00:23:03 This happened in Virginia City, Montana Territory in the 1860s.
00:23:07 The smarter criminals, they all got involved in the government,
00:23:11 all got involved in law enforcement, and then terrorized the population.
00:23:14 And who do you turn to when law enforcement is the bad guy, right?
00:23:18 So remember, all of these myths, it's like there's a bad guy, there's a really super great, good, wonderful cop,
00:23:23 and he protects you from the bad guys.
00:23:26 Okay, what if the bad guy becomes the sheriff?
00:23:28 But if he gains the system or camouflages himself or bribes people or threatens people,
00:23:33 and he becomes the cop, who do you turn to?
00:23:35 So you need this competition.
00:23:37 So remember, six months, right?
00:23:39 San Francisco Vigilante Committee, 1856, you had 100 murders in six months.
00:23:45 The group remained in action for only three months and solved the problem, right?
00:23:50 Remember, the sort of Pareto principle applies to productivity, right?
00:23:55 So the Pareto principle is that the square root of--in a meritocracy,
00:24:01 the square root of any group produces half the value, right?
00:24:05 So if you've got a company of 10,000 people, 100 of them are producing half the value,
00:24:10 and 10 of that 100 are producing half the value.
00:24:13 So a quarter of the value of the 10,000 people is produced by only 10 people.
00:24:17 It's the same thing with crime. It's the same thing with crime.
00:24:20 It's a very, very small minority of criminals who do most of the crime.
00:24:24 Who do most of the crime, I mean, outside the government.
00:24:27 So dealing with crime is actually very easy.
00:24:30 You can see this in El Salvador and other places.
00:24:32 Dealing with crime is actually very easy.
00:24:34 Crime exists because it's allowed, not because it's hard to solve.
00:24:37 You just get a small number of criminals, recognize that recidivism is very common, right?
00:24:43 That you can't keep criminals from becoming criminals.
00:24:46 So you simply put the criminals in prison, and most people don't want to commit crime.
00:24:51 But a small number of people want to commit the vast majority of crime.
00:24:54 It's very easy to solve.
00:24:56 Now, say, "Oh, what's the typical thing? Train robberies and bank robberies in the Wild West."
00:25:03 Well, nope.
00:25:05 So you could--arguably the Wild West era began, turned to the 19th century, early 19th century.
00:25:13 The first bank robbery occurred in 1831.
00:25:17 So 30 years.
00:25:19 So, of course, what are the crimes you see?
00:25:21 Well, there's the random shoot 'em up and terrorizing the women folk and so on, right?
00:25:25 Which, again, would be very much dealt with because the women folk would leave town if they were terrorized.
00:25:29 So the men have a strong incentive to keep the rough men at bay.
00:25:32 But what else do you see?
00:25:33 You see bank robbery, train robberies, and so on.
00:25:36 So sort of peak of the Wild West era, 1850s, 1860s, and so on.
00:25:41 The first bank robbery in America that's recorded occurred in 1831.
00:25:48 It's about 30 years before the Wild West, the peak of the Wild West era.
00:25:51 And those thieves, did they come in Danny DeVito styles and blasting away?
00:25:56 No, they didn't.
00:25:57 They didn't carry any guns, the thieves.
00:26:00 They used forged keys to get in there, right?
00:26:05 So it was subterfuge.
00:26:07 It was cat burglary and so on.
00:26:09 So inner town was not the Wild West era.
00:26:13 Now, the first stick 'em up non-war related bank robbery was in 1863 in Malden, Massachusetts.
00:26:23 So the -- and it was a government employee, right?
00:26:27 So it was a government employee.
00:26:29 So there was a 32-year-old postmaster in Malden, Massachusetts.
00:26:33 His name was Edward Green.
00:26:35 He walked into Malden Bank to get change.
00:26:37 He was a drunk and he was heavily in debt.
00:26:41 Now, a 17-year-old boy who actually was the son of the bank's president was the sole cashier.
00:26:46 So Green, I guess he cased the joint.
00:26:49 He walked out, walked home, grabbed his gun, came back, shot the guy, the boy in the head.
00:26:53 He walked out once again, this time with $5,000 in cash.
00:26:57 That'd be, I guess, well over $100,000 today.
00:27:02 And so, yes, all of these black-barred private criminals, nope.
00:27:07 No, no, no, the first bank robbery didn't even use guns.
00:27:10 And the first shooting bank robbery was a government employee.
00:27:19 At least I assume.
00:27:21 He was probably government subsidized for sure.
00:27:23 But, of course, then people were like, "Hey, how come he can pay his debts all so much?"
00:27:28 Again, everybody knows everyone's business.
00:27:30 So, according to reports, Edward confessed to the murder about a month later and was hanged in 1866.
00:27:38 He was actually the first man hanged for an armed bank robbery in America too.
00:27:42 So, not according to the cliches, right?
00:27:47 Now, before the Civil War, the Western Territories were unincorporated land.
00:27:51 So no government really reached that far west yet.
00:27:54 And the settlers had no "official" or government-sanctioned way to keep the peace.
00:28:01 Now, of course, whenever people gather together, there's going to be conflicts.
00:28:05 Some of those conflicts can be reasoned out.
00:28:07 Some of them, people are stubborn, they can get aggressive and so on.
00:28:11 So you have to have some way to mediate disputes, that sort of third party.
00:28:14 I've talked about this in my books, "Practical Anarchy," "Everyday Anarchy."
00:28:19 I've talked about this in my novel called "The Future," where these things are shown in more vivid and fictional detail.
00:28:23 They're called "Dispute Resolution Organizations."
00:28:26 There's a human need to resolve conflicts.
00:28:29 Now, the government is there, pushes out all of these other things.
00:28:33 Like, I remember when my wife was pregnant with our first child.
00:28:37 We wanted some courses on pregnancy, wanted to go learn about pregnancy.
00:28:40 The only courses that were offered were offered by the government for free, but they were all booked up.
00:28:44 We couldn't get there.
00:28:46 And, of course, nobody offered any private courses on pregnancy because the government was offering them for free.
00:28:50 So you couldn't really compete.
00:28:52 I remember my wife was large, and it was, I don't know, a week before she gave birth, we finally got into a pregnancy class.
00:29:00 Sort of pointless, right?
00:29:02 So the government was effectively preventing us from getting pregnancy classes by offering pregnancy classes, thus driving out the competition.
00:29:08 But the pregnancy classes were unavailable and so on, right?
00:29:11 So it's the same thing with conflict, obviously.
00:29:14 I'm going to take a bit of a stretch here in terms of the analogy, but if the government is there offering "dispute resolution services,"
00:29:22 then these private agencies don't often show up.
00:29:26 Although there are mediation and so on.
00:29:29 I used mediation services once in a legal dispute, and they're actually pretty efficient.
00:29:34 You can get them done in a couple of weeks as opposed to, I remember, when I had a dispute, they said,
00:29:40 "Well, you can go to the courts, it's going to cost a quarter of a million dollars plus."
00:29:44 This is like 25 years ago.
00:29:46 "And it's going to take from 5 to 10 years to complete."
00:29:49 "Or you can go to mediation, which will take a couple of weeks and cost like 5 or 10 grand."
00:29:54 So, of course, there was a ceiling, there was a cap on how much you could get.
00:29:58 But yeah, basically, you created this demand because the government system was so inefficient.
00:30:03 Now, so you've got this demand for dispute resolution.
00:30:09 The government comes along and pushes out all the competition,
00:30:13 and then the government doesn't need to be efficient anymore, and becomes kind of slow and corrupt,
00:30:17 and then becomes for itself rather than for a customer service and so on.
00:30:22 So here's some quotes from a book on the subject.
00:30:27 "Private organizations like land-use clubs, cattlemen's associations, wagon trains and mining camps,
00:30:34 protected private property and mediated disputes.
00:30:39 Civil contracts, localized constitutions and social pressure, including ostracism,
00:30:43 a very real threat so far away from the rest of America, largely kept the peace, instead of threats of violence."
00:30:49 Right, so it's a really, really powerful idea that ostracism is a way to mediate disputes,
00:30:56 to threaten people without using violence.
00:30:58 I mean, when I was a kid in England, growing up, I lived on an apartment estate with a whole bunch of other kids, obviously.
00:31:09 And we would go out, and we didn't have any money, and there was no video games,
00:31:14 so we would just go out and make up our own games.
00:31:17 And how would we enforce the rules?
00:31:19 Well, we'd negotiate the rules, and we wouldn't drive away a kid who didn't obey the rules.
00:31:25 We just wouldn't ask him to play.
00:31:27 Everyone's gone through this, right?
00:31:28 There's a pick-up game of baseball, and if there's some kid who doesn't follow the rules,
00:31:31 who's sucky, who cries, who gets angry and throws the ball at people, you just don't invite him.
00:31:36 You just don't invite him.
00:31:38 In the same way that you get sort of minor ostracism if you're bad at baseball, you get picked last in the team.
00:31:42 So we enforced our games and our rules through ostracism.
00:31:47 And if you move out to some remote area, you set up your farm, you need people.
00:31:53 You need to trade with them, you need them to help you put up your barns,
00:31:57 you need them to help you pick your crops, you help them.
00:32:00 You're really bound into the community.
00:32:02 If you're ostracized, you might as well just pack up and move away.
00:32:08 Ostracism is really, really powerful.
00:32:10 Now, of course, there was a long time where you weren't quite as bound into people,
00:32:13 and you could move, and your reputation wouldn't necessarily follow you, and so on.
00:32:16 And now with social media, ostracism is back, right?
00:32:19 It's a de-platforming, it's a way of ostracizing people that other people disagree with, and so on.
00:32:25 So ostracism is a very powerful--
00:32:30 ostracism, of course, it activates the same parts of the brain that physical torture does.
00:32:34 Like with social animals, the withdrawal of social associations is really, really tough.
00:32:40 So ostracism is a very powerful way.
00:32:43 And in the Wild West, so to speak, you absolutely needed everyone to protect you, to help you,
00:32:50 to be part of the community was essential.
00:32:53 Because remember, ostracism is genetic death, right?
00:32:56 If nobody will talk to you, then--like say you're unmarried--nobody will talk to you,
00:33:00 nobody will associate with you, then it means you can't get married, you can't have your kids.
00:33:04 So it's just genetic death, which is why it tortures us so much,
00:33:07 and will do just about anything to remain in society's good graces.
00:33:11 So ostracism is very, very powerful, and was hugely powerful in the Wild West,
00:33:17 and it's a peaceful way to enforce social standards.
00:33:22 So this is, again, a quote from the book on the subject.
00:33:24 "The contractual system of law effectively generated cooperation rather than conflict.
00:33:29 And on those occasions when conflict arose, it was, by and large, effectively quelled through non-violent means."
00:33:36 Non-violent means.
00:33:39 Violence is very expensive, and very uncertain, and very unstable.
00:33:43 Think of Hatfield and the McCoys and so on.
00:33:45 So violence is very much the last resort.
00:33:48 I mean, I think as a man, like most men--and I'm sure some women too--
00:33:52 I've been in situations where there's potential violence, and you just talk your way out of it,
00:33:57 you make some jokes, you buy someone a drink, or you just leave, right?
00:34:03 The last thing you want to--I mean, it's better than dying, right?
00:34:07 Somebody comes at you, you self-defense, but that's the last thing you want to do is get involved in violence.
00:34:11 Violence is a real genie that you uncork, which goes kind of random, right?
00:34:15 I mean, a friend of mine was once on the jury of a trial where a guy just pushed another guy in a bar,
00:34:21 but the guy stumbled backwards, fell down some stairs, and died.
00:34:24 And then it's like manslaughter, you know, you're looking at years and years in jail.
00:34:28 Like, violence is a really, really bad thing.
00:34:31 Of course, out in the West too, you've got a lot of families, a lot of communities.
00:34:34 You go beat up one guy, he's got ten brothers who are going to come and find you, right?
00:34:40 So that blowback situation is really--you just don't want to go--violence, if you can avoid it.
00:34:48 So they look for very peaceful ways to do it, and there's lots of those.
00:34:54 So with violence in the West, most of it was young people settling what are called "matters of honor."
00:35:05 Now, it's a rough way to enforce social standards in society, but it works.
00:35:13 The question is, does people using violence to settle matters of honor, does that prevent violence overall?
00:35:22 I mean, obviously, if you look at self-defense, the right to self-defense prevents violence.
00:35:29 Just as guns prevent, in America, even contemporaneously, guns prevent way more crimes than are committed through guns.
00:35:36 Like, millions and millions of crimes are prevented every year through guns.
00:35:40 So having guns, it's the seen versus the unseen.
00:35:43 So you see people, the sort of matters of honor, you see this and you say,
00:35:48 "Oh my gosh, there are these duels, there are these fights over matters of honor."
00:35:51 But boy, does it keep people polite, and does it prevent things.
00:35:55 Of course, the things that are prevented, you don't see.
00:35:57 So if somebody commits a crime with a gun, you see that, it might be on the news.
00:36:00 Somebody who prevents a crime with a gun, and most of those you wouldn't even see.
00:36:04 Somebody who prevents a crime with a gun, that doesn't show up in the news. You don't see it.
00:36:08 So it's the vivid versus the hidden, the seen versus the unseen.
00:36:12 Sort of an intelligence test, in a way.
00:36:16 So what do you see? You see all these bank robberies in the Wild West.
00:36:19 Movies, and shows, and books, and so on.
00:36:22 So between 1859 and 1900, really height of the Wild West stuff,
00:36:26 how many bank robberies were there recorded across 15 states?
00:36:32 15 states!
00:36:34 1859 to 1900.
00:36:40 Right?
00:36:42 41 years. 41 years, 15 states, there were only 8 recorded bank robberies.
00:36:49 Right?
00:36:51 So, what would you do if you're a bank owner?
00:36:57 This is back when bank owners weren't government-sanctioned monopolists.
00:37:04 So, if there was a law enforcer's office, that could be public or private.
00:37:08 And when I say "sheriff," that doesn't necessarily mean government, it just means the guy responsible for keeping the peace.
00:37:12 Could be private, could be paid for by the community, could have competition.
00:37:16 So, you're going to have a sheriff's office.
00:37:20 Where do you want your bank to be?
00:37:22 Well, you're right next to the sheriff's office.
00:37:25 So you're next to the sheriff's office and the general store,
00:37:28 for convenience and also to have people around who are well-armed who can protect you.
00:37:32 You have reinforced walls, your bar is in the window, all that kind of stuff.
00:37:38 So, it's pretty hard to steal gold and silver and these certificates.
00:37:47 And even if you do get a hold of them, let's say you get a hold of a bunch of gold,
00:37:50 well, you've got to make it across to somewhere.
00:37:52 You can't sell it in this town.
00:37:54 News would spread pretty quickly, particularly after the telegraph.
00:37:57 And where are you going to go? How are you going to sell it?
00:38:01 Now, burglary and robbery rates back then were much lower than most modern-day urban centers.
00:38:09 So, you've got less government, lower crime.
00:38:15 And rape was exceptionally rare.
00:38:19 So, again, obviously there's the ethics of it all, but just look at the self-interest.
00:38:23 Why would rape be so rare in the Wild West?
00:38:26 Remember, men are trying to lure women out to come and be their wives
00:38:30 and be their girlfriends and make families with and so on, right?
00:38:34 So, if there's a rapist, women don't want to come to that town.
00:38:39 So, you know, men and women would stay safe, and if there was a rapist,
00:38:44 he would be swiftly dealt with by the community, and everybody would know that.
00:38:48 Because if the town gets a reputation that someone got raped there,
00:38:52 women don't want to go there, and the men are really upset and angry.
00:38:55 So, just understand all of that.
00:38:57 Men have a great deal of incentive to keep women safe, and rape is exceptionally rare.
00:39:07 So, how did this play out? Again, here are more quotes.
00:39:10 Stagecoaches hired security guards to protect passengers and their goods.
00:39:14 Legal institutions were established by mining camps during the gold rush of California.
00:39:19 Pioneers settling on land held in the public domain formed land clubs,
00:39:23 installed regulations, and maintained property rights.
00:39:26 Cattlemen's associations were widespread to prevent another tragedy of the commons, right?
00:39:30 So, tragedy of the commons is you've got your own land, there's some unowned land,
00:39:34 some public land or land that everyone shares in common,
00:39:37 and you have a huge incentive to have your cattle grazed on the public land.
00:39:43 So, they all got-- they recognized this problem of the commons.
00:39:46 It's funny, you see people say, "Well, you need the government,"
00:39:48 because people will prey upon stuff that nobody owns, but then nobody owns the government,
00:39:53 and people just prey on the government the most, or use the government to prey on others the most.
00:39:56 The government doesn't solve the problem of the commons.
00:39:58 The government is the biggest manifestation of the problem of the commons.
00:40:04 So, what happens is these unusual episodes are cited as if they're the norm.
00:40:12 So, here's the kind of thing, right?
00:40:14 One way to spot propaganda is you see these improbable and unusual situations.
00:40:20 Everybody remembers, right?
00:40:22 Buffalo Bill, Cody, and all of these people, the Dillingers,
00:40:25 all these people that you would know, well, you know them because they're unusual.
00:40:30 They're vivid. They're out of the norm.
00:40:33 Do you remember Robert Walpole, whatever his name was, the eight-foot-plus tall guy?
00:40:37 He's Andre the Giant. You remember these people because they're out of the norm.
00:40:40 So, when you see the same kind of names repeated over and over again--
00:40:45 Do you know? There were, I don't know how many dozens of shootings in urban centers in America just last weekend.
00:40:53 Do you know the names of these people? No, they're not vivid because it's a blur.
00:40:56 There's so many, right?
00:40:58 Whereas when there's very few and they're constantly recycled, that's because they were very much the exception.
00:41:04 And you recycle them so that you're trying to pass off the wild exception as the common norm.
00:41:11 So, in other cases, this is another quote, "In other cases, principal actors themselves exaggerated the truth in order to cultivate the mystique of the Old West.
00:41:18 Buffalo Bill Cody, for example, admitted that he had been wounded in battle with Indians not 137 times as he had claimed, but only once.
00:41:28 The 137 figure, though, was more effective in selling dime novels.
00:41:31 People are drawn towards these exaggerations and they quickly become the truth."
00:41:38 So, let's look at these protection associations.
00:41:43 So, here's a quote, "If a man was mistreating his family, the women of a community would see that he was run out of town.
00:41:52 The men of the community would see that he never abused another family again.
00:41:58 They took care of incest.
00:42:00 In New England, every family was regulated by the community to see that children were not abused.
00:42:06 When they were, the offending spouse was kicked out of the town.
00:42:09 The property would be confiscated, their property would be confiscated and given to the family.
00:42:14 The abusing parent was never allowed near their children again."
00:42:18 Oh, isn't that wild?
00:42:22 "Every family was regulated by the community to see that children were not abused."
00:42:29 Think of the isolated, atomized, alone in a crowd of people families that we have in the West today.
00:42:38 The community has no investment in protecting children as a whole and very little capacity to do so, even if it wants to.
00:42:45 This is why child abuse is increasing and pretty rampant in our society.
00:42:50 And again, you just sort of think of, right?
00:42:53 Think of this.
00:42:55 You're in a town. Some guy is abusing his children.
00:43:00 It could be molesting them, could be beating them up, could be whatever, screaming at them.
00:43:06 Some guy is abusing his children.
00:43:08 Now, why would you take an interest in that?
00:43:10 Of course, there's Christian charity and so on, and I get all of that.
00:43:13 But why would you have a really visceral interest in dealing with that?
00:43:18 We know, right? We know.
00:43:20 We know because you're going to have to live with these kids in your community when you grow up.
00:43:26 So your kids will be playing with them, and then when they grow up, or even into their sort of early to mid-teens,
00:43:32 the children who are brutalized are going to be in your community, and they're going to be dangerous in general.
00:43:38 They're going to be violent. They're going to be drunks. They're going to be promiscuous.
00:43:41 They're going to be seducers. They're going to--all the things that happen.
00:43:44 As we know from the Brahmin, the Brain series I did many years ago,
00:43:46 all the things that happen to abused children will then be inflicted on the community.
00:43:50 So the community has a very, very powerful interest in dealing with child abuse very early, very decisively.
00:43:59 And you'll see, of course, they also understood that you can't reform serious child abuses.
00:44:05 You can't reform them.
00:44:07 So ostracize, never allowed to see, never allowed near the children again, ever.
00:44:13 And this, of course, would prevent child abuse as well.
00:44:19 So women, right? So the women--how do you get a woman to come to your town?
00:44:24 How do you get women to come to your town?
00:44:27 It's pretty wild, right?
00:44:29 So women in towns, or to come to towns, they demanded community orchestras, community theaters, sponsored artistic events.
00:44:39 They say the town provide money, and again, this would probably be--it's mostly private--
00:44:44 to bring in a troupe of theatrical performers, an opera star, a lecturer, or a Shakespearean actor.
00:44:51 I guess this is a parody in Tom Sawyer.
00:44:55 Towns would run their own theaters and opera houses.
00:44:58 They gave parks, bandstands, fireworks.
00:45:02 Bands provided a whole infrastructure for community betterment to please the ladies.
00:45:07 It's beautiful, right?
00:45:11 Men--I mean, I guess back in the day, men made the world, and women made the world worth living in, right?
00:45:19 So men built the houses, women made them beautiful.
00:45:23 This was all going on.
00:45:26 So I'm going to do a couple of interludes here, just really cool stuff I found during my research that I wanted to sort of point out here.
00:45:34 So here's one.
00:45:35 In 1911, a fellow named Elmer McCurdy robbed a passenger train.
00:45:41 He thought that this thing had thousands and thousands of dollars on board.
00:45:46 Nope, he just shook down the passengers, I guess, and made off with only $46, and lawmen shot him shortly thereafter.
00:45:57 So he was a loner, I guess, far away from friend, family, and kin.
00:46:01 His unclaimed corpse was then embalmed with an arsenic preparation, and nobody wanted to pay for the cost of his burial.
00:46:09 Nobody cared or knew about him, so the undertaker sold him to a traveling carnival, and his body was exhibited as a sideshow curiosity.
00:46:21 So over the course of the next 60 years, McCurdy's body was bought and sold by wax museums and haunted houses and circuses to use as a prop or an attraction.
00:46:35 And his corpse finally ended up in an amusement park funhouse in Long Beach, California.
00:46:43 Now, in 1976, the old television show with Lee Majors called "The Six Million Dollar Man" was filming there,
00:46:51 and the prop's finger or arm, depending on who you are talking to, broke off, and it revealed human tissue.
00:47:03 So the body was sent to the Los Angeles coroner's office, and they tested it, and it revealed that the prop was actually McCurdy.
00:47:15 So the dude traveled all over America for 60 years straight before a television show revealed that it was, in fact, a real person under this arsenic embalming preparation.
00:47:29 God knows what he looked like after 60 years. I'm sure he'd been left in the sun for a while and been rained on, and this guy was like a human mummy.
00:47:37 So eventually, 66 years after he was shot to death, he was buried in the famous Boothill Cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas,
00:47:47 which I thought was a pretty wild story.
00:47:51 You can get around even after you've been plugged with a thousand holes.
00:47:56 So let's look at some of the data.
00:48:02 So just remember, homicide rates, even in the big cities in the Old West, were astonishingly low.
00:48:07 Major railroad stops like Wichita and Dodge City had lower murder rates than major eastern cities like New York and Boston at the time.
00:48:14 I mean, now it's like way, way lower.
00:48:16 Now, cowboys and Indians.
00:48:23 Now, I'm going to use the word "Indians." I understand it's a little fraught, but this is what the contemporaneous and even later historical accounts refer to them as.
00:48:30 So interactions with the local Indian tribes were mostly peaceful.
00:48:33 Of course they were. Violence is very, very expensive and costly and risky.
00:48:39 You have to off-source the costs and risks of violence to the state in order for it to really happen at all.
00:48:44 So if you go out there, what do you want to do?
00:48:47 You want to trade with them to deal with the local population in a peaceful way.
00:48:54 You're going to wage war on them. How are you going to do that?
00:48:58 And what is the blowback? You don't even know the size of the enemy.
00:49:01 You don't know how many there are. You don't know how many alliances they have.
00:49:03 You don't probably even speak their language very well, if at all.
00:49:06 So it's a real unknown.
00:49:09 It's a hard thing to figure out just how little was known back in the day, how uncertain the maps were,
00:49:15 how little the language of the indigenous populations had been studied, how little you knew about them at all.
00:49:21 You're just out there in the middle of nowhere, there's some natives, and what do you do?
00:49:24 Well, you want to be peaceful.
00:49:26 I mean, I remember when I was working up north, I was in the woods panning gold,
00:49:33 and something brushed into my back and bumped up against my back.
00:49:39 And I thought it was a tree branch.
00:49:41 I sort of brushed it back a couple of times, but it had gone.
00:49:45 And finally, I felt cold, hard metal.
00:49:48 I turned around, and there was a native pointing a shotgun at me.
00:49:57 And I didn't feel exactly-- I felt shock.
00:50:00 I didn't feel exactly fear, because he didn't have any unfriendly features.
00:50:04 He wasn't snarling or anything like that.
00:50:06 I did have a sudden urge to tell him that I was from England and had nothing to do with colonization of his tribes.
00:50:13 But he actually was-- I mean, it was a bit of a stereotype, right?
00:50:18 So the indigenous population of North America doesn't have much capacity to process alcohol in their systems,
00:50:25 which is why the sort of drunken is kind of a cliche.
00:50:28 But he was kind of drunk. He was lonely.
00:50:31 We had lunch together. He told me about he was out hunting on his own and so on.
00:50:35 And I gave him-- I think we had a half bottle of brandy somewhere around the camp, and I gave that to him.
00:50:42 And we toasted each other. I don't really drink, but I did have a shot that day.
00:50:47 Not the shot I was-- the shot I wanted, not the one I didn't.
00:50:51 And we just dealt with each other peacefully, of course.
00:50:53 Again, I'm not saying this is some sort of Wild West scenario, but, I mean, you don't-- what am I going to do?
00:50:58 Like, a guy's got a gun pointed at me, and you talk your way. You reason your way.
00:51:02 You friendly your way. You offer him some food and a drink. You trade.
00:51:06 I mean, if the guy had a gun pointed at me, I mean, I guess I could have done something violent in terms of self-defense,
00:51:11 but that's not what you-- it's not how you deal with people.
00:51:15 And this, of course, was the case back in the Wild West, right?
00:51:19 So Jennifer Roback wrote a great book called "Property Rights and Indian Economies."
00:51:26 So Europeans accepted the rights that Indians had to their lands.
00:51:33 They accepted the fact that Indians retained possessory rights to their lands.
00:51:38 So trade with the Indians, right, especially the fur trade, right, the beaver hats and so on, was profitable.
00:51:43 War was very expensive.
00:51:45 Now, this all changed in the mid-1860s, and we know enough, right?
00:51:50 We know enough at this point to know what changed.
00:51:53 Post-Civil War, the federal government turned its attention westward.
00:51:59 Now, once you can offload the costs of using violence against the native tribes of the plains through the use of taxation,
00:52:10 trade was replaced by raid.
00:52:12 You can't trade with them anymore, because once you've got the government taxing everyone to pay for the violence,
00:52:17 the violence is now subsidized and escalates.
00:52:21 Quotes, "Deals had been struck prior to the war for the federal government to subsidize the building of the transcontinental railroad,
00:52:28 and now that the war was over, it was time for the government to make good.
00:52:31 Violence against the American plains Indians was at the behest of the government on behalf of crony railroad barons.
00:52:39 The campaign to 'pacify' the western territories resulted in the destruction of the native population
00:52:44 and fatally injured the tenuous relations between white settlers and native tribes.
00:52:51 Two of the U.S. generals, General William T. Sherman and General Grenville M. Dodge,
00:52:56 who headed up many of the major campaigns in the western territories,
00:52:59 grew into great detail about the atrocities committed against the plains Indians following the American Civil War,
00:53:04 and more importantly, why.
00:53:07 It was government.
00:53:09 It was crony capitalism.
00:53:11 It was, "I want land, I want to build this railroad, I want to expand, and I want somebody else to pay for the violence."
00:53:18 And then the government wages war and disperses the costs to taxation.
00:53:23 And of course what happens as well is that the costs are borne not by the government, but by the settlers, right?
00:53:30 So the settlers don't wage war against the native population because they kind of got to live with them,
00:53:36 and you don't know how many there are and how organized they are,
00:53:39 and you got to sleep, right? You got to sleep sometime.
00:53:42 It's different in war when you have lines and roughly equal foes,
00:53:46 but people can come in the middle of the night and they can slaughter your livestock and then you're dead,
00:53:51 or they can set fire to your crops, or they can poison your well water, or they can abduct your children.
00:53:56 You don't wage war as a private citizen against other people who aren't subsidized by the state.
00:54:02 You find some peaceful way to achieve it.
00:54:05 And so when you see this kind of mass destruction, you've got to look at who's funding it and why.
00:54:10 It's always funded by the government because the thing is too,
00:54:12 the government starts attacking the native population using the army or using mercenaries
00:54:16 or having a bounty as they did on the bison.
00:54:20 The government starts attacking the local population.
00:54:23 The local population then attacks the settlers as retribution.
00:54:28 So the government wages the war on behalf of the crony capitalists
00:54:31 and their own power lust and blood lust and all of that land lust.
00:54:36 The government wages war against the native population.
00:54:38 The native population then attacks the settlers, right? The blacks or the whites.
00:54:43 And then the settlers are like, "Oh my gosh, the natives are so aggressive."
00:54:47 And you get this whole crazy aggressive Indian story.
00:54:50 But of course, it's perfectly understandable.
00:54:53 Government wipes out half your tribe, you attack the closest whites.
00:54:57 Perfectly natural, perfectly inevitable. The government doesn't pay for the violence they cause.
00:55:02 They're safe in their offices.
00:55:05 It's the locals who end up with the blowback and then they talk about how violent the native population is.
00:55:11 So let's talk about, it's not quite a segue, right?
00:55:14 The gunfight at the OK Corral.
00:55:17 It was a famous movie, right?
00:55:19 One of the most famous gunfights in history is the shootout between the three Earp brothers,
00:55:22 Doc Holliday, Billy Claiborne, the two Clanton brothers, and the two McLaury brothers.
00:55:28 The movie's two hours. The gunfight lasted, in fact, about 30 seconds.
00:55:33 Also, by the way, the gunfight didn't even take place within the OK Corral at all.
00:55:37 It was near the current intersection of 3rd Street and Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona,
00:55:40 which is behind the corral itself. Just kind of want to mention that.
00:55:43 Very, very short gunfight, but there was a lot of bloodshed, right?
00:55:46 Three of the lawmen were injured and three of the cowboys were killed.
00:55:49 But yeah, it was very, very short. And again, why is it a famous gunfight?
00:55:55 Because it's very rare.
00:55:58 Just remember that. Dealing with propaganda.
00:56:00 When something is repeated and exaggerated, then you know it's out of the norm.
00:56:08 So was it the Wild West? No.
00:56:10 Property rights were protected. Civil order prevailed.
00:56:13 Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society
00:56:17 where property was protected and conflicts were resolved.
00:56:22 Was it a government agency? Here's a quote.
00:56:27 "These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on keeping order.
00:56:32 They soon discovered that warfare was a costly way of resolving disputes
00:56:36 and lower-cost methods of settlement, arbitration, courts, etc., resulted."
00:56:43 OK, we're going to go into a little bit more detail here.
00:56:45 It's my fetish. I promise you it's really powerful and way beyond our understanding
00:56:51 because dispute resolution has largely been displaced by government.
00:56:56 So let's look at four examples of institutions that provided law and order in the American West.
00:57:05 So we want to provide some support for the hypothesis that private rights were enforced and chaos did not reign.
00:57:11 So we're going to talk about land claims, clubs, cattlemen associations, mining camps, and Yee-Haw wagon trains.
00:57:18 So let's look at land clubs, and I'm going to read from books.
00:57:22 "These marginal or frontier settlers, squatters as they were called, were beyond the pale of constitutional government.
00:57:28 No statute of Congress protected them in their rights to the claims they had chosen and the improvements they had made.
00:57:33 In law, they were trespassers. In fact, they were honest farmers.
00:57:38 The result was the formulation of extra-legal organizations for protection and justice.
00:57:44 Each claims association adopted its own constitution and bylaws,
00:57:48 elected officers for the operation of the organization, established rules for adjudicating disputes,
00:57:53 and established the procedure for the registration and protection of claims.
00:57:57 The Constitution of the Claims Association of Johnson County, Iowa, offers one of the few records of club operation.
00:58:04 In addition to president, vice president, clerk, and record, that constitution provided for the election of seven judges,
00:58:11 any five of whom could compose a court to settle disputes,
00:58:14 and for the election of two marshals charged with enforcing rules of the association.
00:58:18 The constitution specified the procedure whereby property rights in land would be defined,
00:58:23 as well as the procedure for arbitrating claims disputes.
00:58:27 User charges were used for defraying arbitration expenses."
00:58:32 Now, of course people say, "Well, what if people didn't abide by the rules?"
00:58:40 Okay, so, as a sanction against those who would not follow the rules of the association, violence was an option.
00:58:47 But the following resolution suggests that less violent means were also used.
00:58:52 Right? Here's from the actual constitution of this private enforcement agency.
00:58:59 "Resolved that more effectually to sustain settlers in their just claims according to the custom of the neighborhood
00:59:06 and to prevent difficulty and discord in society, that we mutually pledge our honors to observe the following resolutions rigidly.
00:59:13 That we will not associate nor countenance those who do not respect the claims of settlers,
00:59:19 and further that we will neither neighbor with them, trade, barter, deal with them in any way whatsoever."
00:59:27 Right? So this is again, this is the ostracism. You can't survive without cooperation in a frontier society.
00:59:36 All right, let's do a little interlude.
00:59:40 Food. So, the California Gold Rush caused a mad dash, of course, to these hills.
00:59:48 You've got mining camps in towns springing up overnight all around.
00:59:52 So this is a huge demand for goods, spike prices, and it was really expensive to live in some of these mining towns.
01:00:01 It was more expensive to live in certain towns during the California Gold Rush than it is to live in Silicon Valley today.
01:00:08 So here's how much you'd expect to spend in 1851 in a Californian mining town.
01:00:15 A single egg could cost as much as $3, the equivalent of over $100 today.
01:00:20 A pound of butter could cost $20, about $700 today.
01:00:25 Gold pans that once sold for 20 cents a couple of years ago now went for $8 or $280 today.
01:00:31 Shovels sold for $36, which is over $1,200 in current dollars.
01:00:38 And remember, miners found like $10 to $15 in gold each day, if you were lucky.
01:00:47 And in general, in the Old West, it's funny, right?
01:00:50 In the general store, you'd find some familiar brands, right?
01:00:52 You'd find Quaker Oats, Royal Baking Powder, Baker's Chocolate, Durkee, Almond Hammer, Fleischmann's Yeast, Pillsbury Flour.
01:00:59 All of these things are available in the Wild West. It's kind of interesting.
01:01:03 All right, so let's talk about cattlemen's associations.
01:01:07 So early settlement of the cattle frontier created few property conflicts.
01:01:11 But as land became more scarce, more fenced in, voluntary enforcement mechanisms for property rights evolved.
01:01:19 Initially, and I quote, "There was room enough for all."
01:01:22 And when a cattleman rode up some likely valley or across some well-grazed divide and found cattle thereon, he looked elsewhere for a range.
01:01:29 But even, quote, "As early as 1868, two years after the first drive, small groups of owners were organizing themselves into protective associations and hiring stock detectives."
01:01:40 The place of these associations in the formation of, quote, "frontier law" is described by Lewis Pelzer, and I quote,
01:01:51 "From successive frontiers of our American history have developed needed customs, laws, and organizations.
01:01:57 The era of fur trading produced its hunters, its barter, and the great fur companies.
01:02:02 On the mining frontier came the staked claims and the vigilance committees.
01:02:06 The camp meeting and the circuit rider were heard on the religious outposts.
01:02:10 On the margins of settlement, the claim clubs protected the rights of the squatter farmers.
01:02:15 On the ranchman's frontier, the millions of cattle, the vast ranges, the ranches, and the cattle companies produced pools and local, district, territorial, and national cattle associations."
01:02:26 So this is, we gotta understand this.
01:02:29 It's really essential to understand. Human beings have a need for conflict resolution, and they spontaneously generate effective forms of doing that when left unmolested by central political power.
01:02:40 It will happen. It doesn't happen because the government's doing it, for the most part, but it happens on its own.
01:02:45 Spontaneous self-organization is the rule of my childhood and the rule of life as a whole.
01:02:51 Now, so these cattlemen's associations. So, like the claims associations, the cattlemen's associations drew up formal rules governing the group.
01:02:59 Now, their means of enforcing these private rights were often more violent than the trade sanctions specified by the claims associations.
01:03:09 So these private protection agencies were a market response to huge demands for the enforcement of rights.
01:03:19 Now, of course, a lot of the people who were out there are self-reliant. They're kind of rebels. They're handy with guns.
01:03:24 So you needed something to keep the peace as best you could.
01:03:29 So the market-based enforcement agencies of the cattlemen's frontier were different from modern private enforcement firms.
01:03:36 The earlier versions enforced their own laws much of the time rather than serving just as an extension of the government's police force, right?
01:03:43 So the sort of modern private eye gathers information, maybe turns it over to the police, lets the police take it from there, but these guys were the police as well.
01:03:51 So when you look at sort of private solutions to conflict, they say, "Oh, well, the enforcement's going to be ineffective."
01:04:00 And also the organizational agencies, the enforcement agencies will themselves become mini-governments and use their powers to infringe upon people's rights.
01:04:10 So you understand, they're not going to be effective, and they're going to grow in power and take over the local area, become sort of a local tyranny.
01:04:20 So no, ineffective, they were actually very effective, and we know that because there was competition.
01:04:26 So the most effective ones are the ones that get people's dollars when you don't have to pay, right?
01:04:30 What about the second concern? Did the enforcement agencies grow and tyrannize the local population?
01:04:36 No. No.
01:04:39 So major economies of scale did not seem to exist in either enforcement or crime.
01:04:46 So there are records of gunslingers, a lot of records of gunslingers making themselves available for hire in a, I guess a mercenary kind of way.
01:04:57 There's no record whatsoever that these gunslingers said, "Hey, let's all gang together and form a super defense agency and tyrannize everyone."
01:05:08 That didn't happen.
01:05:11 So some of the individuals, they drifted in and out of a life of crime, and sometimes they did form loose criminal associations.
01:05:18 But of course, the more effective the criminal associations, the more you would get, as in San Francisco, 8,000 guys signing up to shoot all the bad guys.
01:05:27 So these associations, the criminal associations, did not seem to be encouraged by the market form of peacekeeping.
01:05:35 They seemed to be dealt with more quickly and more severely under private property protective associations than under government organization.
01:05:41 Look at the criminal rates in Baltimore. I just scrolled through all of this stuff, and it just goes on and on and on.
01:05:46 It's just not being dealt with at all.
01:05:48 And of course, governments have, modern governments in particular, they have an incentive for crime to continue because it keeps the population nervous and fearful and easy to control.
01:06:00 So there's no example of all of this, right?
01:06:04 So, time, ding ding ding.
01:06:06 Okay, so, it's a lot of freedom, a lot of fresh air, but you had to deal with the food in the Wild West.
01:06:14 So the one meal that you and I could probably stand in the Wild West was breakfast, cornbread, stew, boiled eggs, fried potatoes, and omelets.
01:06:21 That's some good stuff, right?
01:06:24 Dinner? Dinner? Okay.
01:06:27 Cornbread, boiled mutton, saust, calves feet. Saust I just think of as drunk, but I'm sure it means something else.
01:06:35 For dessert, you might get some pudding. This is a family frontier food typical in 1853.
01:06:42 How do you cook your food? Well, you got roasting spits, frying pans, and ovens.
01:06:48 And the food, of course, is restricted to whatever meat or veggies were available during that time of the year.
01:06:53 Now on the range, you got your canned beans, rock hard biscuits, dried meat, dried fruit, and I'm sure not exactly latte-worthy coffees.
01:07:02 A lot of the whiskey being sold was mixed with water or other spirits to increase profits.
01:07:08 According to the book Serious Eats, some of the so-called bourbons were distilled with low-grade molasses.
01:07:17 That's a slow drink. Slow to get you drunk and slow to leave your body.
01:07:23 Nicknames for popular whiskey in that area include coffin varnish, mountain howitzer, and tangle leg.
01:07:30 Booze so strong your legs would get tangled while trying to leave the bar.
01:07:33 So I guess you kind of risked liver explosions and sudden death from getting drunk.
01:07:42 So let's go back to dispute resolution. Mountain howitzer is a great name for a bluegrass band, wouldn't you say?
01:07:48 So let's go back to the mining camps, right? Or go to the mining camps.
01:07:51 So, of course, as the population of the US grew, westward expansion was inevitable.
01:07:55 But the discovery of gold in California in 1848 rapidly increased the rate of this expansion.
01:08:02 So thousands of Easterners rushed to the most westward frontier in search of the precious metal they left behind their relatively civilized world.
01:08:11 Now, later, you had sort of less vivid gold rushes in Colorado, in Montana, and Idaho.
01:08:20 And, of course, every time you get to this sort of virgin territory, and, you know, there's stories of people paying the natives, like the Indians, like...
01:08:29 The Indians didn't care. It's like, "Oh, it's a pretty yellow rock." They just lead them to where it was, and then things would go kind of from there.
01:08:36 So the first to arrive at these gold rushes, they have to write the rules of the game.
01:08:41 So there was no constitutional authority in the country, and neither judge nor officer within 500 miles of this gold rush, right?
01:08:51 The invaders were remitted to the primal law of nature. And I guess you could say some common law inherent rights of American citizenship.
01:09:00 So every gulch, every valley, every stream was filled to the brim with red-hot treasure hunters.
01:09:06 Every bar was pockmarked with prospect holes. Timber, water rights, and town lots were soon to be valuable.
01:09:12 And some sort of regulation was an imperative necessity, right?
01:09:16 So this is a wonderful place for legal theorists to test their views as to the origin of civil law. Where does law come from?
01:09:26 So if you don't know, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, which means that I believe free markets should replace statist functions.
01:09:34 So the early civil law which evolved from this process approximated anarcho-capitalism as closely as any other experience in the US.
01:09:42 So in the absence of formal government structure for the definition and enforcement of individual rights,
01:09:47 many of the groups of associates who came seeking their fortunes organized and made their rules for operation before they left their homes.
01:09:56 Dispute resolution is a basic human need.
01:10:00 It's sort of like people saying, "Well, governments educate the young, therefore if governments don't educate the young, the young won't be educated."
01:10:06 No. Education of the young is a primal parental requirement, societal requirement, human requirement. People will find a way to do it.
01:10:13 So this is sort of similar to company charters today.
01:10:18 These voluntary contracts entered into by the miners specified financing of the operation as well as the nature of the relationship between individuals.
01:10:26 So this is a group going out to share risk, to share costs. Remember, you've got $1,300 shovels. You've got to share costs.
01:10:34 So how are they going to share profits? They come up with their own contracts.
01:10:37 Now remember, these contracts aren't enforceable by a state.
01:10:40 So these rules applied only to the miners in the company and did not recognize any outside arbiter of disputes.
01:10:47 They did not "recognize any higher court than the law of the majority of the company."
01:10:52 So these company constitutions often specified arrangements for payments to be used for caring for the sick and unfortunate,
01:10:59 rules for personal conduct including the use of alcoholic spirits,
01:11:03 and fines which could be imposed if you didn't follow these rules, to mention just a few.
01:11:09 So in the truest nature, this is an actual social contract.
01:11:13 To go out there and do work and to share risk and so on, you obey these rules, you abide by these rules, the punishments.
01:11:18 The rules are specified, the punishments are specified. This is an actual social contract.
01:11:22 You can either go out on your own or you've got a bunch of companies that are offering to share costs and expenses and risks with you,
01:11:28 and you can choose between them. So you're actually bound by a contract which you chose, not imposed by history or centralized authority.
01:11:35 The governing rules of the company were negotiated, and as all market transactions, unanimity prevailed.
01:11:42 Those who wished to purchase other bundles of goods or other sets of rules had that complete alternative.
01:11:48 So once the mining companies arrived at the potential gold sites, the rules were useful,
01:11:54 only insofar as questions of rights involved members of the company.
01:11:59 When other individuals were confronted in the mining camps, additional negotiation was necessary,
01:12:04 so the companies would resolve disputes within their own employees or members,
01:12:08 but of course there'd be more than one company out there. How do you negotiate between companies?
01:12:13 Now the first issue arise is the ownership of mining claims.
01:12:17 When the groups were small and homogenous, divvying up the land with the gulch or the stream or the land with the gold was pretty easy.
01:12:24 But when the numbers moved into the gold country, reached the thousands and thousands, the problems got bigger and bigger.
01:12:31 So how do you solve this? People don't want to go out there and look for gold and get shot by some guy.
01:12:36 They don't want to shoot some guy, because he could have a brother up the stream who's going to now hunt you to your death.
01:12:43 So what's the solution? You've got a bunch of people coming in, how are you going to divvy up?
01:12:46 There's greed, there's a kind of gold rush, hysteria.
01:12:50 How are you going to divvy up the land for people to look for gold?
01:12:54 Well, the general solution was to hold a mass meeting and appoint committees assigned to drafting the rules, the laws.
01:12:59 So there's a place called Gregory Gulch in Colorado, here's an example.
01:13:02 A mass meeting of miners was held June 8th, 1859, and a committee appointed to draft a code of laws.
01:13:08 This committee laid out boundaries for the district and their civil code.
01:13:13 After some discussion and amendment, the civil code was unanimously adopted in a mass meeting July 16th, 1859.
01:13:20 Okay. All the laws, all the rules, all the regulations. In eight days.
01:13:33 I mean, can you imagine the law system working even remotely that fast?
01:13:39 Even remotely that fast.
01:13:43 Of course, the discovery in some recent American case was 11,000 pages, which is hundreds of years to go over.
01:13:50 So this example was rapidly followed in other districts, and the whole territory was soon divided between 20 or more local sovereignties.
01:13:59 So again, once you've got the first draft, other people will copy/paste and maybe adopt a little, but you don't start from scratch.
01:14:07 So there's a guy named General Riley, visited a California camp in 1849.
01:14:13 Told the miners that "all questions touching the temporary right of individuals to work in particular localities of which they're in possession should be left to the decision of the local authorities."
01:14:25 So no council, no justice of the peace, no sheriff was ever forced upon a district by an outside power.
01:14:31 The district was the unit of political organization in a lot of regions long after the creation of the state.
01:14:38 And delegates from adjoining districts often met in consultation regarding boundaries or matters of local government,
01:14:44 and reported back to their respective constituencies in open air meetings on like a hillside or a riverbank and so on.
01:14:51 So it's all about negotiation.
01:14:56 Now, you'd think, "Well, we've got to have trained lawyers."
01:15:01 Well, first thing we do is say Shakespeare, kill all the lawyers.
01:15:04 Although he was actually pro-lawyer at that point.
01:15:07 So how were lawyers viewed?
01:15:11 Were lawyers viewed as superior in the negotiation of these kinds of things?
01:15:15 Well, let's look at the Union Mining District.
01:15:18 Quote, "Resolved that no lawyer be permitted to practice law in this district under penalty of not more than 50 nor less than 20 lashes, and be forever banished from this district."
01:15:32 Remember, a lawyer is sanctioned by the state, right?
01:15:34 So this way the local camps were able to agree on rules, individual rights, contract and dispute resolution, and on methods of enforcement without coercion from US authorities.
01:15:47 Lawyers were representatives of state or government law.
01:15:52 When outside laws were imposed on the camps, there's some evidence that they increased rather than decreased crime.
01:15:58 So when the government came in to impose laws, increased rather than decreased crime.
01:16:02 So of course you want to protect your property, right?
01:16:04 You want to protect your property.
01:16:05 Let's just look at property rights in the modern world, right?
01:16:08 All over the world.
01:16:09 You don't own your house, right?
01:16:11 You have to pay the government like 2% or 1.5% of its value, which the government determines.
01:16:17 Every year or you lose your house, right?
01:16:19 So if you have a way of keeping your property without losing your property, that's a good thing, isn't it?
01:16:27 So that's what we're looking at here.
01:16:30 One early Californian writes, "We needed no law until the lawyers came."
01:16:35 Another adds, "There were few crimes until the courts, with their delays and technicalities, took the place of miners' law."
01:16:41 So courts are complicated and very expensive.
01:16:44 They serve the rich and the powerful and the well-connected.
01:16:46 They don't serve the average citizen, whereas these dispute resolution organizations were composed of, paid for, and served the needs of the average citizen.
01:16:53 In which cheap, fast, effective, efficient. That's the name of the game.
01:17:02 So the mining camps didn't have private courts where individuals could take their disputes and pay for arbitration,
01:17:07 but they did develop a system of justice through the miners' courts.
01:17:11 These courts didn't usually have permanent officers.
01:17:14 There were instances of justices of the peace.
01:17:17 But this folk system was common in California.
01:17:20 So what happened was a group of citizens were summoned to try a case.
01:17:23 From there, they would elect a presiding officer or judge and select 6 or 12 persons to serve as a jury.
01:17:31 Most often, their rulings were not disputed, because remember, you'd get ostracized if you disputed or didn't follow their rules.
01:17:37 But there were recourse when disputes arose.
01:17:40 Here's an example. One case involved two partners.
01:17:44 After a ruling by the miners' court, the losing partner called a mass meeting of the camp to plead his case, and the decision was reversed.
01:17:51 If a larger group of miners was dissatisfied with the general rulings regarding camp boundaries or individual claim disputes,
01:17:57 notices were posted in a whole bunch of places calling a meeting of those who wanted a division of the territory.
01:18:05 And the quote is, "If a majority favored such action, the district was set apart and so named."
01:18:12 The old district was not consulted on the subject, but received a verbal notice of the new organization.
01:18:18 Local conditions making different regulations regarding claims desirable were the chief causes of such separations.
01:18:27 And here's a quote. "The work of mining and its environment and conditions were so different in different places
01:18:32 that laws and customs of the miners had to vary even in adjoining districts."
01:18:38 You had competition to find the best, cheapest, most effective, most efficient way of resolving disputes.
01:18:44 Can you imagine?
01:18:47 In Colorado, there is evidence of competition among the courts for business, and an additional guarantee that justice prevailed.
01:18:56 I mean, just think of this, right? If you're in a free market, and if you find out that some insurance company isn't paying out its claims
01:19:03 or is fighting people, they'll just lose business. So you have to be just and fair.
01:19:07 On the other hand, if insurance companies pay out too much, right, if they just accept everyone and every claim, never push back,
01:19:13 then they'll start losing money, they'll have to raise rates, and then they'll be driven out of business.
01:19:17 So finding a balance is one of the challenging things, and only the free market can find and maintain that balance,
01:19:23 because it's a moving target.
01:19:27 So here's a quote about Colorado, right?
01:19:32 "The civil courts promptly assumed criminal jurisdiction, and the year 1860 opened with four governments in full blast."
01:19:40 Now, this is not a state government, this is governance.
01:19:44 "The modest courts, people's courts, and provisional government, a new name for Jefferson, divided jurisdiction in the mountains,
01:19:50 while Kansas and the provisional government ran concurrent in Denver and the Valley.
01:19:54 Such as felt friendly to either jurisdiction patronized it with their business.
01:19:58 Appeals were taken from one to the other, and papers certified up or down and over, and recognized,
01:20:03 criminals delivered, and judgments accepted from one court by another with a happy informality,
01:20:08 which it is pleasant to read of. And here we are confronted by an awkward fact.
01:20:13 There was undoubtedly much less crime in the two years this arrangement lasted than in the two which followed
01:20:18 the territorial organization and regular government."
01:20:22 Right.
01:20:24 What incentive does the government have to solve crime cheaply and efficiently?
01:20:30 There's no competition.
01:20:33 All right, it's interlude time, time to talk about camels, not the cigarette, but the US Camel Corps.
01:20:42 Heard about this?
01:20:44 Camperdi, Texas, 1856.
01:20:46 They said, "You know what? The arid southwest, that's a lot like the deserts of Egypt."
01:20:51 So what they did was they paid for the importation of 66 camels from the Middle East.
01:20:56 Now, of course, camels, what did they do? They spit, they regurgitate, they're not exactly obedient to orders,
01:21:02 but they considered this a great success.
01:21:05 Now, as the Civil War broke out, exploration of the frontier, of course, fell off,
01:21:10 and the Confederates captured Camperdi.
01:21:14 After the war, most of the camels were sold, some actually to the Ringling Brothers Circus,
01:21:19 and maybe they were cheek by jowl with that mummified guy who traveled for 60 plus years across the US.
01:21:26 But some of the camels escaped into the wild.
01:21:31 The last reported sighting of a feral camel came out of Texas in 1941.
01:21:38 Nobody knows for sure if there are still camels out there somewhere.
01:21:45 All right, Yeehaw wagon trains.
01:21:48 So perhaps the best example of private property voluntarism in the US West
01:21:54 was the organization of the wagon trains as they moved across the plains in search of gold in California.
01:22:02 So, the region west of Missouri in Iowa was beyond the jurisdiction of the US law,
01:22:08 an organized, unpatrolled, no central legal authority.
01:22:12 But to use the old trapper saying that there was no law west of Leavenworth to describe the trains,
01:22:17 the wagon trains would be inappropriate.
01:22:19 And I quote, "Realizing that they were passing beyond the pale of the law and aware that the tedious journey
01:22:25 and the constant tensions of the trail brought out the worst in human character,
01:22:29 the pioneers created their own lawmaking and law enforcing machinery before they started."
01:22:37 Isn't that wild?
01:22:40 Like their fellow travelers on the ocean, the pioneers in their prairie schooners negotiated a plains law,
01:22:46 much like their counterparts see law.
01:22:49 The result of this negotiation in many cases was the adoption of a former constitution patent,
01:22:54 patented after that at the US.
01:22:57 So here's a preamble of the constitution of the Green and Jersey County Company as an example.
01:23:03 Again, the constitution is not the same as the US government one, right?
01:23:07 They say, "We, the members of the Green and Jersey County Company of EMI, grants to California
01:23:12 for the purpose of effectively protecting our persons and property,
01:23:17 and as the best means of ensuring an expeditious and easy journey, do ordain and establish the following constitution."
01:23:24 So what did they talk about?
01:23:26 Well, organization of jury trials, regulation of Sabbath breaking, gambling, intoxication,
01:23:33 penalties for failing to perform chores, especially guard duty, of course, hostile territory, right?
01:23:38 Especially at night.
01:23:39 And in certain cases, there were provisions for the repair of roads, building bridges,
01:23:43 and the protection of other goods held in common.
01:23:49 So they quickly negotiated amongst themselves and agreed from nothing, from a state of nature,
01:23:59 to enforceable, efficient protection for dispute resolution with no coercive powers of government.
01:24:07 This was the basis of social organization.
01:24:12 Now, these constitutions and bylaws, private constitutions, they don't mention individual property rights much.
01:24:20 So these were of little concern as a whole.
01:24:25 So in his article, "Paying for the Elephant, Property Rights and Civil Order on the Overland Trail,"
01:24:31 John Philip Reed convincingly argues that respect for property rights was paramount.
01:24:37 So even when food became so scarce that starvation was a distinct possibility,
01:24:44 there are almost no examples where the pioneers resorted to violence.
01:24:49 They found a way. They negotiated.
01:24:52 And I quote, "Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the immigrants who traveled America's Overland Trail
01:24:58 gave little thought to solving their problems by violence or theft.
01:25:02 We know that some ate the flesh of dead oxen or beef with maggots while surrounded by healthy animals they could have shot.
01:25:09 Those who suffered losses early on the trip and were able to go back did so.
01:25:13 The disappointment and embarrassment for some must have been extremely bitter, but hundreds returned.
01:25:18 They did not use weapons to force their way through.
01:25:21 While a few of those who were destitute may have employed tricks to obtain food, most begged.
01:25:26 And those who were too proud to beg got along the best they could or employed someone to beg for them.
01:25:32 If they could not beg, they borrowed.
01:25:35 And when they could not borrow, they depended on their credit."
01:25:39 So, even when people were surrounded by healthy animals they could have shot and eaten that they didn't own,
01:25:48 they ate dead oxen or beef with maggots.
01:25:54 So, another kind of organization on the Overland Trail was called the MESS.
01:25:57 It's similar to sharecropping arrangements in agriculture.
01:26:00 The MESS allows individuals to contribute things like food, oxen, wagons, labor, for the joint production of travel or meals.
01:26:11 So, the MESS allowed the property to remain privately owned, and it differed from the partnership where property was concurrently owned.
01:26:20 MESS property was available for use by all members of the MESS, so the potential for conflict was great, right?
01:26:26 When conflicts occurred, renegotiation of the contract was sometimes necessary.
01:26:32 When new agreements could not be reached, the MESS would have to be dissolved and property returned to the individual owners.
01:26:38 Since ownership remained private, division was not really that difficult.
01:26:44 Now, there was gain from trade to be obtained from combining inputs.
01:26:51 It was usually possible to renegotiate when violations in the contract occurred.
01:26:55 So, here's an example. There were some examples where renegotiation seemed impossible.
01:27:02 So, in one MESS, one of its members was just unwilling to do his share of the chores.
01:27:07 And here's a quote.
01:27:08 "We concluded the best thing we could do was to buy him out and let him go,
01:27:12 which accordingly we did by paying him $100.
01:27:15 He shouldered his gun, carpet, bag, and blanket, and took the track to the prairie without saying goodbye to one of us."
01:27:21 Let's just buy people out. It's way, way better than shooting and cheating and all this, that, and the other. You name it, right?
01:27:29 So, was it the Wild West?
01:27:34 Of course not. Is it a lie that's been sold to you so that you submit to political power?
01:27:39 Well, yeah, of course. Of course.
01:27:43 Did people spontaneously self-organize when there was no centralized political authority?
01:27:50 Of course they did. Was it better and more efficient?
01:27:52 Imagine creating an entire community rule set that everyone agrees to in eight days.
01:27:58 Was violence? Yes. Absolutely. Was the cost of enforcement less? Absolutely.
01:28:02 Was corruption lower? No question.
01:28:05 Were people eager to police their own neighborhoods?
01:28:07 Why, yes. 8,000 people in San Francisco signed up to deal with these kinds of issues.
01:28:14 So, have you been sold a lie?
01:28:19 Well, not really sold. It's kind of enforced, kind of inflicted.
01:28:22 So, the Wild West, as it was called, was a huge problem for centralized political authority and its justification.
01:28:28 It's a huge problem.
01:28:30 People were doing it on their own.
01:28:33 It was cheaper. It was more efficient. It was more moral.
01:28:37 It was better. It was an actual social contract.
01:28:41 So, governments had a big problem.
01:28:44 In that spontaneous self-organization that was better than government was happening all the time, everywhere.
01:28:50 It was consistent. It was universal. It was peaceful.
01:28:53 Not good for the justifications for government.
01:28:58 So, what did people have to do?
01:29:02 Well, governments had to provoke a lot of conflict by attacking the indigenous population,
01:29:07 by hunting out the bison and provoking desperation to provoke a lot of conflict.
01:29:13 A lot of conflict means you need the government.
01:29:16 Just this constant manipulation.
01:29:18 And then, of course, people who wanted the favor of the state, wanted the protection of the state,
01:29:24 needed the intellectual property rights, the copyrights, and so on, promoted a narrative.
01:29:30 And the narrative was, "Boy, you know, without the government,
01:29:33 Black Bart is just going to shoot your woman in the hip.
01:29:36 And you're just going to need the government to keep you safe and to keep you protected."
01:29:41 And that's how the reality that threatened the justifications for centralized, coercive, oligarchical power was dealt with.
01:29:50 All of the endless examples were lied about, buried, redirected to propaganda.
01:30:00 And the few crazy people were promoted as a central motif.
01:30:06 And the examples of freedom that could have liberated us all were buried under an avalanche of bullshit.
01:30:16 This is Devan Mullaney from Free Domain. I hope you find this stuff helpful.
01:30:20 If you would like to help out this show, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it.
01:30:23 Freedomain.com/donate. Don't forget to check out my free novels.
01:30:28 Justpoornovel.com, almostnovel.com. You can go to freedomain.com/books to check out my free books.
01:30:36 And I really, really do appreciate your support.
01:30:39 Freedomain.locals.com is a great community you can join to chat more about this stuff.
01:30:43 I look forward to your feedback. I thank you for your time and attention. I wish you the very best today and every day.
01:30:49 Lots of love. Take care. Bye.
01:30:51 (Music)

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