This proposal was not really all that shocking: Such a program would have been consistent enough with the advertised purpose of certain phases of American land policy from 1776 on. American governments handed out land (however acquired) for over a century to veterans, settlers, land speculators, railroads, timber corporations, mining companies, and other parties. (I’ll give you three guesses which groups made out the best). Governments did so as a source of revenue, for geostrategic reasons, to win favor with voters, or to reward a small class of typically American operators who flat-out deserved to be rich.

In a new, revolutionary, and republican society, there was of course much talk about widespread property as the bulwark of republican freedom. But the talk was so general that Federalists and Republicans could share it, while leaving themselves plenty of room in which to create a small class of owners of a disproportionate amount of the public domain. Overall—from the founding land speculators down to 1893, when the frontier allegedly ran out—American land policy resembled in both theory and practice the kind of “privatization” we see under mercantilist Republican administrations. One landmark in the process was Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William M’Intosh (1823). Here, Chief Justice John Marshall undertook to write a long essay on the received theory of how property previously stolen by European kings or their agents is best conveyed. As was his wont, Marshall proved entirely too much, in as clear a case of Albert Jay Nock’s “copper riveting” of narrowly focused property rights as we could want. (See my “Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History,” The Freeman, November 2008.)

Southern agrarian Andrew Lytle noted that from the settler’s point of view the whole frontier process represented an attempt to get away from would-be aristocrats and other aspiring land monopolists. Consistent republican ideologists like Thomas Skidmore and George H. Evans agitated from the 1820s into the 1840s in favor of giving homesteaders first claim on the territories. Generally speaking, other claimants prevailed, while the politics of slavery and antislavery further complicated the matter. In the bigger picture, the Homestead Act of 1862 was the exception rather than the rule, as Paul W. Gates showed in a noteworthy 1936 paper (“The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review).

I cannot discuss here what an ideal policy based on “mixing one’s labor” with resources might have looked like. Suffice it to say that sales of thousands and tens of thousands of acres to individuals, land companies, and corporations were not especially consistent with any genuine republican ideal. The disappearance of most of the best land in California into the hands of a half-dozen individuals in a few decades comes to mind. But large-scale buyers had mixed their money with federal land officers, and that no doubt counts for something.

Meanwhile, the judiciary—state and federal—busily remodeled the common law and shifted the burdens of industrialization onto third parties, extensively modifying the older law of nuisance. Harry Scheiber finds that “law was often, if not to say usually, mobilized to provide effective subsidies and immunities to heavily-capitalized special interests [under] either ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘formalist’ doctrine.” Even existing doctrines of “public rights” and eminent domain came to serve business interests. Finally, federal judges’ discovery in the 1880s of corporate “personhood” in the Fourteenth Amendment perfected the Federalist Party’s original mercantilist program. All these changes importantly influenced just who would benefit from the American State-system of land tenure (to use Nock’s phrase) and its attendant modes of preemption and exploitation.

Land and Independence

Many writers have seen a special relationship between landownership and personal independence. And here we hit on what is perhaps the truest insight of republican theory—one taken up by many classical liberals. Briefly, this holds that a broad “middle class” of property owners is essential to the maintenance of free societies. The point is as old as Aristotle. On the negative side, in decrying the social effects of England’s fabled land monopoly, radical liberals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Paine, Thomas Hodgskin, and John Bright implicitly affirmed the republican axiom.

A typical nineteenth-century American “self-help” book aimed at young men did not say, “Get a job working for wages within an increasingly intricate division of labor so as to enjoy a greater variety of consumer goods.” Instead, it said, “Get yourself a competency”—a vision fraught with republican implications suitably modernized. Working for wages, if one did it at all, was a temporary stage—to be endured while learning a skill or trade and abandoned later in favor of real or potential independence. This independence, derided in our time as “illusory,” left one free (within limits) not just from state interference but also from nineteenth-century employers. And if independence is illusory in our time, it is at least partly because the political activities of well-connected elites long since removed the preconditions of independence deliberately and systematically.

One key (but not the only one) to this much-sought-after independence was access to land, a theme taken up by Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in early twentieth-century England. Sociologist Robert Nisbet commented that never, after reading Belloc, did he “imagine that there could be genuine individual liberty apart from individual ownership of property.” In any case, as historian Christopher Lasch put it, “Americans took it as axiomatic that freedom had to rest on the broad distribution of property ownership.” Perhaps Americans were wrong to believe such a thing. But let us examine the matter a bit more.

This American axiom receives support from those political economists who believed that the land/labor ratio importantly determines social structure. Edward Gibbon Wakefield somewhat gave the game away in the 1830s by opposing easy access to land in Australia, lest potential wage-earners try for self-sufficiency before spending “enough” years working for others. Marx chided Wakefield for letting this “bourgeois secret” out and was in turn chided by Franz Oppenheimer, Achille Loria, and Nock for not learning the right lesson from Wakefield’s recommendations on rigging the market.

H. J. Nieboer argued (1900) that where resources are “open,” few will work for big enterprises, and the latter will (if they can) institute some form of slavery. Evsey Domar writes (1970) that one never finds “free land, free peasants, and non-working owners” together. Why? Because where political leverage allows, aspiring lords and (literal) rent-seekers will eliminate the free land, the free peasants, or both.

Colonial Policies

With this theorem in view, let us survey some colonial evidence. Enterprisers in colonies have always wanted regular supplies of cheap labor for their projects. Although there is no evidence in favor of a “right” to such a thing, these prospective employers were never discouraged. Aided by colonial administrators with the same assumptions, they gradually overcame native economic independence. Land was the key, and neither the colonizers nor the natives doubted it. No matter how hard natives worked on their holdings, colonialists decried their “idleness”—and their uncivilized failure to work for wages.

We may therefore give the overworked English Enclosures time off (for now) and look at some other cases. Consider the Japanese colonial administrator in Okinawa who complained in 1899 that the typical Okinawan held land and therefore had low expenses and few wants. For these reasons, the native saw “no need to undertake any other business, nor to save money.” Since native lands were held informally, they could not be capitalized. Such people and properties did little for the great cause of development and, shortly, the Japanese government (!) denounced Okinawans’ customary arrangements as “feudal” and set out to modernize the island. American occupation later perfected this anti-agrarian revolution. Doubtless, however, much “employment” was created in the post-World War II Okinawan service economy dominated by the U.S. military.

Turning to English colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, we find comparable phenomena. England abolished slavery in the colonies in the 1830s. (Never mind that, as historian Eric Foner comments, “Through a regressive tax system, the British working classes paid the bill for abolition.”) By this time, English policymakers had embraced Adam Smith’s view that positive incentives motivated labor better than fear of starvation or draconian punishments did. But an ocean made all the difference, Foner observes, and new peasantries made up of former slaves were “seen in London, as in the Caribbean, as a threat not simply to the economic well-being of the islands, but to civilization itself.” John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of peasant proprietors “did not extend to the blacks of the Caribbean; their desire to escape plantation labor and acquire land was perceived as incorrigible idleness.”

And so Britain’s former slave colonies put vagrancy and other laws to work and crafted taxes aimed at restricting “the freedmen’s access to land.” As Foner puts it, “Taxation has always been the state’s weapon of last resort in the effort to promote market relations within peasant societies”—that is, to force people into markets in which they were not eager to participate. In Kenya the problem was one of “dispossessing a peasantry with a preexisting stake in the soil,” but colonial legislation proved up to the task. Foner concludes that in “the Caribbean and southern and eastern Africa . . . the free market [was] conspicuous by its absence”—its workings restricted “as far as possible” in the interest of the well-off and powerful.

Historian Colin Bundy has studied the economic rise and political-economic fall of a class of independent African farmers in the Eastern Cape Colony and other parts of South Africa. Various Cape Location Acts (1869, 1876, and 1884) sought to lessen “the numbers of ‘idle squatters’ (i.e., rent-paying tenants economically active on their own behalf) on white-owned lands.” Such peasant farming “conferred . . . a degree of economic ‘independence’: an ability to withhold, if he so preferred, his labour from white landowners or other employers.” Further: “Both the farmer and the mine-owner perceived . . . the need to apply extra-economic pressures . . . to break down the peasant’s ‘independence,’ increase his wants, and to induce him to part more abundantly with his labour, but at no increased price.” In their view, “Africans had no right to continue as self-sufficient and independent farmers if this conflicted with white interests.”

Bundy observes that “Social engineering on this scale took time and effort, but the incentives were powerful.” By way of a “one man one lot” rule under the Glenn Grey Act of 1894, legislators sought to keep African farming within “certain acceptable bounds.” (Here, finally, was a use for John Locke’s famous “proviso” about leaving enough resources for others!) Evictions increased after the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1903). Rents rose (Enclosure defenders, take note), and former tenants stayed on as laborers. Tax pressure on African farmers increased. This “employers’ offensive” from 1890 to 1913 ended successfully in the South African Natives Land Act of 1913, which effectively outlawed the practices under which a particular African peasantry had shown much success.

One supposes, in standard libertarian fashion, that agricultural employment increased thereafter along with land values. But that was the whole point: to proletarianize independent peasants by leaving them no option but to work for wages for Boers and Brits on farms, in mines, and elsewhere. Whether more “employment” was good in itself seems unclear. We can, at least, impute the outcome back to specific political intentions and levers. So much for the colonies, then—and all this without even mentioning the two greatest monuments to England’s defense of free markets: Ireland and India.

Telescopic Land Reform

Colonial bureaucrats and employers saw a definite connection between small-scale landownership and independence, and resolved to cut that independence short. By now we begin to see that “the subsidy of history”—to use Kevin Carson’s useful term—has been very large indeed. A number of libertarians have understood the problem at hand in pretty much these terms. They have tended, however, to dwell on instances far away from our own shores, writing about land reform in Latin America, South Africa, Asia, and other places. In the mid-1970s Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs, and others addressed the matter.

Rothbard wrote that “free-market economists . . . go to Asia and Latin America and urge the people to adopt the free market and private property rights” while ignoring “the suppression of the genuine private property of the peasants by the exactions of quasi-feudal landlords. . . .” In this vacuum, only the local communists appeared to support “the peasants’ struggle for their property. . . .” And so libertarians “allowed themselves to become supporters of feudal landlords and land monopolists in the name of ‘private property.’”

Decades earlier, that very conservative German liberal economist Wilhelm Röpke wrote that German history would have gone better had Prussia undergone “a radical agrarian reform breaking up the great estates and putting peasant farms in their place.” He adds: “Influential Social Democratic leaders opposed the transformation of the great estates in Prussia into peasant holdings . . . as a ‘retrograde step.’” Röpke called for freeing Germany from “agrarian and industrial feudalism” and the ills “of proletarization, of concentration and overorganization, of the agglomeration of industrial power and the destruction of the individuality of labor. . . .” In his view, the typical proletarianized worker or clerk wanted “a small house of his own with a garden and a goat shed, an undisturbed family life without training courses, mass meetings, processions, and political flag days; dignity and pleasure in his work, an independent if modest existence. . . .”

Why Go Abroad?

For Enclosure-like pressures on small-holders closer to home, we need look no farther than states like Kentucky, where courts vigorously enforced the full feudal rigor of the “broad form deed,” thereby ensuring the strip mining of many a mountaineer out of productive existence down to the early 1990s. With the system so long stacked in favor of big landholders and bankers, well subsidized by history, one begins to understand the popularity of those New Deal programs that promoted individual home ownership.

Economist Michael Perelman has confirmed a direct relationship between rural labor without independent means of support and the applied politics of English classical economists. The latter preached a great gospel of “work,” mainly for others, who ought to be doing this work. Except for a narrow class of Dissenting Protestant factory owners, those most vigorously espousing this gospel were not themselves noted for doing a lot of work. Together, however, owners and economists said in effect, “Work for us, join the armed forces, or emigrate, ye doughty Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Scots.” And emigrate they did, leaving us with an American folk wisdom in which old times in England, Scotland, and Ireland were not that great. (This folk memory may have at least as much heuristic value as latter-day econometric claims that everyone became better off in the new division of labor.)

And so we return to Henry George’s problem: How did Americans manage as a society to seize so much land, incur whatever moral guilt goes with the seizures, and then not bloody have any of it? The chief mechanism was precisely the political means to wealth that Oppenheimer and Nock analyzed. The reason Brisco County Jr.’s “Robber Barons” struck the right note is that there were such individuals. California was a laboratory case, as George well knew, of the successful primitive accumulation of land by a microscopically small class of state-made men. As with ontogeny and phylogeny, Western accumulation recapitulated Eastern accumulation. From such causes arose the famous “end” of the frontier circa 1893. But open land did not so much disappear naturally as succumb to preemption. And then, with perfect timing, the conservation movement put enormous quantities of land beyond the reach of actual settlers.

As for those Americans who currently own property, they typically own it after 20 or more years of bank payments. Is land so genuinely scarce that a bank must always be in the middle? This remains our central question. Certainly, nineteenth-century allocations played a lasting role, and later political interventions added to concentrated property ownership.

And what of the promotion of “easy” home ownership in recent years? It is a product of 1) the widespread delusion, in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s inflationary financing of the Vietnam War, that real estate constitutes the ultimate inflation hedge, and 2) the specific dynamics of the expansionist fractional-reserve banking under new rules (“deregulation”) increasing moral hazards for bankers.

There is also the unhappy fact of property taxes—our chief surviving feudal due. Fail to pay those, and the state enrolls a new owner on your former property. This reduces somewhat the fact of private property in land.

Independence, Republicanism, and Liberty

Some classical liberals and libertarians downgrade personal independence. Better to participate in the going order and enjoy a wider array of comforts, they say. But socialists and corporate liberals can play the same game—and have for over a century. It seems to me that those libertarians who join in this refrain rather willfully misconstrue a very simple point: They hail the joys of the division of labor, the higher degree of civilization (that is, more stuff) to be gained from dependence, interdependence, and sundry trickles of income and utility down and up. But already in 1936, Southern agrarian John Crowe Ransom noticed a flaw in this reasoning, writing, “[I]ncome is not enough, and the distribution of income is not enough. If those blessings sufficed, we might as well come to collectivism at once; for that is probably the quickest way to get them.” If greater choice among consumer goods makes up for lost independence, then the case for socialism (or X) would be clinched, provided socialism (or X) could deliver the economic goods (where “X” stands for any political ideology offering us the same stuff/independence tradeoff.)

I doubt we are necessarily “better off” merely because of employment. We need to know more, including why particular sets of choices exist in the first place. Back in the ’60s, Selective Service used to “channel” us into the “right” occupations by threatening to draft us. Given the parameters, our choices were “free.” If it’s that easy, then we are always free, no matter the historical and institutional constraints. Similarly, “To Hell or Connaught” was a choice, and never mind that Oliver Cromwell and his army arbitrarily created this particular prisoner’s dilemma. But perhaps I have leapt from choices among goods to choices between ways of life. Why? Let us look into this.

What if proletarianization is not the ideal form of human life? What if a complex division of labor is merely useful or convenient, but not a moral imperative? What if most of us are hirelings, well paid or otherwise, and then we learn what that status amounts to? The post-Marxist socialist André Gorz writes, “Capitalism owes its political stability to the fact that, in return for the dispossession and growing constraints experienced at work, individuals enjoy the possibility of building an apparently growing sphere of individual autonomy outside of work.” Our interest here is the “autonomy” mentioned, which sounds like a near cousin of “independence.” The sentiment seems sound enough, and the partial convergence of Röpke and Gorz is eye-opening.

Now in the view of Quentin Skinner (a modern republican theorist of note), unfreedom arises both from direct, forcible coercion and from institutional arrangements that make people dependent, since the latter always contain the possibility (realized or not) of arbitrary interference and coercion. Such discussions usually center on the form of state. Utilitarian liberals like Henry Sidgwick did not care about forms. If the Sublime Porte, Tsar, or King of England leaves us substantially alone, we are “free,” and that is that. In Skinner’s view, if those worthies can on their own motion change their policy of leaving us alone, we are not free, no matter what they are doing right now. Freedom requires that we not be menaced by latent unknown powers.

Freedom in this sense is liberty—a shared civic or public good. Like many real public goods it is not provided by the state, indeed the state may be its chief enemy. Law and settled custom may provide this public good, and consumer goods—the people’s pottage—do not compensate for abandoning such an order, where it exists. Today, people often work long hours to buy some independence. In another time, they began with some independence, and then chose how hard to work. Now we see, perhaps, the difference between choices among economic goods and past choices between systems structuring our choices.

Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.

In real life much of the Great Plains was truly open range and the plentiful grass that stretched from the Texas Panhandle to Montana and the Dakota Territories offered wonderful grazing after the elimination of the buffalo and the military’s removal of the Native American populations. As the railroads stretched west and created a means to transport cattle east to markets, the free-range cattle industry sprang up in the 1870s and 1880s. As homesteaders spread west, however, violence occurred between the two groups as the cattlemen sought to keep homesteaders off “their” range and the homesteaders fenced off streams and plowed up pastures for their crops. The conflict between free-range cattlemen and homesteaders (portrayed memorably in the 1958 western Shane) was more common than the “intramural” conflict between cattlemen shown in Open Range.

North of Texas much of the Great Plains was federal land. The land that wasn’t federally owned was generally in noncontiguous blocks: “checkerboard” sections alternating along railroad lines granted to the companies to subsidize the building of the railroads, sections set aside for specific public purposes such as schools and the like. Someone who wanted to purchase large tracts of land outside Texas could do so only from the federal government, and it would not sell. Federal land for grazing could be acquired only in relatively small tracts through the homestead laws, which required actual occupation and residency. Cattle ranchers could not purchase the land they used.

Western cattlemen thus faced exactly the conditions that today we describe as producing the “tragedy of the commons.” Most often used to describe environmental problems, the tragedy occurs when unregulated access to a common resource produces overuse. Private property solves the tragedy because each property owner receives the benefits and bears the costs of his actions, forcing the owner to be responsible.

Since they were denied land ownership as a means of solving their common property problems, cattlemen formed range and roundup associations to do the job instead. These associations organized cooperation on the roundups, greatly reducing costs, and wrote and enforced rules which prevented most of the problems that come with the lack of the ability to exclude others. Members were required to contribute bulls, ensuring the herds would continue to grow; contribute labor to the roundups, ensuring that everyone paid their share; and help pay for stock detectives to stop rustlers. All these contributions were proportional to their herd sizes, making the scheme fair. As the associations developed further, they also provided disease control, common facilities at railroad stations (pens and livestock inspectors), and brand registries to help identify cattle ownership.

The cattlemen’s associations were not perfect substitutes for land ownership, however. They could do nothing to control nonmembers, as their only sanctions were to threaten expulsion from the association. This can be seen in the legendary cattlemen–sheep-herder battles of the West, which came about because sheep herders had no need of the associations’ services and so were immune from the pressures the associations brought to bear on their members. As homesteaders continued to enter the western range, the cattlemen found themselves unable to protect “their” range from the intruders.

The Transition from Ranch to Farm

Farming is often more lucrative than ranching, at least where the soil and water supply justify it. Converting at least some of the Great Plains to farmland from ranchland made a great deal of sense. Converting as much of it as the homesteaders did, and converting it in the small parcels allowed under the homestead laws, did not make sense.

Most important, however, the conversion of open range to farmland imposed a cost on the ranchers (less land for the cattle) without allowing them any corresponding benefit. Frustrated in their attempts to buy the land, the cattlemen of the northern Great Plains saw the land and water they had been using taken away without compensation by the new arrivals.

This problem is captured in Shane, an unusual western that allows its villain, the head open-range cattleman William Ryker, to explain to the heroes, homesteader Starrett and gunslinger Shane, why the cattlemen feel entitled to the land. After his offer to buy out Starrett’s homestead is rebuffed and Starrett asserts his rights to the land, Ryker explodes.

Right? You in the right! Look, Starrett. When I come to this country, you weren’t much older than your boy there. And we had rough times, me and other men that are mostly dead now. I got a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrowhead. We made this country. Found it and we made it, with blood and empty bellies. The cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother you much anymore because we handled ’em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doin’ it. We made it. And then people move in who’ve never had to rawhide it through the old days. They fence off my range, and fence me off from water. Some of ’em like you plow ditches, take out irrigation water. And so the creek runs dry sometimes. I’ve got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. The men that did the work and ran the risks have no rights? I take you for a fair man, Starrett.

In this short passage, Ryker manages to deliver a concise summary of Lockean property-rights theory: the land belongs to the ranchers because they “made” the range.

When Starrett objects that Ryker isn’t taking into account the trappers and Indian traders who were there first, Ryker dismisses their claims by the derisive snort: “They weren’t ranchers.” Starrett then brings out his best argument: “You talk about rights. You think you’ve got the right to say that nobody else has got any. Well, that ain’t the way the government looks at it.”

Starrett and the homesteaders may not have had a sophisticated philosophical argument, but they had a winning one. The government didn’t recognize the ranchers’ property rights and actively sought to undermine them. Not only did the federal government forbid the sale of public land to ranchers, it subsidized the small holders whose fences cut the cattlemen’s stock off from water. Far from being the inevitable clash of the contrasting character of the cattleman and the farmer, the problems between the open-range cattlemen and the homesteaders were the direct result of federal land policies.

Range Wars

The conflicts that sprang up on the northern Great Plains were no Hollywood screenplays. Homesteaders shot cattlemen; cattlemen shot homesteaders; vigilantes chased rustlers; and rustlers chased cattle. Most notoriously, in 1892 a group of prominent cattlemen in Wyoming set out to rid themselves of a group of homesteaders in Johnson County. While the cattlemen portrayed the homesteaders as rustlers, the history of the “Johnson County War” suggests the real conflict was over the homesteaders’ land and water claims on range the cattlemen considered their own. The conflict continued for years, including passage of repressive legislation allowing the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association to seize nonmembers’ property. Despite their virtually total control of Wyoming’s territorial and state governments, the cattlemen could not eradicate the homesteaders because juries routinely refused to convict on rustling charges.

The cattlemen determined that extralegal methods were needed. They assembled a team of gunmen, taking along a doctor and a newspaper reporter for good measure. A special train was hired to transport the raiding party north, and a death list of 100 rustlers and sympathizers was made up. The telegraph wires to Johnson County were cut and the most prominent cattlemen headed for Denver and the nineteenth-century version of “plausible deniability.”

Fortunately for the citizens of Johnson County, the leader of the expedition made some critical mistakes. Instead of immediately seizing the local militia arsenal, he allowed the expedition to get bogged down in a siege of a ranch where two suspected rustlers were staying. This allowed the rest of the county to learn about the attack and to arm themselves. Confronted by an armed population, the invaders took refuge in another ranch house. Just as the locals were about to set fire to the house, the U.S. Cavalry rode over the hill, and rescued the invaders. Legal maneuverings by the invaders’ defense team kept the matter from ever being resolved in court and none of the invaders was ever punished. Considerable bloodshed was averted only by the bad judgment of the invaders’ leadership. The Johnson County War was the logical culmination of the federal land policies that prevented ranchers from acquiring private property in western lands.

The Private Property Alternative

The open range was not the only way to organize western lands, however. Texas, which had been an independent country before it entered the union, had no federal land. All its public land was owned by the state. In need of cash after the Civil War, the Texas state government was willing to sell land in large parcels, allowing Texas ranchers to create the contiguous spreads they needed for their herds. As a result, the Texas panhandle was soon privatized into large ranches, including the famous XIT Ranch, whose brand stood for “Ten in Texas” and referred to the number of counties the XIT’s land covered.

The Texas ranches invested in barbed wire (a recent innovation), accurate rifles for their cowboys, improved stock, and internal improvements such as windmills that increased the carrying capacity of their range. The rifles allowed a “shoot to kill” policy on rustlers that resulted in low levels of rustling; the fences allowed the benefits of the expensive bulls the ranchers imported to be kept for themselves.

Most important, because they owned the land, the Texas ranches received the benefits from converting it from ranchland to farmland. When homesteaders came to the Texas panhandle, they bought their farms from the ranches. Their farms were of an appropriate size to survive, located on the best farming land, and laid out to avoid cutting off the remaining range from water. Texas ranchers had an incentive to see the farms succeed — successful farms would drive up the price of the remaining ranchland. As a result, farming and ranching peacefully coexisted in the Texas panhandle while war raged in Wyoming Territory.

There are some powerful lessons from the cattlemen’s experience in the West. Unfortunately, these lessons don’t make as exciting a movie as the typical story of gunslingers and range wars.

• Private property rights allow peaceful coexistence of competing land uses. Texas avoided range wars, not because it was populated by more civilized people but because the existence of private property allowed the cattlemen to receive a share of the benefits of the transition to farming.
• Customary institutions can substitute for property rights, but governments can destroy customary institutions. Wyoming’s problems didn’t arise until the federal government began subsidizing the homesteaders’ entry (with “free” land). So long as the only people in Wyoming were cattlemen, the roundup associations were able to prevent the appearance of a “tragedy of the commons.” As more and more people who did not care about the threat of expulsion from the association arrived, the power of the customary solution declined.
• Property rights prevent violence. Private property is a substitute for violence because it allows contracts between willing parties. Where property rights are absent, as in Open Range and Wyoming Territory, the cheapest substitute is often violence.

In his book The Mysteries of Capital, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto points to the development of property rights in the American west as one of the “missing lessons of U.S. history” that explains why the United States has succeeded in growing rich while few Latin American countries have. Those “missing lessons” make a more accurate story than Hollywood’s version of how the west was won.